What Calliope Draper learned working three of The World’s 50 Best Bars
As ever, the little things make a big difference for great bars.
Drinks At Work is here, albeit a day late — it has been a busy month already, what can I say.
Much of what we talk about here at Boothby is about what we can learn from the best bars in Australia and the world. The thinking is, of course, if you look at who is doing interesting, successful things, and try to unpack it, there will be practices that you can appropriate for yourself and to the benefit of your own career.
Which brings me to today’s guest on Drinks At Work. Callie Draper was awarded the 50 Best Bars Roku Scholarship at The World’s 50 Best Bars awards in Madrid last October, in front of some 1,000-odd of the world’s best bartenders, bar owners, and enterprising brand types — a big deal for a bartender from Alberta, Canada. There was a huge number of entries, which were whittled down to just three final candidates, including Australia’s own Keeley McAlinden.
Callie came away with the win, and her prize was the opportunity to stage at three of the world’s best bars: Maybe Sammy in Sydney, where I caught up with Callie for this chat; Virtu in Tokyo, high atop the Four Seasons there; and the legendary Bar High Five from Hidetsugu Ueno in Tokyo.
Callie is in Sydney doing a couple of weeks at Maybe Sammy, and she’ll be making some Roku cocktails at the bar on Friday 14 March (tomorrow) from 4.30pm to 7.30pm. We’ll see you there.
In the meantime, however, we’ve got a few key takeaways from the chat below, but do give the full episode a listen — Callie is a smart bartender and engaging communicator.
”High five in many ways is a very perfect bar, but people aren’t perfect, so they build it into practice.”
The lengths to which Callie has gone to wring as much knowledge and experience from these stage shifts is impressive, if you ask me. In the episode, Callie talks about hanging back after High Five closed to relearn how to stir a cocktail, and practising peeling lemons at some ungodly hour of the morning. I don’t think I ever once practiced getting a lemon peel right. I admire Callie’s determination to make this opportunity work for her — kudos to you, Callie.
“Almost every single cocktail on their menu had some aspect of a table side moment.”
Guests love a little touch of table side theatre — that’s why the Martini trolley has been a thing for many bars over the last few years.
But the one big thing Callie took away from staging at Virtu in Tokyo was how just about every cocktail had some element that was finished with the guest at the table. It’s a high end cocktail bar, of course — not everyone can do this. But what everyone can take from this is the extra little consideration involved. Yes, you have made a wonderful drink. But what’s that one little thing you can do to make it just one or two percent better, or that little bit more memorable?
”There’s that same level of detail and intricacy of how everything’s laid out every step of the way.”
You know that Maybe Sammy is famous for the show they put on — we all talk about it, the bubble gun billowing out bubbles mid-shift, how the bartenders have a little dance to The Tequila Song that they do to cheers from the people at the bar. These little bits of theatre have been imitated and copied by bars around the world, by the way.
But it’s easy to mistake the theatre and the show for smoke and mirrors. As Callie says in this episode, there’s an intense attention to detail at Maybe Sammy and an emphasis on getting the little things exactly right — like the perfect mist en place every time, and how “everything goes exactly in the same place as it does.” It is only because they get this right that they can put on the show they do.
That was always the gripe about flair cocktail bars — there was way too much emphasis on throwing bottles around needlessly and not enough attention on what’s going in the glass. As Callie points out, it’s only because they are so minutely focused on what goes into the glass that the team at Maybe Sammy can afford to put on the rest of the show.
There’s good advice to be had there.