Tomi Pylvänäinen of Oulu’s 1Bar is already something of a celebrity amongst the city’s cocktail connoisseurs. He can juggle four wine bottles at a time and play many other dangerous looking games as he serves the bar's many cocktails in the most dramatic and injury-defying ways possible.
In fact, the drink-serving stunts of Pylvänäinen and his colleagues are so popular that the bar organises private parties at which they are the central attraction. For just under a thousand euros, you can buy the ‘Tandem Show’ where the bar’s professional ‘bar masters’ will attend to your drinking needs all night in the most breath-taking and flamboyant way possible.
And these rare skills have led to Pylvänäinen, who has been a barman for 14 years and has been practicing what is known as ‘flair tending' for the last five years, reaching the semi-finals of London’s Road House World Flair Championship. Being a successful ‘flair tender’ is not easy. Tomi trains for up to three hours a day and spends a lot of his spare time honing his ‘flair tending’ skills.
Hopefully, it will all have been worth it when he travels to London on Monday to take part in the third heat of the ‘World Open Road House World Flair Championships’ with thirty of the best flair-tenders from all around the world. If he makes it through by being one of the top three, he could win prize money of up to £1000 (about 1100 euros) and go through to the November world final. And here he could take way prize money of £10,000.
Tomi triumphed in the Baltic heat of the competition last year but lost out to the eventual winner, an Englishman. ‘There is some really tough competition,’ he said. However, for Tomi, taking part is about ‘getting known and getting this bar known around the world . . . it’s not just about the money!’
The competition is has pretty strict rules. The flair routine must last no longer than 5 minutes and bottles to be used must not be empty when the routine starts. And the criteria as to whether or not a drink has delivered with ‘flair’ are also stringent. The glass must be full of ice, there must be one shot of alcohol, there must new and original moves and interactions with the music and tenders will be penalised for any spillages while doing their performance.
The competition began ten years at ‘Road House’, a nightclub in London’s ‘Covent Garden’ district. Bartenders decided to get on the stage and compete with each other to see who could make a drink in the most dramatic, skilful and entertaining way. Impressed by they’d done, the bar went about organising an international competition. It began the following year.
