Bella Porcile can't walk anywhere without picking something. A flower, a berry, a leaf she hasn't seen before. She looks it up, brings it home and finds out what it can become.
She is a bartender and a forager. She makes wild drinks: cocktails built on what is edible in the nature around her.
The taste of a place
When Bella arrives somewhere new, she asks one question. What does this place taste like?
She works with restaurants that are good but don't yet have a good bar. She finds out who distils spirits nearby, who blows the glass, who grows what, and builds the menu from that. When we filmed her, she was running the bar at Bonden & Bönorna in Slite on Gotland, a restaurant built on local produce.
Her method is experiment, not recipe. A flower that smells of almonds might go with whisky. Can it be dried, turned into syrup, sprinkled on top? Nothing is written down.
Some guests tell her a drink brought back a memory: a walk in the forest with a grandfather. That is what she is after.
Where it comes from
Bella grew up in Sweden with an Italian father who ran a restaurant and taught her what was edible in the forest. Her Danish grandfather was a baker. Only recently did she learn that he kept a room he called the laboratory, where he dried herbs and made his own schnapps.
Her father told her to stay out of the business. She didn't. Restaurant school, four years in a London pub, then fifteen seasons in Åre in the Swedish mountains.
What it cost
Bella talks openly about the hard side of the industry. Men who expected more than a professional relationship. A colleague who told her she wasn't a real bartender. And one workplace where a manager spread lies about her until she started to believe them herself. The lies came out later, and the company apologised. By then the damage was done.
She left employment and started her own company. It is harder, she says, but freer. Now she chooses the people around her.
Surround yourself with good people that see what you can do.
Why I made this film
I thought this would be a film about how to make cocktails. It became a film about experiencing nature with every sense. Walking behind Bella, there was something edible behind every rock, and I realised how much I had stopped noticing.
In Sweden, the right of public access lets anyone forage, as long as you leave nothing but footprints and are completely sure of what you pick. Bella's advice is simpler still: be curious, open your senses and ask.
Bella has also written a book about foraged drinks through the seasons, Vilda drinkar.
Slite Strand Resort hosted us during the shoot on Gotland, and Bonden & Bönorna served the food and many of the drinks.
Read the original article about Bella.
The question this film answers: how do you design work intentionally?
