Subsequent Wave Awards Bartender of the 12 months: Garret Richard

This characteristic is a part of our 2024 Subsequent Wave Awards.

“I’m continuously searching for the intention of a basic drink and investigating what might need modified over time and the way we will get again to that intention,” says Garret Richard, chief cocktail officer at Brooklyn’s Sunken Harbor Membership because it opened in 2021. “That usually requires taking a look at newer concepts to take action.”

Richard, maybe higher than any drink-maker nowadays, mixes the avant garde with the accessible, each by his work behind the bar and behind the keyboard in his writing.

Raised among the many retro tradition of Los Angeles and a tiki fanatic earlier than he was sufficiently old to drink — he got here to the tradition by way of exotica music in highschool — Richard ditched his deal with a radio profession to get into bartending.

One yr out of Fordham College, he began working at midtown New York’s Monkey Bar in 2011, the place Julie Reiner acted as cocktail advisor on the time. A yr later he began a “Tiki Takeover” collection at Prime Meats in Brooklyn. He then helped open Manhattan’s Slowly Shirley, whereas concurrently operating his personal tropical pop-up collection “Exotica.” By 2018, Richard had been employed by culinary whiz Dave Arnold for the opening staff at Current Situations.

“I cherished how each serve was a shock for our friends at that bar,” he recollects of his time on the now-shuttered Current Situations. Arnold, together with co-owner Don Lee, emphasised to Richard that they wanted to make drinks that friends would need to return to each week versus ones with extra baroque shows. “These creations aren’t essentially the drinks you need each Friday if you find yourself performed with work,” Richard says.

He has taken that philosophy to Sunken Harbor Membership, maybe the nation’s most interesting tropical bar. A dramatically lit, cosy area that resembles the hull of a ship, Sunken Harbor Membership sits above the Downtown Brooklyn chop home Gage & Tollner, which received “Finest Meals & Beverage Program” at VinePair’s inaugural Subsequent Wave Awards in 2021. There, Richard has infused his personal character by using classic glassware and different refined thrives.

Take the bar’s The Funky Ti Punch, a mix of Clairin Vaval, lime juice, cordial, and gum syrup that’s served on massive, clear ice in a classic rocks glass. It’s nonetheless a minimalist drink befitting the Caribbean basic, however improved by trendy approach by way of using acid-adjusting.

Or The Ginza Lights, a mashup between a Chu-Hello/Chūhai (shōchū highball) and a Wray and Ting (Jamaican rum with grapefruit soda). Made with Japanese rum, yuzu, and white grapefruit, Richard’s cocktail implements each soda fountain strategies from Darcy O’Neil’s seminal guide “Repair the Pumps” in addition to carbonation tips discovered from Arnold. “It’s a love letter to all of the canned cocktails of Japan,” Richard says.

Whereas Nelson’s Blood could seem very basic in its taste profile and presentation, akin to a drink from the golden period of tiki and evocative of pioneering tropical spots just like the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, most of its substances are ultra-modern, just like the acid-adjusted orange juice, lime punch syrup, and ginger ale extract.

“The opposite facet of this coin is that over time many substances have modified for the reason that golden age of the Mai Tai and Zombie,” says Richard, noting how grapefruits are much less tart and rums are distilled in another way. “Utilizing trendy strategies like acid-adjusting or measuring Brix evens out the enjoying discipline.”

In some ways, Richard believes he’s simply following a longstanding custom of the tropical drinks world in embracing expertise, citing tiki pioneer Don the Beachcomber as one of many cocktail world’s earliest innovators. “His first location on McCadden Place was an entire improve of your entire setup of a bar,” Richard says. “Instantly, drinks required electricity-utilizing blenders, freezers, and ice shavers. Drinks had been sweetened with complicated syrups slightly than sugar or a liqueur. The acid of a drink reworked to a baroque layering of grapefruit, lime, and fervour fruit. Don used the newest improvements to inform a whimsical story by crafting drinks and I’ve all the time thought that was inspiring.”

Final yr, Richard bought to place his personal whimsical story to paper with the publication of “Tropical Normal” (co-written with author and editor Ben Schaffer). If Arnold’s “Liquid Intelligence” (2014) was the mixology masters program par excellence of a not-too-distant earlier period, “Tropical Normal” is essentially the most bold cocktail guide of this courageous, new world — the post-pandemic panorama the place at-home bartenders have boundless curiosity and a fearlessness towards making an attempt extra superior strategies that had lengthy been strictly the area of the skilled.

“Even earlier than writing ‘Tropical Normal,’ I assumed the drink world’s willpower of what was basic in model and what was avant garde was an ever-changing dialog,” says Richard, including that, whereas one thing like ginger syrup is taken into account “regular,” it requires a variety of heavy equipment for the typical drink-maker to execute it correctly; conversely, acid-adjusting a grapefruit is definitely fairly straightforward to do at residence. “I needed to offer all the data I may to the readers of ‘Tropical Normal’ to allow them to determine what works for them and what doesn’t,” he says.

And but, Richard doesn’t encourage using these strategies in a “take a look at me” form of approach. They aren’t gimmicks; every approach is employed for no different purpose than to make the very best drink doable. Typically, the strategies aren’t even talked about on the menu at Sunken Harbor Membership. The Ginza Lights and Nelson’s Blood and plenty of others are gratifying as a result of they’re nice drinks, not as a result of they’ve been tirelessly engineered to be show-offy “nice drinks.” That enables them to attraction to each neophytes and cocktails connoisseurs alike.

“At Sunken Harbor Membership we see our program as trying on the complete story of the tropical drink. Time is in a blender in that room. Drinks from the ’70s or ’30s sit proper subsequent to a stirred drink impressed by [modern bartending legend] Audrey Saunders,” Richard says. “We’re fortunate that we will take that strategy and discover how recipes echo over the a long time and the way they will inform one massive story.”