A good bartender is a hospitality worker who happens to also pour drinks.
I have been shaking cocktails professionally for seventeen years, in Boston and New York and now New Orleans. In that time the word mixology has gone from unfamiliar to overused to, briefly, unfashionable, and back again. The hats got taller and then shorter. The vests came and went. Flair bartending retreated to Las Vegas, which is, broadly, where it belongs.
What has stayed, through all those cycles, is a small set of things that make a great bartender great. None of them are secret. All of them are hard.
1. Balance before invention
A cocktail has three jobs — sweet, sour, and strong — and most classics argue for a particular proportion of them. The Daiquiri is 2 : 1 : 0.75. The Margarita, as Julio Bermejo pours it, is 1.5 : 1 : 1. The Old Fashioned does not have a sour at all, which is why it's so unforgiving: get the sugar wrong, and you've got nowhere to hide.
A young bartender, told to "come up with a new drink," usually invents a cocktail that is five ingredients making the same noise. A good bartender starts from a shape — a sour, an aromatic, a highball — and finds one thing to vary. The Jerk Mango Spritz on our opening list is a riff on a shape that's a century old. The scotch bonnet in the aquavit is the one new thing.
"If every ingredient could leave and the drink would still make sense, it was never a drink. It was a committee." — Dale DeGroff, 2016 industry panel
2. Ice is an ingredient
If you take one thing away from a cocktail class, make it this: ice is doing work in the drink, not just cooling it. The volume of water a cocktail picks up while being shaken, stirred or built on ice is part of the recipe. Change the ice format and you have changed the drink.
At ShaSha our bar has four ice formats:
- Kold-Draft cubes — the standard, for stirred and shaken classics.
- Clear 2x2 cubes — for serving over, in Old Fashioned-shape drinks. Clear ice melts slower; the drink keeps its structure longer.
- Cracked ice — for juleps and swizzles, which want a lot of surface area and a lot of dilution.
- Spear ice — long thin cubes for highballs, so the drink carbonates evenly through the glass.
3. Technique is boring, which is why it matters
Nobody writes long magazine pieces about the way a great bartender pours. There is nothing visual to describe. They pour the correct amount. They do it the same way every time. They do it without looking at the jigger. If you watch Alex Marchand build a Sazerac, the single thing you will notice is that his hands are not in a hurry. That is the technique. It is boring.
The two unglamorous skills that separate the best bartenders from everyone else: muscle memory for pours (so attention is spent elsewhere), and spoon stirring (which, done right, moves the drink without aerating it, so a stirred drink feels dense and glossy rather than thin and foamy).
4. The guest is the recipe
Here is the thing people trained in fine dining understand instinctively and bartenders sometimes forget: a cocktail is a conversation. If the guest doesn't like gin, they do not need to be educated. They need not to drink gin. If they want something sweet at the end of a long day, that is correct. If they want something bitter at the start, that is also correct. A great bartender listens for ninety seconds before suggesting anything.
At ShaSha we train for this explicitly. Before every service, a sixty-second check-in: who is in the room, what did they order last time, what is the weather doing to their mood. The best drink I ever made was a two-ingredient tomato-and-salt highball for a woman who had been crying in her Uber on the way over. She did not order it. I suggested it. She finished it in silence and smiled.
5. Memory is a tool
The private club format works especially well for cocktails because the room sees you more than once. By the fourth visit we know you like your Negroni with a wider bitterness and a smaller ice cube. By the twentieth, we don't ask. This is not a party trick; it is the point. The cocktail that is best is the one that is already waiting.
Closing
I have taught a lot of Masterclasses in a lot of rooms. The students who leave with the most are the ones who abandon the quest for a signature move. Mixology is not a signature. It is a set of practices you can read on the back of a postcard, and spend a lifetime trying to actually do.
If you'd like to spend an evening practising with us, come to a Masterclass. Bring a notebook.
— Alex Marchand, Beverage Director
