Carina Soto Velasquez

Coming Up

Training at University in Paris framed a career that was built less through a single track than through service, repetition, and adaptation. Before bartending, Carina Soto Velasquez worked as waitress and host at restaurants and bars in Paris, learning the floor first: pacing a room, handling arrivals and departures, and keeping service moving under pressure. From there, she moved behind the bar at a tapas bar in Paris, where the craft became direct and specific. As she put it, “It was the beginning, I needed to learn how to bartend.” In 2011, that progression became institutional with the founding of Quixotic Projects, the business that anchors her place in Paris hospitality. The arc is practical rather than polished: starting over, working through service, and accumulating enough experience to turn necessity into method. In the context of her work, the line reads as part of the record rather than a gap; the education continued in bars, restaurants, and the demands of the floor.

Where They Are Now

Today, the work at Quixotic Projects keeps Carina Soto Velasquez closely linked to the evolution of Paris’s drink scene. As co-founder and owner, she remains part of the group that helped push the city’s bar culture forward, with an approach shaped by opening rooms, sustaining service, and making hospitality function beyond the glass. In Paris, where atmosphere carries as much weight as the pour, her work sits inside a broader change in how drinking spaces are built and understood.

In Their Words “It was the beginning, I needed to learn how to bartend.”