Danil Nevsky identifies when hospitality becomes a platform for one…

There is a generational bartending war going on. The old guard versus the new. Each has a bone to pick with the other. I belong to the older group and it’s easy for me to say “it ain’t what it used to be”, but here’s how I see it – our old version of the bar community is dead. The new generation’s version of the…

Laura Grassulini:  In our previous column, we interrogated ourselves on the status of cocktail competitions and on the future of on-trade advocacy. We’ve set value as the ultimate, collective benchmark, so the question naturally arises: what value is advocacy supposed to deliver, and is it delivering it? In corporate terms, on-trade advocacy falls under the marketing umbrella as a set of strategies and activities designed…

Danil Nevsky: No amount of googling or ChatGPT-ing has helped me find the first-ever cocktail competition, or at least one that was the first real game changer. So, I’m going to use my own bar industry experience to make the following claim: the golden era of cocktail competitions was 2008-2018. Anything before that can’t be remembered, and anything after is largely insignificant. But how did…

Another week. Another bar show. Another cocktail week. Another symposium. Another convention. Same startenders. Same seminars. Same topics. Same swag. Same brands. Same complaints. In 2021, I started an online bar event calendar. The idea was to have a simple, easy-to-access, synchronised-straight-to-your-smartphone calendar that everyone can use to plan their year. In 2021 we had 14 bar events around the world. In 2025 we have…

Recently I watched a clip of Tristan Stephenson’s excellent The Curious Bartender podcast, in which Toby Cecchini – New York bartender and inventor of the Cosmo – was bemoaning the proliferation of the guest shift. His views were nothing new – many have called out the soullessness of transactional guest-shifts – and in some ways, he’s not wrong. I have personally taken jabs at the…

We all know making money in operations in the bar business is hard. Unless you’re in a multi-venue operations role or working for a five-star hotel, you’re usually bottom of the barrel when it comes to earnings. Ironically, the romance of the job is propped up by external brand trips more than your bar offering free staff pizza on Mondays. As a result, the established…

Comparison is the thief of joy. It’s a phrase I’ve often uttered to bartenders when they compare their conditions to those enjoyed by their colleagues living in London. The global cocktail capital has been instrumental in the modern cocktail revival, and the school of London bartending is undoubtedly the best in the world. Yet, for the rest of us, this pedigree has, on occasion, tipped…

This article first appeared in the Drinks International Global Bar Edition which can be read in full here What if I told you that cocktail culture, as we know it, with all the industry trimmings – guest shifts, takeovers, bar shows and brand collaborations – could all be gone within the next 20 years? What if consumers around the world just didn’t care anymore? If that sounds…