I’ve been working on getting Christophe Rossi on the show  since mid-August of last year. His bar, L’Escamoteur, came highly recommended from several Kyoto locals while I was in Japan. I dropped in expecting to have a drink or two, but ended up  staying all night. And several subsequent nights. The cocktails were perfect and delivered with a bit of magic, but the read draw was the sense of customer service. He was born in Marseilles and lived in India for nearly a decade studying sitar and Indian Classical music before moving to Japan. In Japan, he spent his time as magician before d ..read more

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This week’s guest, Garett Richard has worked in some of the best bars and with some of the best bartenders in New York, which also makes them some of the best in the world. And being a tikiphile running a Tiki/Tropical bar in New York makes him something of a unicorn these days. Having made an unlikely jump from radio to hospitality, he has, in just a decade, made some pretty big splashes in the industry. After the closing of his workplace, Existing Conditions — owned by industry luminaries Don Lee, Dave Arnold, and Greg Boehm, Garret wasn’t sure what he’d be doing while NYC shut down due to C ..read more

Rolling Fork Spirits won me over immediately. The two owners, Turner Wathen and Jordan Morris, set out to create a brand that offered something no one else was offering. Luckily for us (read: me) that meant rum! This small, independent bottler could easily fly under the radar of spirits geeks. But, again, lucky for us, they’re doing it more for themselves than anyone. They source some of the best rums of the world and then, rather than bottling immediately, they further age in southern Indiana, just a few minutes from Bourbon country in Kentucky. And that proximity means access to some very in ..read more

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Returning to the show this week is the legendary cocktalien, Brother Cleve. Since our last conversation back in 2017, he’s been hard at work DJing, tending bar around Boston, and working as a brand ambassador for various spirits. As the pandemic brought about a lot of changes for all of us, Brother Cleve was forging new friendships and eventually business partners. And those relationships have given birth to the Lower East Side’s newest cocktail haven… Lullaby, in the space previously occupied by Nightcap. (If you happen to catch this interview the day it drops, you’re just in time for the gra ..read more

A week ago I had the opportunity to visit KōHana Rum in Kunia, Oahu. And that visit was precisely what I needed to get my groove back. The trek to the distillery from Honolulu is a picturesque paradise. But the one thing that I didn’t see on that drive was sugarcane. Sugarcane used to be an important crop for Hawai’i, but the industry up and vanished – seemingly overnight. So starting a distillery that not only highlighted native sugarcane (kō) but also worked to preserve heirloom varieties native to the islands was a monumental task. And it is a task that Kyle Reutner takes seriously. As the ..read more