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Download the new Bartender1/21/2024 He has incomparable foresight and is always looking at new designs. Gary is the everyman each bartender should know and revere. I usually recommend The Joy of Mixology, by Gary Regan, first and foremost. When training staff, what’s your educational emphasis?Ī. Given the recent resurgence of cocktail lore and how the publishing world has taken to the books, publishers such as Mud Puddle Books have done a terrific job re-distributing the forgotten classics, where we find the bartenders of the late 1800s through Prohibition really taking their position to a new standard. Often times, I’m the one that goes to the greenmarket and picks up the kimchee from Momofuku for our Chang Dog and goes to WD-50 for mayo sticks for the Wylie Dog. I make daily reservations for industry friends and peers handle ordering, write the menu and buy all the booze I hire and fire oversee training handle public relations and book all the private parties. What’s a day in the life for you at PDT?Ī. We changed the lighting, the tables, the color of floor, the glassware, and all those details needed room to grow. I think that’s so important when opening a new place. We put out entirely new menus each season in the beginning, and eventually scaled back to rotating blocks of new drinks on a monthly basis. It helped to be proactive with the menu too.Ī. PDT is affiliated with Crif Dogs (the hot dog restaurant connected to PDT’s entrance), and Brian Shebairo, the owner of PDT and Crif Dogs, celebrated this kind of growth. For example, chefs were doing their own hot dogs and we parlayed their ingenuity toward our food program. We had many ideas to try and be innovative. One thing that definitely helped when we opened PDT was being a small bar in the new economy. What were some of your early obstacles when PDT opened its doors.Ī. You helped open PDT after the success of Pegu Club, which was a big part of the beginning in our current cocktail revival. We need to be thinking about the next season. And as a bartender it’s our job to know about them. Cocktails in pint-size plastic cups, micro-brews, single malt scotches, small batch bourbons, and St. The bar is a trendy place, and things come and go out of style all the time. And the bar that you run has the potential to expand on that?Ī. So I saw an opportunity to approach bartending in a different way, and it was exciting. But the funny thing about that is, I think all bartenders – whether you’re passionate about cocktails or not – are opportunistic people. So you had this newfound passion to spark the fire.Ī. Shortly thereafter, I went to Milk and Honey for the first time and had a drink called the ‘Gold Rush,’ which opened my mind to the world of cocktails in a whole new way. I really got involved at Pace, working for Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams, and after I started there, one of my cocktails made it into Bon Appetit’s ‘Best Cocktails of the Year’ issue. When did this new attention to cocktails start influencing you?Ī. You’ve been heavily involved in the new classic cocktail movement for the past five or so years. My passion level for bartending was very high in Madison and I simply wanted to expand that in New York. I left Brats for Paul’s Club, where I spent the rest of my Madison career, before departing for New York City. I knew that I didn’t have enough money to stay in school without working, and my buddy Andre was a bouncer at State Street Brats, so he helped me get a job. I was a college freshman in Madison, Wisconsin. So how did this young scrapper from River Forest, Illinois, get to be such a renowned bar figure?Ī. Recently, I had the good fortune of sitting with Jim and discussing the world of bartending through his work regiment and finding some insightful wisdom from a fellow bartender and good friend. He’s worked at Five Points, Pace, Gramercy Tavern, Pegu Club and, now, PDT (short for Please Don’t Tell), the internationally-renowned, wildly successful cocktail bar he’s been a part of since they opened in 2007. Since he’s been in New York, Jim Meehan’s bio reads like a stepladder. Ask Jim Meehan who he is, the answer is what it’s always been in his eyes: bartender. Meehan, however, is far too humble to accept this word into his lexicon. Yet when one reads his name in print, “mixologist” is the word often used to categorize him. Yet he could arguably be characterized the same way one reads a historic figure from a bygone era: Connoisseur. In the ever-expanding world of cocktails and their recent revival, Jim Meehan is a name often exploited.
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