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Stronger cocktails, weaker scene?
When bartenders turn into consultants, they either water down the cocktail scene-or make the cocktails better.
Four years ago, when the United States Bartenders’ Guild opened a chapter in Chicago, few of the bartenders involved had made a name for themselves. Nacional 27’s Adam Seger was the one exception, and he served as the organization’s poster boy, lending credibility to a group of unknowns. But within just a handful of months, many of those drink makers—John Kinder, Kyle McHugh and the Guild’s leader, Bridget Albert—had become renowned. And they were soon joined by others: Peter Vestinos (then at Sepia), Charles Joly (the Drawing Room), the bartenders of the Violet Hour. Suddenly, the first generation of Chicago mixologists was looking pretty strong.
Today, however, many of those people have stopped mixing drinks and started consulting on them. Debbi Peek, who earned her reputation at the Cenitare group of restaurants, is now with Bacardi Rum, where as a brand ambassador she creates cocktails for that spirit. Kinder does the same thing for Death’s Door Spirits. And Vestinos joined the Wirtz Beverage Group, where he does the same thing Albert does for Southern Wine and Spirits: visits accounts using Wirtz brands and builds them a cocktail program from the ground up.
The retreat from behind the bar has become a typical career path for bartenders, but it presents a dynamic that seems antithetical to bartending: You can get a cocktail by any of these mixologists, but it won’t be him or her who shakes it for you.
“[Consultants] bring a lot of knowledge to cocktails [and] to the company’s portfolio,” says Josh Pearson, the mixologist who took over the bar program at Sepia when Vestinos left. “[Vestinos has] brought a lot of new product into Wirtz that a lot of mixologists were interested in and needed but that we couldn’t previously get. But then, they’re not behind the bar anymore, so that’s kind of a double-edged sword.”
In a city with a long cocktail history, the losses behind the bar might be no big deal. In more traditionally shot-and-beer Chicago, on the other hand, the losses can set back a scene that’s still in a crucial growing phase.
Yet it was exactly the lack of growth in Chicago’s cocktail culture that led Vestinos to join Wirtz. “I hemmed and hawed about taking this position for a while,” he says. “As accepting as local and national media was of the Chicago cocktail scene in 2007–08, it still hasn’t exploded like other cities have.… I feel like we’re still making the argument.” To that end, Vestinos now gets to “spread the gospel” about cocktails and improve the city’s drinking from behind the scenes.
The process is easier said than done. Thanks to the city’s (perhaps not quite explosive) cocktail boom, restaurants are feeling pressure to have programs more than they ever have before. Now, it’s no longer just an option to offer well-crafted cocktails; it’s become an expectation. But the time, expense and manpower involved in running an effective cocktail program can come as a surprise to restaurateurs who are used to simply pouring wines and making gin and tonics. Which is why some restaurants receive the consultation, run the program for a few weeks—and then quickly shut it down.
“You have to do it either really right or not do it at all,” says Steve McDonagh, who started a cocktail program himself when he opened Hearty late last year. To make it work smoothly, he had to invest both time and money in the proper glassware, the right (and oftentimes more expensive) ingredients and a head bartender who oversees the program with him. It’s working—almost every table starts with a cocktail, he says—but the labor is born out of a love for the drinks, not necessarily the money. “You can probably make more profit off a quick beer than something like this,” he says.
All that effort can make a restaurateur wonder if a cocktail program is worth it. Or if not the restaurateur, at least the bartenders, who sometimes resist the new regime. “It is tough to retrain a bartender,” Vestinos says. Pearson explains further: It’s “like a chef cooking—it’s your food, it’s your name, it’s your creation…[but] when you’re making somebody else’s cocktails, you’re just making drinks.”
That may have been one of the problems with Old Town Social, which opened with a much-touted list designed by Kinder. A few months after opening (long after Kinder had left the premises), Old Town had scrapped the program—the bartenders were now filling their time with shots.
But as of press time, Old Town was working on a new cocktail list. And it was doing so with new consultants—Joly and Tim Lacey, who recently started a consulting group called Angel’s Share. The consulting industry contributed to the bar’s first failed cocktail program. But it can also, they hope, fix it.
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