Christina Cabrera

Christina Cabrera represents a new breed of bartender — the consultant.

Even though you can find her charming drinkers behind the bar at the Mission’s Wildhawk (3464 19th St.) on a regular basis, her imprint is wider than most, having also masterminded cocktail lists at Old Bus Tavern, Novela, Barbarossa and Guerneville’s El Barrio, among others. Yet Cabrera arrived via the cooking world, and her restaurant resume — from Ubuntu to Michael Mina — is just as impressive.

Her nontraditional approach to the industry is par for her course, and fittingly, her path to bar stardom was anything but standard. The Texas native enlisted in the Navy at age 20. Cabrera enjoyed the work, but as a proud lesbian during the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” era, she declined to build a career there.

She eventually enrolled in Napa’s Culinary Institute of America and fell into bartending while cooking at the now-closed Orson. Chef-owner Elizabeth Falkner — a role model in the LGBT community — coaxed her into working the bar for ladies’ night, citing her charisma. Besides, Falkner reasoned, if she could cook, she could bartend. “It started out as a one-night-a-week thing, and evolved into me behind the bar,” Cabrera says.

She was hooked. The social side came easily, as did the technical side: With her cooking background, she excelled in combining flavors. In recent years, her consulting business has enabled her to learn, and teach, the nuts and bolts of bar operation: the numbers, design, inventory systems, hiring, training and so on.

“I always went to places where I could learn the most,” she says. “The thing I like most about this industry is you never stop learning.”