The Importance of Mentors

I am what you might call a millennial bartender. My first cocktail bar job was at PDT, where Jim Meehan hired me. I started on January 1st 2014 - a few years after it had won every award known to mankind, after a league of tenured mixologists had passed through its ranks, and its power of influence had long since been established. 

My first spirit tasting ever was with Hans Reisetbauer himself and his entire portfolio. My second was with Ron Cooper and all of his green bottles. I know, in a word, SPOILT. I’ve come up in the industry in a flashy time of cocktail apps and social media, of bar shows, awards and best of lists. Who’d have thought 10 years ago that we would be bitching about Stanley Tucci’s shaken Negroni when 10 years ago bars had to pull teeth to get a guest to drink a French 75.

I started writing this piece on the day that Pegu Club announced it would not reopen following the COVID-19 quarantine. It was such a sobering loss for our industry. My feed that day was flooded with heartbroken dedications and commemorative pictures. Jim eulogized that Pegu Club’s opening team was the most competitive, talented group of bartenders that he’d ever worked with under one roof at the same time, likening it’s leaders to Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls. How exhilarating it must have been to sit at that bar or to stand behind it even. I can imagine the spark of newness in the air as you walk into the room, to know that you are witnessing the game change in real time. The phrase, “end of an era” is tossed around here and there, but with this closure in this time that we are all living, that saying feels much more tangible.

When I first started at PDT, I had no idea there was a bar called Pegu Club or anything of its significance. I had made a gut decision after spending about a year and a half working at a restaurant in Soho that the food and beverage scene seemed a viable option to try to make a career out of. I didn’t know anything about booze or cocktails. I was pretty much a blank slate and felt completely thrown into the deep end. Jim showed me the books to read, the bars to visit, let me in on his tastings, talked me through the politics of his meetings. He never really fed me the answers, but always showed me where to look.

In my readings, a certain framework of modern cocktail history (can you call it history if its like thirty years old?) in New York seemed pretty clear. Dale Degroff made his name at the Rainbow Room, where he worked with and mentored Audrey Saunders, who I read was so enthralled by a seminar he gave that she offered to work for free in exchange for training. She then went on to open Pegu Club where she hired and trained a company of bartenders hoping to revive the golden age of cocktails. Years later, they would in turn open their own bars and most of them we now regard as our industry giants. There seemed to be a pretty evident chain between mentor, mentee, and new cocktail bar. Fast forward 10 or 15 years and you see what we have now, a world awash with cocktail bars and mixology lounges.

I was thrilled to learn all this of course, because it was unbeknownst to me at the time of my interview that I would be working at one of these heritage bars with the bartender grandchild of King Cocktail himself. I had never before given much thought to the origins of a bar or restaurant and felt privileged to be working at one with such a significant story. Jim had been holding daily photoshoots at the bar before shifts for a then new PDT cocktail app, so everyday I brought a notebook to write down every ingredient I didn’t know, every spec, every bartender and historian. I remember thinking, this is what it’s going to take to be successful in this business, memorising all of this “stuff” so when a guest asks I don’t look like an idiot. Jim was a diligent and hard teacher.

About six months in, I was at work and going through a really rough experience in my personal life. He asked light heartedly how I was, and it all came gushing out. He immediately sat down and talked with me about it like a friend for a couple hours. I was completely embarrassed that he had put both our work aside for my tears, but I remember one thing he said to me distinctly.

He said that he felt like it was no coincidence that he became more successful in his professional life when he became happier in his personal life. So as my boss and mentor, it mattered to him that I was happy. I was so touched by his kindness and that sentiment. It made me respect him that much more. Jim had taught me so much, but as I reflect on it now I see that I really embraced him as my mentor when I started considering him as my friend.

Mentorship gets thrown around these days with a lot of other buzzwords, hospitality, sustainability, education, etc. We hear them, we talk about them, but I don’t think we often enough stop to really take in their true meaning. Does the biggest backbar and the best technique mean the most hospitable? What about an expensively designed menu and a groovy playlist? The most comfortable bar stools? What does it mean to take care of a stranger? It’s wonderful that we are having more conversations about wasting less. We should absolutely be throwing less shit away. But what does it really mean to be sustainable in an industry that consumes? Education and mentorship surely go hand in hand with a lot of overlap. But the distinction to me is that education pertains to learning and mentorship involves growth. To teach something is to pass down knowledge, teacher to pupil. But the relationship between a mentor and mentee is much more personal. How was it that almost all of Audrey’s graduates went on to succeed and lead themselves? The key to success is not as I had thought early on, to learn the most. The key is perhaps to care the most. My take away is that a mentor doesn’t just teach, they inspire.

Our industry would in no way be the same now without Audrey and her team, a case for mentorship if there ever was one. The key words to focus on there are, her team. When we speak about mentorship, often we only focus on the role of the mentor but not the equally important role of the mentee. Mentorship is not a top down system, but rather in my opinion a symbiotic relationship. As I spoke earlier of my relationship with Jim, he was certainly there for me as a teacher and leader, but I also whole heartedly stepped up. He spoke of the ferocity of his coworkers at Pegu. The closest thing I can relate to this would be working with the Cocktail Apprentices at Tales of The Cocktail. A lot of my friends have given me various levels of grief over the years for taking two weeks out of summer to volunteer hard labor instead of enjoying myself in Nola and getting paid work. But the reason I go back year after year (except this year, fuck you Coronavirus!) is for the energy of sixty strangers coming together in one room, each one more eager than the next, ready to absorb and problem solve, lead and follow. There’s a high of accomplishment and ambition that you don’t always feel in your bar at home in your daily routines. It’s refreshing to say the least to be surrounded by people all wanting to take the system they’ve learned, put it to use, and find ways to make it better. Mentorship obviously doesn’t happen in just two weeks, but the relationships that we form there have certainly led to it. What the CAPs and the Pegu opening team had in common, is that they had something to prove. Half the battle is as they say showing up. Somewhere down the line as the diaspora of our industry has spread and knowledge is so readily available, I feel we’ve forgotten that a relationship is give and take. As mentees we can’t be waiting with our hands open for wisdom to be dropped in our palms. If we only define mentorship as education then we are cutting our industry’s future off at its knees. Two global pandemics have already started to do that for us, so let’s step up and cling to those mentors we can call friends.

We have to accept now that our industry is finding itself in somewhat of a similar position as Pegu Club when it first opened, a rebirth. Months into a global shutdown, weeks after a long overdue eruption for systemic equality, and after loads of speculation, the fact is that we don’t know what our professional futures hold other than a lot of change. We have been forced to either take a hard look in the mirror or be condemned to our willful ignorance. It’s very evident with most media as we scroll through our Instagram feeds (because let’s face it, that’s about 90% of what occupies our time now) that at the start of quarantine, the brands and establishments that ruled our industry for the last however many years were still sticking to what was seemingly most important, the best Quarantini spec, drink trends of 2020, Stanley Tucci’s damn Negroni. After the most recent Black Lives Matter protests, the same brands have pivoted to statements of solidarity, yet to be seen if they come to fruition. So once all of the talk and conjecture has fallen away and we are forced to really evolve, what we’re left with is the underlying reality that our industry is above all a human one. What does mentorship look like once we strip away all the factoids and education that we once confused it with? Additionally, who are those mentors that we prop up and mentees that we foster and do they reflect the expansive future that we want to see? What I’ve most dearly gained and continue to gain from Jim and all the others I consider my mentors was a sense of integrity, a sense of self. They’ve empowered me just as much as they’ve looked me in the face and told me that I’m better than that. We won’t know what bars will look like in six months, but what we can hold on to is the knowledge that to be the best bartender we can be, we should start by trying to be the best person we can be. We need this kind of mentorship now more than ever before.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but this year I was asked to be a judge for some Spirited Awards with Tales of The Cocktail. If there was any doubt for the necessity of awards during the first global pandemic, after the most recent upheaval they seem laughably futile. However as I reflect back, the category I had the most difficulty with was Best Bar Mentor. The list was stacked with dozens of people I look up to, that have made huge impacts on their communities and whose accomplishments speak for themselves. I have to admit to being sentimental, thinking of all the awards how significant this one is, and how at a loss I was trying to narrow it down. I found myself asking what kind criteria should I be looking for? Is it the number of mentees that determines the best? The success of their protégées? Dedication to activism? But if the true meaning of the title is as I consider it, hugely personal, then how do you judge the best mentor? How do you judge a best friend?