Originally, Zoe comes from Manchester, although London has been her home for 16 years now. She moved down there to go to Chelsea College of Art. With a lot of training on attention to detail and seeing the possibility in anything, Zoe learned to be incredibly self-driven. 

After finishing her degree, she started working for a small chocolatier, one of the first companies to make chocolate from bean to bar. This is where Zoe realized that she had a really good palate and a real passion for flavor. “I’d always love food and drink. It was always what I was thinking about every minute of every day, but I just did not realize I had a kind of skill in doing it.“

While working there, she had insight into the process, design, and flavor development. She was quite involved and also picked up some management skills on the way. Zoe ended up opening several concessions for them in Selfridges and a few department stores, including a store opening in Notting Hill that was actually in a barbershop. “A lot of the hairdressers here have alcohol licenses, so the thought was to open a cafe. It was a large shop and they wanted to serve some cocktails. That was kind of my route into the world of cocktails. I fell in love with 69 Colebrooke Row and took it from there.” 

“After my first experience at 69 Colebrooke Row it became clear to me that this is my world, and I have to find a way to enter this. I knew I really want to do this. I told the team that I’d do anything, I don’t care, as long as I’m learning something.”

Zoe ended up doing a stage with the Colebrooke team. As they were expanding, they needed someone to look after the production of the ingredients in the research development kitchen, the Drinks Factory. It was a case of being at “the right place at the right time.”
“I could see the potential in learning and creating these really unique and kind of all-encompassing experiences with liquid and I got on really well, as my mentor had a fine art background, so we were able to communicate in a very specific way.”

While working at the Drinks Factory for 10 years, Zoe had the chance to work with Charles Spence on some of his “gastrophysics” research and got to make the drinks menu for Dinner by Heston Melborne, which is how she got to know the Heston Blumenthal team. She also worked with various brands, such as Pernod Ricard, spirit brands, perfumers, and opened Untitled Bar down in East London as a co-founder.

“I’m very influenced by my mood and the narrative that you’re trying to create and there’s a huge parallel with perfume. When you put on perfume it’s about you and feeling a certain way or portraying a certain side, or tapping into a season and I think for me personally when I’m making drinks, a lot of it comes from the tactility of the drink. How do I feel when I drink this drink? Will I feel happy? At what moment of the night am I drinking it? Is it the start, the middle or the end? Is it something that needs to stimulate me in a certain way? These are not questions that I outright ask myself, but they’re just always there and it helps me to think this is a “martini moment”. If I want to work with these flavors and have them communicate a certain tonality, then this drink needs to be dry and this drink needs to be sour and then I kind of feed that to the decision whether it’s a Martini or it’s a Collins. Champagne is a great example. We already have so many associations and connotations with it. When you drink or order a glass of champagne, you’re celebrating something. So you tap into that. What if I want to give you the most amazing moment of celebration, what would I do to that liquid?”

“There was a drink I created at Untitled that is called “Snow” and the idea was to try to capture the moment when you’re a kid and you’re outside and it starts snowing and you kind of run around with your tongue out and you catch a snowflake on your tongue.”

When the pandamic hit, the long lockdown period has brought along a lot of mental decompression time and Zoe was no exception. As a consequence of the world, she had a chance to go back to the basics, reflect a lot on why she does what she does, what she wants to contribute towards, and why she came into the world of cocktails in the first place. It was at this moment that Zoe’s idea for her first book, The Cocktail Cabinet: The art, science and pleasure of mixing the perfect drink, struck.“There was a lot of thinking during covid, to be honest. It was difficult for a lot of people, but I realized that there was an opportunity and that opportunity was time. We have so little time and especially I think in the creative realm and you forget the value of space and just to be able to mentally decompress. I decided to carry on with Atelier Pip and just thought about how I would evolve it. Through that, I came up with the idea for a book.” 

Zoe’s book demystify cocktails at home.“I’ve felt that a lot of consumers still don’t understand how cocktails work. Or they feel it’s quite an expensive thing to do at home because you have quite a lot of different ingredients, you might not know if you’ll like the drink in advance and it’s a bit of a risk. You spend all of that money, and half of the products stay on the shelf and just get dusty. I wanted to try and find a way to demystify the structure of cocktails and build a better understanding of what cocktails are and why people like what they like and what they can do with that knowledge. Explore the drinks world and really maximize on the products that they’ve got at home, so if you have one bottle of gin you really know what you can do with it, you know?”

Growing up in Manchester, Zoe values baseline ingredients and is all about finding the best way forward and using the potential of each product. Luxurious items are not to be taken for granted. 

“The one thing I really want to keep doing now isjust making drinks. I’m now on this real path of discovering new things to taste and experience and I keep on building my palate because it suddenly becomes so exciting. I guess it’s like when you start your career and suddenly something clicks and the hours that you put into crafting something you suddenly get that muscle memory and you do that automatically. No matter what happens after the end of this year, I’ll still be tasting and making a million interesting things on the side (laughs).”