We were lucky to catch up with Carl Wrangel recently and have shared our conversation below.

Carl , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

Thinking back, as far as I can remember, flavor was always there as a subject. My parents always shared their thoughts on flavor and how things tasted to them. Not overly descriptive, but a little more than just “mmm that’s good”. F ex my mom did most of the cooking herself, it was pretty rare that we got take away food, both due to the options available in the 80s in the town I was from, but she also put pride in cooking, and to her luxury came in the form of taking the time to prepare a good home cooked meal. My dad always cared about the quality of the produce, be it a tomato, fish or a good piece of meat. So, since my dad is a truck driver (still to this day, way past his retirement) he would source ingredients from all over europe, which ment that we would have cheese, spices, meats, vegetables, wine, even real italian flour to make pizza dough etc. At the time it was ingredients that wasn’t as readily available as it is now, All this accumilated to a good chat around the dining table, we often spoke about where the ingredients came from, what mad them better than the ones we could find here, how was the food prepared and what did it taste like. They both made a thing about “good” is not really the answer they were looking for, but to be more descriptive.
I also strongly remember the times we had orange juice, it was mainly on saturdays when my mom had time in the morning to squeeze fresh orange juice, I still remember the orange and white plastic hand squeezer and the smell that filled the kitchen every time she squeezed juice. It is those memories now, that I am trying to pass on to my daughters, to teach them about good produce, how things taste and how to use them. To apreciate that one squeezed orange rather than a whole box of the store bought stuff.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

It is year 2001 and I am boarding a plane to London to go chase my dream as a future graphic designer. The plan was to get into one of the better design schools in Europe at the time, spend four years there, and probably move back to Sweden to start my career. fast forward three months and I still haven’t picked up my application to school, I am running out of money, and I have been hitting the pub to hard. What I needed was a job, and that’s quick. I printed a big stack of CV’s and went from shop to shop to apply for a job. Up and down Oxford street and surrounding areas. I was sure I’d land a job in one of the bigger clothing chains, but weeks passed, and my situation didn’t change. Last resort, get a bar job or go back to Sweden. I applied in a ton of bars, but with no relevant experience it was a little harder than I’d thought. Eventually one bar got back to me, Market Place in Oxford Circus. It was ground floor bar with a kitchen and space for about 75 people. Outside was a big square, with outdoor seating and in the evening a basement bar with dj’s would open up, a little larger than upstairs. It was a very vibrant bar, serving mainly pints and spirit mixers, but there was a cocktail program in place and a bunch of training to go with it.
I collected glasses and ran the glasswasher the best I could until I passed my test and got promoted to bartender eight months later. By that time, I already knew that this was what I would do for a big part of my life, it felt natural, like I finally hit home.
I stayed with my first bar over four years, until I felt it was time to move on, get some new inspiration and hopefully find a mentor that help me get to he next level.
I think it is pretty common that after a long-term relationship you switch it up a lite, try a few different bars, before you realise that the long-term thing was pretty good, and it is time to find another place to call home. I found a Mexican restaurant and cocktail bar, Green & Red.
This was my first real flirt with Mexico and I fell in head over heels. The following years I would geek out completely tequila style, I would come in a few hours early to work every day, just to read about tequila or pick my managers head on details in production. Everyone who worked here shared this passion and was so willing to share that the passion for all thing Mexico was contagious.
In 2007 I left London for Copenhagen, a little closer to home, but more importantly a cocktail scene that was about to explode and I wanted to be a part of it. I just about settled in, got a job in a good bar, filled the bar with tequila, and I booked tickets for my first trip to Mexico. Something happened to me on this trip, on a deeper personal level, I felt connected with Mexico. Before I went to Mexico for the first time, I had a romanticised vison of what it would be like, but I could never have imagined what it would be like to, for the first time, feel that you belong to the earth you are standing on.
Back in Copenhagen, it is a few years later and we are deep into the economic recession, I have changed jobs and doing a summer stint at one of my favourite bars, this is the year of the big flood in Copenhagen and pretty much every basement is wrecked, damaged and wet. Everything was so wet.
At the time it was hard to rent out basement venues, both due to the economic situation but also the flood has ruined a lot for a lot of people. However, if you never really had anything, you couldn’t lose much, and it was a great market for someone with just a little bit, to get more that we could have otherwise. So, me and my business partner Jarek, got ourselves a basement bar, The Barking Dog. Which is now almost 11 years old and running stronger than ever. It is a lowkey cocktail bar, in the setting of a neighbourhood bar, inspired by an English pub, with focus on agave spirits. It is important here that we are not a Mexican bar, we are just a bar, who happens to love agave spirits. 11 years ago, the bar scene was very different, and what we thought was missing at the time was a laid-back bar with good service, good spirits and high-end cocktails in a setting where you should be as comfortable in sweatpants as in your Sunday best.
However, I felt the need to work closer with agave so in 2015 me and my partner got a little office space / storage which late turned out to be Shoppen, a local liquor store just a stone’s throw away from the bar. The focus here was clear, high-quality spirits with an abundance of agave. We build a large tasting table to educate our guest and customers from the trade interested in learning more about spirits. Shoppen showed us a whole new world of spirits and we quickly realized how much we had to learn if we wanted to compete with the best shops in town. It is now eight years later, and we recently started talking about getting a bigger space for the store, which is at times full to the brim.
In the summer of 2018, a small butcher shop around the corner became available to us, and we had spoken for a while to have a space where we could sell and showcase vermouth, that thought ended up being Paloma, a lively little vermouth bar with twice as many seats outdoors as indoors, which was a perfect complement to Barking Dog, a basement bar with litterally no outdoor seating.
Now I am sitting here, pretty much just off the plane from Mexico, and I just had the most inspiring trip, I learnt so much on this trip, and more than that, I met wonderful people who I am happy to now work together with. Shoppen has grown in the sense that we now import agave spirits from a few different producers, which we sell exclusively in our shop, and a handful of bars and restaurants, mainly in Copenhagen.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

March 2020 and we all know what happened. From one day to another all bars and restaurants closed, and everything was very unsure. No information, no guidelines, no security, all gone within a couple of minutes. At the time I remember thinking “it’s only for two weeks, no biggie” but very soon realized that this would last a lot longer. Lucky for us, Shoppen, our liquor store was allowed to stay open, which gave us something to do. When you are self employed hours can get long and intense and we are used to this, the worst thing that can happen is to not have anything to do so Shoppen was a life saver. That being said, people were told to stay home and not leave their house unless absolutely necessary. We came up with the idea to do free same-day bike delivery in all of Copenhagen.
We started spamming our social media with this, and slowly but surely it caught on. At first it was a lot of our regular customers in the shop, but at their house, and you could tell that a lot of them were just really happy to see other people and have a little chat about booze at their doorstep. To some I gave cocktail advice, how they could twist or improve their drink making skills, and we could see that home bartending was growing, now when people had the time. so we adapted and started making cocktail kits, and pushing home bartending a bit, we became a useful source of both ingredients and advice for people at home wanting to step up their game a little. And the bike routes became longer. At some point I was averaging about 40km a day, which is a lot for me. Sure, I am used to cykling in the city, but usually shorter distance and not as intensely. After dinner i would fill up my bike with today’s order and leave no later than 7pm and I would have all deliveries done and be back at the shop by 10pm.
I also used this time for a lot of online education and to renovate the bars. I would park the bike outside the bar, open a beer and my laptop, and I would write a somewhat funny public log on social media about my day as a booze pusher during lockdown.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Winter 2017 and Jarek my business partner is at wwork in our liquor store when a loud man storms into the shop, “Are you the owner?!”. At the time he didn’t think this would be the start of a new business, but rather that we were in big trouble of some sort. The two quickly established that this was a awkward start of a conversation, and the loud man, went back out, only to come in again and re-introduce himself. He was the butcher from up the road, and he was closing his business. He wanted to pass the venue on to someone who would keep some of the values of the neighbourhood and lived locally, that was us. We got the venu on the 1st of January 2018, and we had no idea, no money and no concept at the time, but the space had good soul and we’ve been talking for a bit to diversify our business. We started to expose the old brickwalls while chatting about a concept. The thing that grew on us was an all day cafe koncept with a vermouth focus, perfect for day drinking. Trying to adapt the standars of quality and service we were providing at Barking Dog, we quickly ended up baking our own sourdough bread, third wave coffee, butter from scratch etc etc. What we delivered was of very high quality, and our guest loved it, but it was to labour intensive and the training period was very long for new staff.
On top of that people did not dig the all day concept. In the Nordics we are used to places specializing in one thing and we become sceptical when a place is trying to do multiple things, even if coffee and vermouth are both drinks, they are seperated by the time of day. Eventionally our guest asked us to make a decision. In december 2019 we closed the morning concept, became a vermouth cafe with tapas, opening in the afternoon and closing at 10/11pm. We finally made our first little bit of money that Decemnber, then we went head first into Corono. Fast forward and we came out stronger on the other side, after two years of what felt like eternal darkness.

Contact Info:

• Website: shoppencph.dk thebarkingdog.dk palomacph.dk
• Instagram: @therealpapacarl @barkingdogcph @shoppencph @palomacph
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cwrangel https://www.facebook.com/barkingdogcph https://www.facebook.com/shoppencph https://www.facebook.com/palomacph

Image Credits
@fotofobico / Pablo HTG