A colleague pointed out to me this recent VinePair podcast (skip ahead to 5:10) in which a couple somms and a periodical editor discuss a survey conducted by “a major liquor company” that indicated young bartenders weren’t interested in the history of their profession and didn’t feel it was important. To a significant degree, the three hosts of the podcast agreed.
It seems we don’t have access to the industry survey in question, so we don’t know much about it other than—reportedly—a lot (?) of young bartenders don’t know who Dale DeGroff is and don’t care. I was more struck by the blasé ignorance of the somms than these secondhand survey results.
The podcast is a weird, appalling listen. While the trio use the word “history”, they mostly talk about individuals—DeGroff, Sasha Petraske and Toby Cecchini (whose name they repeatedly butcher)—and the subtext seems to be more about rejecting what passes for “celebrity” culture amongst professionals than professional history per se. The hosts—ostensibly expert professionals—do not seem to understand the distinction.
But you are right, having access to the survey (the questions asked), would make it more clear, to understand the situation.
I must admit, I have seen, since few years, a decrease of interest about bar culture in general, with some young professionnals.
It might be due to the fact, the answer is at their fingertips - if someone ask for something, they will google it… (and unfortunately, we know how bad the web can be, sometimes, regarding bar history).
So, this “modern cocktail renaissance” started around 25 years ago, correct? Meh… maybe it’s just the natural, next generational shift. Back then, did anyone really care that much about who invented famous 70s and 80s drinks like the Screaming Orgasm or the Fuzzy Navel? No, the goal was to completely change and replace the existing drinking culture. Yeah, it was based on history, but a fuzzy, long-dead history. And especially at the beginning, it was misunderstood, misinterpreted and overly romanticized until it actually created a groundswell of enough bars, liquor producers and drinkers to make it into something worthwhile and sustainable instead of just… new.
But now it’s grown to the point where it’s become SO dense and codified, perhaps it’s off-putting to the young. Maybe new bartenders who weren’t even born when it this renaissance started and have no personal connection to the long, hard work it took to get here… maybe they just want to start over again, like we all did back then. Rejecting the existing status quo is how new things start. We didn’t just want to continue and make a better Cosmo or Tequila Sunrise, we wanted a Martinez, we wanted a Paper Plane.
This reminds me of an interview I often think about of Ad Rock where he explains this shift from the perspective of rap music, just from the opposite side.
This is a pretty common phenomenon: when people, and in particular young people, reach a certain basic level of mastery in a craft they have a tendency to protect their pride in their accomplishment by writing off as irrelevant or out of touch anyone who reminds them that they have barely scratched the surface; that those flashy riffs they learned so painfully are just the ABCs. If they choose to pursue the craft more deeply eventually they come to the realization that history and the individuals who helped to shape it are a priceless resource to be engaged by conversation and understanding, not a source of competition to be walled off.
I suppose that’s not always true, but I’ve seen it often enough and I hope, for selfish reasons, I’ll see it again. There are a whole lot of new bartenders since pandemic who can make the drinks on their lists plus a couple of modern classics but have never mixed a Rob Roy and don’t know how to balance a cocktail or what a Daisy is–or, just as importantly, what Constante Ribalaigua, Harry McElhone or Donn Beach can teach them about building their brands.
Robert, from your own 2017 Imbibe article on Brother Cleve…
"… drinking cocktails was the most punk-rock thing you could do in the ’80s, because nobody did it,” Cleve says. “Doing all these old-school cocktails was an act of defiance against society.”
And David, there was an interview somewhere with you where you talked about being in your 20s, in punk bands, drinking in old man bars and trying to find dusty bottles of Old O.
Can anyone really fault the kids for wanting to do what nobody else is doing or (at least in their youthful inexperience) what no one else has done? For defying society? It’s what they do. It’s what we did, but… we’re just old now.
I don’t expect wisdom from kids. It’s quite charming when they show up with some.
However, I do expect a degree of wisdom from the founder and the editor of an (ostensibly) significant publication (VinePair) and an ostensibly credible somme and “wine educator”. Instead, I got what now just seems like a toxic hot take.
(Which isn’t to say I don’t also find toxic and distasteful what passes for celebrity culture in the bar world.)
Something relevant I see is the original cocktail pioneers all had a “cool hunter” personality where they could find the right ratio of digging in the crates and unearthing culture and then also pulling new things from the margins. It is totally a dying breed where exploring a deep cultural richness is traded for “satisfying” and “premiumization”. Some people look back on the cool hunters and don’t understand the motivation. Satisfying doesn’t care about keeping tabs on who set artistic precedents or the rabbit holes of finding who influenced the things you loved until you find yourself simultaneously listening to Lead Belly while watching a Fletcher Henderson youtube video in the wee hours.
A lot of the people that inspired me, like Brother Cleve (I was lucky to be a Bostonian at an exciting time), worked across many scenes. It almost seems like people from the pre internet era could leverage it better than people today saturated in the web and drowning. You pile money on top of that and find that the strivers aren’t really capable of being true cool hunter culture creators. Strivers can sure capitalize on the cocktail seen but I haven’t seen much new culture lately.
It seems like only people trained in a flourishing music scene of influencer discovery were capable of pulling off the cocktail renaissance. What are the kids of today supposed to do when so many formative forces are broken?
When the cocktail scene went a little south, I jumped to other hobby scenes like metal machining. There is/was constant ebay treasure collecting and infinite historical rabbit holes. The community is on the internet, like early cocktail scene, but with those old digging in the crates vibes.
So yeah, I can see why no one young knows or cares who DeGroff is. The art & music scene pedigree has been stripped from the cocktail scene. It is alive in pockets, but not broadly.
As a mid 30’s, new bartender, I’m just curious what age ranges everyone is thinking of here? Some terms I’m seeing are “kids”, “young people” & “Young professionals”. …Typically conversations like these are centered around millennials, but now that time has past a lot of people don’t realize that millennials are now pushing 40.
…So do folks think it’s a lot of people in the millennial generation or the next step lower in Gen z? … Or both?
