The Bartender's Pantry

Introduction

The food and drink rituals I grew up with in the suburbs of Chicago were humble and practical for a family of six.

Every morning, my mom steeped bags of Lipton’s tea in a stainless-steel pot to sip piping hot with a teaspoon of granulated sugar and a splash of 2% milk. While her Quaker Oats warmed, she scooped ground coffee from the plaid Stewart’s tin for my dad’s morning cup into a drip coffee maker. He drank it with a splash of half-and-half in a ceramic mug while toggling between smoking a Marlboro Red and maneuvering a Datsun 210’s stick shift to transport us to school in the morning.

I vividly remember summer trips to Michigan, where we stayed with my maternal grandmother, who kept a huge stack of old Gourmet magazines and cooked fresh vegetables from her garden in a kitchen with a collection of copper pans that rivaled Julia Child’s. But my parents didn’t cook like my grandmother. They made pragmatic decisions about food and cooking because they worked double shifts throughout much of my childhood and had four boys to feed. We’re all grown and out of the house now, but they still take their tea and coffee the same way.

My eating and drinking experiences changed once I began working in bars and restaurants. I visited the incredible farmer’s markets around the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. I worked alongside some of the most celebrated chefs in America in New York City. I moved to Portland, Oregon, where the food scene is so earnest it was lampooned on the TV sitcom Portlandia. I’ve had so many pinch-me moments in these places, and more when I was initiated into a deeper understanding and appreciation of food and beverage thanks to the time, attention, and care of bakers, chefs, sommeliers, farmers, brewers, distillers, baristas, and my fellow cooks, bartenders, and servers.

I didn’t know much about tea, for example, until I worked at Gramercy Tavern, which procured some of the best loose-leaf teas in America from Sebastian Beckwith of In Pursuit of Tea. From smoky lapsang souchong to verdant lemon verbena, I was surprised to find these new-to-me teas and tisanes tasted perfectly balanced and vibrant without sugar, honey, lemon, or milk. Working with Sebastian made me realize the world of tea was so much more vast, varied, and delicious than I had previously encountered.

Later, I expanded my palate with travel. For instance, in San Francisco, a pilgrimage to Elizabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bakery made me rethink every loaf of bread I’ve ever eaten. Their now-famous sourdough is a taste experience that engages all the senses; the texture goes from an airy crumb to an armored crust, and when I cut through its shell, the aromas of fruit, grass, and grain stop me in my tracks. Discovering new flavors and culinary practices, and revisiting old favorites like the ones championed at Tartine, is a joyful practice that guides my eating and drinking rituals.

My life experiences inform the way I perceive ingredients as a bartender. Every time I taste a coffee or fruit or spice, I wonder if it’s really the best version I can find, or if I need to search further to source something more appropriate for the application at hand.

Today, the practice of continuously evaluating the quality of ingredients and understanding their origins drives my work as a bartender. I am not alone in this; the sentiment, I believe, is driving today’s cocktail zeitgeist. We’ve moved beyond rejiggering recipes from the “Golden Age” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, bartenders are blazing new paths by prioritizing transparent sourcing, environmentally sustainable farming, and worker rights alongside the way ingredients taste or function in a recipe. Bartenders are increasingly caretaking the narratives of these ingredients—past, present, and future—in addition to coaxing out their best qualities in the glass.

The axis for this new era of bartending isn’t just centered around the base spirits, bitters, and liqueurs; it has expanded to include the mixers, too. I’ve identified sugars, spices, dairy, nuts, grains, vegetables, flowers, herbs, fruits, coffee, tea, sodas, mineral waters, and ferments as the “universal” ingredients that comprise the components of the bartender’s pantry I’ve written two books that feature spirits and subordinate these zero-proof mixers. I stand by them as works of their time, but today, the pantry ingredients are ushering mixology into the twenty-first century. That’s why instead of glancing past these ingredients and their preparations, I’ve made them the focal point of this handbook.

In the following pages, you will find primers on ten different families of ingredients. Each one can be used to make cocktails and many may be served unmixed. Each family gets its own chapter, with a contemporary overview and tips for sourcing, storing, and preparing them as components of the mixers used in classic and modern cocktail recipes. I want to draw attention to how these ingredients are grown, processed at origin, and shipped. I want you to meet some of the people who bring them to us, and learn how proper tools, functional serviceware, and reliable recipes become critical building blocks of a dynamic bar program or home bar.

Each one of these ingredients has a complex history, with thorny ethical considerations and quality benchmarks. I hope you’re ready to dig into policy and politics, because we can’t talk about sugars, spices, tea, and coffee without examining the role colonialism and capitalism play in bringing these ingredients to the bar. And we can’t survey these subjects without interest in the welfare of the land, the people who farmed it, and those who profit from that work today. Reconciling this history in our mixing practices should matter to both bartenders and our guests.

This book is a celebration of the ingredients in the bartender’s pantry along with the people who help stock it. Every one of the world’s best bars is powered by a team of the world’s best prep people (many of whom tend bar, too), who check in the produce orders, make the syrups, extract juice from fruits and vegetables, monitor infusions, pick and prep all the herbs, neatly organize the storage areas, and much more before opening the bar for service. Here, we focus on their work, and in following their lead, you will not only improve your drinks mixing, but also enrich your social circle with a whole community of growers, wholesalers, and experts to help you navigate your way.