San Jose bartenders learn tales of the trade
If you noticed your favorite bartender wasn’t around last week, he or she was probably in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail, a weeklong conference in the Big Easy akin to Comiccon for the cocktail crowd.
“For me, this is about inspiration, education and community,” said Cache Bouren, who owns Haberdasher in downtown San Jose and was among about a dozen Silicon Valley bartenders and owners who decamped to the French Quarter for the week. “In this business, it’s really important to stay current and to network with people from other regions to see what they’re doing.”
Two Haberdasher employees, Jacob Lopez and Katrina Alvarez, were at their first Tales conference. Alvarez said it was an eye-opening experience that provided her with lessons from bartenders in places like New York, Chicago, Ohio and Kentucky that she planned to bring back to San Jose. “They all had different experiences dealing with their area that changed the way they made their bar,” she said.
Most of those connections happen at countless parties and tasting events hosted by distributors — Tales of the Cocktail is spirit and wine-centric, beer fans are on their own — where mixologists from around the globe mingle and learn from on another. There were seminars
and workshops on myriad topics: making batch cocktails, American authors who created the nation’s drinking culture, sniffing out bogus cocktail histories (aka “Fake Booze News”) and what the future holds for the bar industry in a world with legal cannabis.
“We’re always searching for new ideas, talking to other bartenders, going to seminars — any little thing we can do to make our business better,” said Eric Nielsen, managing partner of 55 South in downtown San Jose, who pointed to Trash Tiki, an environmentallyminded bar resource that launched in 2016.
“That movement is taking expended items and turning them into ingredients for cocktails, like making an orgeat out of old almond croissants that a bakery has thrown away,” Nielsen said. “If we can get something that makes us a little bit greener, a little bit more sustainable and at the same time brings down costs, it’s good for business.”
But Tales is more than just a drinkfest, with events and workshops at the Royal Sonesta hotel in the French Quarter and elsewhere that focus on the health and wellness of bar customers and employees alike. Drew Johnson, bar manager at the Cedar Room at the Pruneyard Cinemas in Campbell, said he appreciated the seminars that focused on practical matters like how bartenders — who work until 2 a.m. and beyond — can restructure their sleep schedules and handle finances, depression and other emotional disorders. “That all plays into overimbibing and overworking, so you have to learn how to reformulate those things,” he said.
George Lahlouh and Dan Pham, who own Paper Plane and Miniboss in downtown San Jose, also attended Tales of the Cocktail for the first time. Paper Plane bartender Mary Palac was named by the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation as one of the top 10 bartenders in America and attended the conference as a returning member of its prestigious Cocktail Apprentice Program. For Lahlouh, getting to hang out in New Orleans with the rest of the South Bay bar crowd away from work was an added benefit.
“People think we’re competitors with, say, the guys from 55 South because they’re across the street from Paper Plane. Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Lahlouh, who hung out at Bar Marilou with Nielsen and Mike Nguyen from 55 South, as well as Rachel Malm, bar director at Camper in Menlo Park. “We all want to make downtown’s cocktail scene better and the whole area around us.”