Face-to-face beats phone screens
Indie Bartender Dan Nevsky’s early career was shaped by The Vagabond Project, a personal mission to work in bars around the world. At a time when we can swipe, scroll or stream our way through global culture, Dan insists nothing compares to firsthand experience.
“For anyone who has seen the film Good Will Hunting, you will remember the scene with Robin Williams & Matt Damon where he says to the protagonist: ‘You can tell me how many spires the Sistine Chapel has but you can’t tell me how it smells,’” he says. “No matter how much we watch a video of a giraffe on our iPhones it can never prepare you for seeing the real thing. The sights, the smells, the feeling of ‘that place’ on your skin, the human interactions & the ability to be fully present in a place is impossible to properly understand through a smartphone.
For Dan, working in bars abroad offered the kind of cultural immersion no app could match. “The mistakes, the stress, the relationships (good & bad) and all the choices involved have shaped me, and made me who I am today,” he says.
Bars as embassies
At Kabin, a Norwegian cocktail bar near Hudson Square, New York, general manager Kristine Gutierrez helps turn every service into a cultural exchange. Kabin’s mission: introduce guests to Norway beyond the clichés.
“No fault to anyone, but Norwegian culture is still unknown,” Kristine explains. “Sure we know about Vikings and skiing, maybe the new Nordic cooking trend, but Norway is a lot more complex and quirky. We’re so excited to introduce guests to Utepils (drinking outside), to concepts like Lille lørdag (drinking on Wednesdays). Our new menu aims to match a cocktail to a Norwegian concept or quirk, giving our guests the opportunity to learn and enjoy Norwegian identity as they drink.”
This sense of cultural pride extends to staff, too. “We have about 7-9 different nationalities. Everyone is eager to learn and understand. We try to share as many fun facts, videos, and books with our team that help them understand why we’re so proud of our culture,” she says.
And sometimes cultural exchange means pure celebration, like their recent Syttende Mai (Norwegian national day) event. “It attracted the whole NYC Nordic community, so I think it was quite fun for our locals to see the Norwegians dressed in their traditional clothes. It was ultimately a party for everyone. It’s easy to enjoy tacky European techno and pop music after a few drinks!”
When Harry met Millie
Australian bartenders Millie Tang and Harrison Kenney met on an agave farm in Mexico, fell in love, and followed each other to Paris.
Millie recently joined one of Europe’s most innovative bars, De Vie on rue Saint-Saveur in Paris’ second arrondissement, and in a quirk of fate, Harrison will soon open Bar Abstract with Remy Savage on the same cobblestoned street. Oh, and they also make time for pop-ups in exotic locations–in August they popped up at Longtime in Bali for a night of cocktails and dumplings.
It’s an enviable life facilitated and enriched from the international nature of modern bars and bartending.
“The community is very tight, very supportive. It is very international, but there's a good amount of French as well,” says Millie of her introduction to France.
So is there something common to all the bars where she’s worked?
“Oh my God, the fact that everybody uses 86 to be out of something!” she laughs. “It's quite nice because when you do a lot of guest shifts you can talk to people in different bars, especially in places you feel are very foreign, like India or China or Japan…people really do, I think when they're working in the service industry, speak the same language.”
Working in Europe has opened her eyes to new approaches to hospitality.
“I think the main thing for Australians when they travel, and see bars and how they work, is the high-level techniques and high-level concepts, as well as preservation techniques. These are the things that people in Australia aren't used to,” says Millie, singling out Luke Whearty and Matt Whiley as notable exceptions"
For Harrison, it was the levels of service that left him most impressed.
“In Australia it’s far more casual, whereas people you hire in Europe have this five-star service. If you’re working in a hotel in Australia, more often than not you’ve come for the local bar scene or a pub, and now you’re shaking cocktails,” he says.
One day they hope to return to Australia and open their own venue, inspired by what they’ve seen. Without giving too much away, Millie suggests it would take cues from Candelaria, Josh Fontaine’s famed taco shop-cum-cocktail bar, though serving delicious dumplings from the Tang family’s secret recipe.
She pauses a beat: “It would be nice to have cocktails and dumplings, but maybe not necessarily in the same place, because dumplings can tend to be a bit smelly.”
… and that’s one more thing you’d never learn by looking at your phone screen.
