He has heard the jokes. Brother, has he heard the jokes. “It’s, ‘Hey, can I have some more ice cubes with my drink?’ ” says the bartender, “and I have to pretend I’ve never heard it before, you know?”
When you peddle drinks in the Ice Bar in Sweden’s capital city, smiling — or is it wincing? — at customers’ lame ice-related humor is part of the job. So is working in temperatures that hover at minus-5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), serving up alcoholic refreshment in ice glasses to crowds swaddled in bar-issued parkas and mittens and boots, working behind a bar made entirely of ice, surrounded by solid-ice walls beneath a solid-ice ceiling.
But Juan Gonzales isn’t complaining. The Nicaraguan-born man who moved to Sweden when he was still an infant — he’s 24 now — has worked at Stockholm’s hippest new nightspot for three months and likes it just fine.
The Ice Bar, which may soon expand to locations in other parts of the world including the United States, is advertised as the only bar on the planet constructed entirely of ice, from the infrastructure — walls, ceilings, tables, bar — to the accoutrements: Drinks arrive in glasses made of ice. Ice sculptures are the only decor. Located in the lobby of the Nordic Sea Hotel, a sleek new place near the central train station in this city of some 755,000 people, the Ice Bar is open from 3 p.m. to midnight every night of the week except Sunday. Starting Monday, the commencement of the tourist season, the Ice Bar will be open Sundays as well.
Customers from around the world stick to the place like a tongue on a frozen lamppost. The Ice Bar combines a cool, almost ethereal beauty — all that crystalline context — with the sci-fi, high-tech feel of an alien latitude. It could be Antarctica, in other words, or it could be Alpha Centauri.
Yet local residents also frequent the Ice Bar, which opened less than a year ago and can hold about 30 people, packed parka-to-parka. It’s a gimmick, yes, but it’s a gimmick with the appeal of unprecedented atmospherics and a perversely appealing physical discomfort. It is really, really cold, especially if you’re foolish enough to keep taking off your mittens to prod objects to ascertain if they’re actually ice, through and through. Moreover, vodka-infused drinks with names such as Arctic Sunset or Wolf’s Paw or Purple Kiss — Absolut vodka is a co-sponsor and all of the drinks have fanciful monikers — simply seem to taste better when served in solid ice glasses. By 10:30 or 11 each night, the Ice Bar is abuzz. And so are the customers.
“We get people form everywhere,” says Elin Alvemark, 23, a fresh-faced Stockholm native who greets guests who are drawn to what looks from the outside like a square block of ice in a corner of the hotel lobby. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, they say, `Oh, my God!'”
The bar’s exterior walls are glass, but the ice walls inside are clear enough to see through. This ice is some of the purest and most transparent in the world, Alvemark explains, because it is hacked out of the Torne River in northern Sweden, the same river that gives up its ice to make the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi in the country’s Lappland region above the Arctic Circle.
The Ice Hotel opened in 1989 and has been a great success; each year in the fall, a 50-room inn is built by ice artists and rented to travelers who want to catch 40 winks at 5 below — before the structure melts in the spring. Marriages often are conducted at the Ice Hotel.
Everything ice
Earlier this year, an all-ice replica of the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s London was constructed and an ice-encrusted version of “Hamlet” performed. The ice artists keep busy year-round; their works are displayed at the Ice Hotel Art Center near Jukkasjarvi.
When it comes to the art of building a bar, Alvemark said, Torne River ice also does the trick. The river’s ice is superior because, unlike ice from a lake, its water freezes while in motion, keeping air bubbles out of the ice. So when the Ice Hotel’s owners decided to expand their operations down in Stockholm, they kept the same crucial ingredient: the clear, pure ice of the Torne River. (The floor is made out of a concrete aggregate; you expect it to be slippery, but it’s not.)
The Ice Bar, which must be rebuilt every three months or so after the body heat from customers slowly melts the 20 tons of ice from which it is constructed, now shows up routinely in Sweden travel books, such as the 2003 edition of Lonely Planet Guide. It draws visitors such as Ruth and Ray Feldhaus of Green Bay, who stopped by on a recent evening near the end of a three-week tour of Scandinavian countries.
“Loved it,” says Ruth, shedding the silver, fur-lined parka shortly after exiting the stylish meat locker known as the Ice Bar. “It’s really cool,” she adds and then laughs at her own bad joke, because she didn’t mean to make it.
She also didn’t mean to be impressed by the Ice Bar — at first. “In Green Bay,” she says archly, “ice is not a novelty.”
But something about the bar — its beauty, its uniqueness, the sheer audacity of the concept — captivates her, just as it captivates another member of her tour group, Yonat Silvers of Los Angeles.
“It’s really fabulous!” Silvers says. “At first we all said, `Well — an ice bar?’ But then we came and — it’s great! I danced! The only thing that got cold was my nose.”
Asked if the Ice Bar might be a hit among the seen-it-all, done-it-all, hard-to-impress multitudes of Los Angeles should one be established there, Silvers instantly responds, “Oh, in L.A., for sure. The people there are crazy.”
No crazier, perhaps, than the man from Holland who stayed all night in the Ice Bar — eight hours — without a break, making him the current record-holder for longest continuous patronage in the frigid nightspot, reports Lisa Malmborg, the 22-year-old Stockholm resident who helps Alvemark at the front desk.
Body heat
Among Malmborg’s jobs is to dole out the gray fur-lined parkas, which dangle in a poofy row on a coat rack just outside the bar’s double doors. Some visitors are resistant to the outerwear, Malmborg says, and they take the macho stand that they don’t need any help enduring the temperatures. “But they don’t understand that the coats aren’t to protect them — the coats are to protect the ice from their body heat,” she explains. “We don’t care about them!”
She is joking, but you can see why it’s a sore point: On a recent night, an elderly woman pitched a major fit over the parka issue, apparently convinced that the parkas were a scam to shake down tourists for extra tips. Malmborg and Alvemark remain calm and polite — but firm. No parka, no entrance to the Ice Bar.
The admission charge is 125 Krona (about $16 in American dollars, given current exchange rates) and includes a free drink. Customers pass through one set of doors, then wait until Malmborg closes it behind them and then they open another set, all to seal in the invigorating cold. Once inside, the cold grows from novel to annoying to unbearable — but not before one has sipped a couple of Arctic Circles and argued politics with Gonzales who, like many Swedish citizens, likes to engage Americans in controversial topics.
The music is loud, the drinks are cold and the atmosphere is decidedly convivial. At one table — a.k.a. slab of ice — two Swedish women are having a grand time, giggling as they try to lift their drinks with hands made slow and bumbling by thick mittens. Brigitta Lindgren and Lena Anesater say the Ice Bar is a popular new destination for Stockholm residents.
“It’s a fun place. But it’s cold,” says Lindgren, her pale round face framed by the fur-fringed hood of the parka.
Fleeting existence
In the hotel lobby just around the corner from the entrance to the Ice Bar is a small, sleek, silver TV set mounted to the wall. In constant play is a videotape about the founding of the Ice Hotel and, subsequently, the Ice Bar. Among the peculiarities of building things out of ice, the narrator points out, is that they do not last; there is not even the illusion of permanence.
“Ice,” he intones, “is not forever.”
So maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the secret of the Ice Bar’s subtle appeal, beyond the primitive, gee-whiz spectacle of a new thing. The Ice Bar is a metaphor for life, for its beauty, its occasional discomfort, its fleeting presence. Life, like ice, melts away right before your eyes. Love it as you might, it won’t last.
Or maybe it all comes down to the taste of vodka that, so magnificently chilled, goes down like an insult but settles in the stomach like a lullaby.
No matter how many drinks they kill, though, the Wisconsin folks don’t lose their heads. They keep their perspective. They’ve seen a few things in their time, after all, such as the memorable football game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys at Lambeau Field on Dec. 31, 1967.
“Yeah, this place is cold,” says Ray Feldhaus, “but it’s not as cold as the Ice Bowl.”
