FEMALE FLAIR FOR THE FLARE
Bartenders are mixing it up. They want to dictate to you, but they also want to be your micro-friend. By Yolisa Mkele
Meet the best bartenders in the world — most of whom are women
PICTURE yourself sipping an Old Fashioned or a Negroni. What are you wearing, where are you and how pretentious are you required to be? The problem with your average cocktail-quaffing escapade is that it usually involves GQ levels of faux refinement and an encyclopaedic knowledge of what liquor goes with what flavour. Couple that with large menus, the overuse of the word “artisanal” and barkeeps dressed like trendy serial killers, and it’s easy to see why some of the world’s best bartenders are gravitating towards a palaver-free future.
At least that is what some of them seemed to suggest when discussing the future of cocktails at this year’s World Class global finals in Miami. This is a weeklong competition that requires the world’s best bartenders to perform a complex routine of mixology gymnastics. Contestants compete in a number of challenges, with the field gradually whittled down until only one is left standing.
But those in attendance also had time to discuss what the cocktail horizon looks like.
“We wanted to open a cocktail bar with everything we loved and nothing that we hated, because we hated the fact that if you worked in a cocktail bar you had to dress like an extra on Gangs of New York,” said Tim Philips, a former World Class winner and co-owner of Bulletin Place, a popular cocktail bar in Sydney.
“We hated long, unchanging cocktail lists that were essentially tomes dedicated to a bartender’s knowledge rather than a customer’s experience. The ones where you had to get strawberries for a cocktail in the middle of June that taste like water,” he said.
Trimming the unwanted fat, Philips and his business partner created a bar where it is just as
easy to have a cocktail as it is to have a beer, and where there’s no place for a gangly menu.
“The whole idea of ‘less is more’ is that we wanted to do five cocktails a day with whatever the best was at the market,” said Philips. “We only wanted to do two beers, two red wines and two white wines and a little bit of food. We only had like two or three different kinds of spirits on the back bar.”
Bulletin Place is not the only bar to kick against tradition. According to Tom Savigar of The Future Laboratory, a UK consultancy firm, bars across the globe are reshaping the way we interact with our mixed drinks.
“Once upon a time, the customer was always right,” said Savigar. “The next generation of bartenders are more willing to voice their opinions and are giving up on trying to please all of the people, all of the time. You wouldn’t go to a Michelin-starred restaurant and tell the chef how to dress a salad, so why tell an experienced bartender how to make a mojito?”
Savigar calls it — jokingly — the bartender as dictator. Think Erik Lorincz, head bartender at the American Bar in The Savoy hotel in London, who will politely but firmly show you the door if you display a course tongue; it does not suit the tone of the establishment.
Bars are not just putting customers in their place; they, and the brands they stock, are starting to have opinions on, well, everything. In response to comments made by the bilespewing Nik Nak that is Donald Trump, Mexican spirits company Ilegal Mezcal launched an ad campaign featuring a stylised image of that toupee-wearing orange peel accompanied by the phrase Donald Trump, eres un pendejo — basically, “Donald Trump, you are a wanker”. The ad was plastered in lights on the sides of building and turned into a popular range of T-shirts. Off the back of the success of this campaign, the brand peddled a range of signature cocktails.
When they’re not bullying you and lampooning your favourite political punch bag, cocktail creators will soon be doing their level best to manipulate your emotions in ways that are at once creepy and ingenious. Using a combination of colour, smell and your deep desire to make friends, your local bartender will serve you drinks of a shade calculated to elicit a certain reaction while he or she chats you up like an old friend. Or at least a micro-friend.
“Making a micro-friend is all about getting that emotional connection with someone quickly,” Philips said. “Customers don’t necessarily come back for the product most of the time. They come back because you’ve made a connection and so people would rather spend time in that bar than in that other bar.”
If the idea of micro-friends, micro-menus and colour subterfuge are more than you are ready for, that might just be because you live where you do.
“I think we are behind the trends a little,” said Dominic Walsh, South Africa’s entrant in the World Class finals and coowner of mobile bar service Molecular Bars.
“In South Africa we are not very adventurous so we have to ease our way into things. We are pushing the boundaries but you can only push boundaries so far,” he said.
According to Walsh, in cities like London and Sydney, drinking holes can afford to toy with their customers more because they have a more advanced cocktail culture.
“For example, just a few years ago, the idea of putting a strawberry in a cocktail was outrageous. So where consumers are concerned we are behind, but in terms of bartenders and their skill levels we are right up there,” he said.
All South Africa needs, Walsh believes, is a bit of cocktail education.
So if you find yourself in a bar looking in confusion at a menu that has only one page, and that page is decorated with insults about politicians, and you are wondering why this turquoise drink is making you feel oddly serene and well-disposed towards the person who poured it — well, you may just have arrived at the future.
Yolisa Mkele was a guest of Diageo