Luke Whearty on five years of Byrdi, and why there are too many average guest shifts

This episode is presented by Never Never Distilling Co., who is supporting the last stop on Byrdi’s Migration tour in Sydney at Icebergs Dining Room & Bar — you can catch Luke from 2pm to 6pm this Sunday.

Thanks to Never Never Distilling Co. for supporting Drinks At Work — Never Never Distilling Co. is a big supporter of Australia’s best bars and you’ll also find that Australia’s best bars are big supporters of —and are pouring — Never Never Distilling Co.

Luke Whearty doesn’t believe the bar industry guest shift is dead, but he does think there can be a better way of doing them. “There’s too many average guest shifts,” Luke says.

Luke knows a thing or two about guest shifts — he’s done more guest shifts than most people, and he’s in high demand. That’s because Luke is at the forefront of what’s creative and delicious in bars, and has been for the last decade, and his Like Minded Creatures collaborations with fellow high-flyers Alex Kratena (Take + Elementary, London) and Matt Whiley (Re, Sydney) have seen them taking over bars from Barcelona to New York; I’ve been to a couple of these, and reckon they’re great examples of world’s best practice takeovers.

I’m talking to Luke for this episode of Drinks At Work because he’ll be in Sydney at Icebergs Dining Room & Bar this Sunday for the final stop on Byrdi’s Migration tour, a series of takeovers celebrating the bar’s fifth birthday this year.

It’s a wide ranging conversation: we talk about we talk about Byrdi and its five year milestone — and the challenges that being a part of the class of 2019 openings that had to contend with the pandemic in 2020; he also talks about what makes a good guest shift, as opposed to one that’s really just about scoring a brand-paid trip someplace else; and he walks us through the thinking and processes involved in bringing Byrdi’s current drinks menu, titled Sonder, to life. We talk menu design, how and why they photograph the menu differently, and loads more.

Below, I’ve got a couple of takeaways from the conversation, but do give the full chat a listen. And make sure if you’re in Sydney you get down to Icebergs this Sunday 8th at 2pm for Byrdi’s takeover. I’ll see you there.

“The more meaningful [guest shifts] that I’ve done always have some form of two-way collaboration.”

The guest shift has been at peak levels for a couple years now. Since we emerged from the pandemic and the borders opened up, the guest shift – in which bartenders from bars in other cities get behind the stick at a bar someplace else — was one of the first things to get back to pre-pandemic levels of activity and go beyond.

There were hundreds of events taking place in Singapore around The World’s 50 Best Bars gala in October last year, and the majority of them were unsanctioned by the 50 Best organisation. It was difficult to step into a bar in Singapore and get served by bartenders who actually worked there.

This isn’t to say I don’t like a guest shift — I really do. I’ll be at Luke’s takeover of Icebergs on Sunday — how can you refuse that iconic location and the chance to drink Luke’s drinks?

But as Luke says in this conversation, there are too many average guest shifts going around. They’ve got to be meaningful.

“The ones that we’ve done in the past that have been great, we’ve collaborated with the host venue to make it a unique space for the night,” he says.

“Sonder basically means the realisation that there’s other people in the world living lives as complex as your own.”

The drinks menu at Byrdi is an award-winning one. In 2022, it won the title of Drink List of the Year at the Drink of the Year awards, and last year Byrdi bar manager Samuel Thornhill took out the number one spot on the 2023 Top 50 Drinks of the Year. For their current menu — which will change in a couple months to celebrate five years of Byrdi — they took inspiration from some of their favourite bartenders to create six drinks. In the conversation, Luke talks about how he also likes to get stuck into the creative process behind the photography of each menu.

“There’s a point where we go to the studio and shoot the conceptual shots with Jana [Langhorst, Byrdi’s longtime go-to photographer]. A lot of the time that takes like a lot longer than I’d like it to take, but it’s worth it in the end,” Luke says. “It’s probably a whole day in the studio shooting six drinks or six concepts.”

“If you let things like that get to you, you won’t last a week in hospitality.”

This is the modern bartender’s curse: you might spend all this time on a beautiful, well-thought out menu, you might have a well-drilled welcome procedure for each guest, but at the end of the day you’re still slave to the algorithm.

“It’s funny because a lot of people will come in and, you know, hold up their phone and say, I want this one,” Luke says. “We purposely change the menu so often that, 99 percent of the time, you can’t have that drink that you’re pointing to because we’ve changed the menu from the season past.” Luke says that this can get the better of his bartenders from time to time, but Luke himself is more zen about it today.

“If your drink becomes that popular that people just want to order it because of what it looks like, or because their friends have sent them a photo of it, you’ve got to take that as a compliment,” he says.

This episode is presented by Never Never Distilling Co., who is supporting the last stop on Byrdi’s Migration tour in Sydney at Icebergs Dining Room & Bar — you can catch Luke from 2pm to 6pm this Sunday.

Thanks to Never Never Distilling Co. for supporting Drinks At Work — Never Never Distilling Co. is a big supporter of Australia’s best bars and you’ll also find that Australia’s best bars are big supporters of —and are pouring — Never Never Distilling Co.