About the Owener
Iris Heitel and Beatrix Delgado Lopez, joint owners of Wald in Hamburg, are giving us advice about running a bar. They cackle with laughter and crack jokes with each other constantly, clearly enjoying themselves, exuding a contagious passion, energy and enthusiasm.
Story
Beatrix: Before our bar, this place was a nostalgic East Berlin pub. It was crowded with old people drinking, starting at 9am. It was decorated in the old German style, lots of wood, too many pictures. Not our style!
Iris: We needed a lot of imagination! But we liked the terrace and the summer garden. It was a new building so it was up to us to create a style that suited us. No-one lives above us, which is rare in such a residential area. We’re at the bottom of a technical building for electricity.
Beatrix: We already had a bar called Koralle in St Pauli, Hamburg’s red-light district. But it’s a real bar bar – where the artists and musicians come to drink, smoke and listen to music.
Iris: We opened Wald in October 2015 and wanted to make it for a different kind of person, to give it its own personality. We knew that this area attracts more locals – it’s a family place really. There are lots of craft shops – shoemakers, metal workers and galleries. It’s more creative and richer.
Beatrix: In the early evening we get city workers and later we get younger hipsters. And then we get the staff after the restaurants close because we’re open later than other bars.
Iris: We met when we were both waitresses, working a place called Kandie Shop. But we knew we didn’t want to be working in a place forever, so we started making plans.
Beatrix: I owned a small grilled chicken restaurant in Costa Brava and was a flight attendant for Lufthansa before being a waitress. We both also worked in bars.
Iris: We are the best team. Bea is the planner, motivator and decision-maker.
Beatrix: And Iris is the creative person and stylist.
Iris: I used to live in Northern Germany’s biggest forest and have always been nature-loving, so we called this bar Wald, German for ‘forest’. We loved the poetry of the word and the lettering.
Beatrix: We liked the idea of people saying, ‘Let’s meet in the forest’.
Iris: The Wald sign is hand-made – a creative friend hand-wrote the logo. It’s a real artwork.
Beatrix: We went to the Plzeň brewery and fell in love with tank beer. I like to serve it to people because it looks so good. It looks so fresh.
Iris: Our customers definitely come for the beer. And even people who are not big beer lovers like it.
Beatrix: Every night one of the owners is here to be the face of the bar and we are open until the last person leaves. We work 4pm to 4am on most days.
Iris: We know we’ve got good beer when waiters from the Irish Rover pub come to drink our beer before their shift. And then come again after their shift telling us they don’t like the beer in their own pub!
Beatrix: We love having a piano in our bar. Once we got chatting to two Russian brothers late at night. It turned out they were concert pianists playing at the Laeiszhalle down the road. They ended up playing a Rachmaninoff concerto for us in the bar on our old piano with just our regulars watching. It was an amazing experience.
Iris: Our vision is to just improve on the bar as much as we can. You never know what will happen though. We said we won’t open another bar but yet when we go out on our bikes we see empty spaces – and we get inspired all over again.
Beatrix: Because we both have children, we understand each other more – bar work is full on. But like we always say, if you can keep the love standing then you never want to stop.
“Owning a bar is just like having a baby – it’s difficult at first and you get no sleep.”
