We Asked: “What Does the Future of the Bar Industry Look Like?”

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In April, Pre Shift toured the country to hold recruitment events for Punch’s Best New Bartenders (BNB) program, in partnership with Astral Tequila. At the heart of BNB is the imperative to promote the next generation of bartenders to ensure a bright future for this industry. With sustainability and social responsibility at the core of its tequila-making process, Astral Tequila brings shared values to the forefront of this initiative, reinforcing a collective commitment to progress and impact.

At four events in Los Angeles, Denver, New York and Tampa, we were joined by BNB alumni and local industry leaders for discussions about their paths to bartending, mentorship, and sustainability—what the future of the bar industry looks like. From mentoring young talent to reducing waste behind the bar, here are some takeaways from those conversations.

“You should never compare yourself to anybody else, because sometimes your biggest weakness is actually your biggest superpower. I am a people pleaser and an empath, and that’s probably what makes me the best bartender version of myself, because I do want to take care of people, and I want to take care of the team, and now that I’ve been doing that for a long time, I know to take care of myself. Being an empath, for me, is the ability to take care of others and to find joy in that.”

—Sarah Morrissey, Le Veau d’Or, New York

“Everywhere I’ve worked, there’s a guy who knows a little trick—whether it’s a dishwasher or barback or just someone who has a thing that they know how to do and it makes the job easier. I try to collect those [tricks]. You just pick them up and then you give them to other people. So there’s a train of little tricks and techniques. But even more than that, I’d say for a younger bartender, you want to teach them how to be interested and go find their own tricks and collect them the way you are. Try to foster that in people, and let them teach themselves.”

—Luke Rose, Normandie Club, Los Angeles

“Align yourself with people that have the same vision, same philosophy. Always train everybody to do your job so they can take over your job. You can’t move forward if there’s no one to take your place. Also, find the person whose job you want and reach out to them. Ask, How did you get there? What was your path? And I want your job. Tell me, how do I take it? It’s important to make it known what you want and put that out into the world.”

—Christine Wiseman, bar consultant, Miami

“Recognize and understand that the people that work for you are not necessarily going to work for you forever. And, while you have them in your care, as a manager or owner, take into consideration what they need—whether that is providing insurance or providing profit-sharing or providing education, managing in a way to prevent burnout, managing in a way that promotes responsible consumption. Ask what they want to get out of the job and what they want their future to look like. And, even if you can’t necessarily catapult them to that place, help them along the way and guide them, give advice when it’s asked for and sometimes when it’s not. We can create a symbiotic relationship where this person is then going to do that for the next generation.”

—Erin Hayes, Bad Witch Enterprises, Los Angeles

“Education is a huge draw. Also, you have to curate talent and look for the spark in people and you have to nourish it. You know, sometimes it’s, How can I encourage you to go get a chemistry degree? How can I encourage you to go, you know, research architecture? How can I support you in your goals of being a therapist? Those people will still continue to work for you while they’re chasing their goals and they will become your biggest advocates.”

—Tammy Bouma, Run for the Roses, Denver

“My biggest step up in bartending was staging. They taught me everything. For a little while, I just peeled fruit, and I cut fruit, and I cut it again, and I cut it better, and I then cut it exactly right. I learned everything from the ground up. And no, staging is not something that will fit what everyone wants. But it was so important to me, just learning from the tiniest little detail of, like, Why do we do this? How do we do it perfectly? Do it again, do it again, do it better, do it faster. And, in bartending, that translates into every level.”

—Renée Fitzgerald, Punch Room, Tampa

“I [created] a cocktail once with a banana peel oleo, because I was like, ‘Oh, this is so rad, it’s using the peel, and I’m turning trash into an ingredient.’ But we weren’t using bananas [to begin with]. So then I’m buying bundles of bananas and peeling them—I still have vacuum-sealed bags of bananas in the freezer. And I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, dude! Like, what are you doing?’ What we do now is break our menu into thirds: These are the bangers, these are what people want, they’re easy, they’re crushable. These are the passion projects, the crazy ideas. And then the last third is kind of like, ‘Okay, what is left over from the passion project and crazy ideas? Now let’s write stuff with that waste.’ We leave a gap on our menu and wait to see what our waste is, and then we write around that, and that’s been really cool because now we’re not buying bananas for the peels. We’re using the pulp of something that’s in something else.”

—Jake Powell, Run for the Roses, Denver

“At Thunderbolt, we specifically only use pebble ice to shake. All that Kold-Draft that you dump out afterward, that’s just wasting water. And the thing about being in California, specifically, is we’re always gonna be in a drought. All of our cocktails that we batch have special refrigerators that are [set to] a lower temperature; the dilution is already accounted for. Therefore, there is no water waste. The cocktail is built to perfection; we pour it out and that’s it. Also, because our wells are all pebble ice, [it] melts super easily, we just scoop [it] out in the sink [at the end of service] and leave it there. I’ve been to bars where you take a hose and you just drown the whole ice well in hot water, which takes forever to melt the Kold-Draft and then it [wastes] a ton of water. Those are small things you could do.”

—Tom Liu, Thunderbolt, Los Angeles

“Sustainability, for me, begins and ends on a community level. There are so many bars, especially in [New York City], that don’t really need to exist or don’t exist in a way that they’re active in the community. If you’re thinking of opening a bar, and it’s your idea, your dream that you want to put on this planet because you’re driven to do so, stop and think about where you’re doing it and why you’re doing it in that place. Being at Clover Club for so many years, I really enjoyed how involved in the community all those ladies are [co-owners Julie Reiner and Sue Fedroff, and partner Christine Williams]—being part of the block association and making sure the street is clear and safe and really sustaining the neighborhood where we take up space is so important.”

—Jelani Johnson, Le Coucou, New York City

“Hopefully, I see even more diversity in our industry. For a long time, we were seeing the same six or seven people speaking and they all look [similar] and don’t have different voices. So it’s nice that a program has developed that diversity, but also it starts with us talking to people on our team and empowering them to empower other people, and then we can see that naturally change in rooms. Like, look around in this room right now. There’s such a diverse group of people, and it’s incredible to see. Pre-pandemic, you wouldn’t have seen this. In the future 20 years from now, I hope we are looking at places and spaces that celebrate [our] uniqueness rather than push it aside or say that it’s something bad or scary.”

—Michael Aredes, Superbueno, New York City

“To legitimize [bartending] as an actual career in the minds of the general population would be epic. Once that happens, maybe we’ll reach that magic pinnacle of healthcare or maternity leave or paid time off, all those things that legitimize our career. And for some reason, we’ve struggled so much to keep up and it just comes down to money. But at the end of the day, we know that constantly voicing and being squeaky wheels are the things that can counter the sway of money. Never stopping that fight, and I hope in 10 years we’re sitting here, laughing about how there was once a day when none of us could take time off while getting paid, right?”

—Mary Allison Wright, Yacht Club, Denver