Danil Nevsky identifies when hospitality becomes a platform for one

I am not here to point. Every bar ever created is, in one way or another, a vanity project. Realistically, every bar started as a project for someone’s own personal wants and needs. Every dive bar, every pub, every cocktail bar. They thought they could do it better, or they spotted a gap they believed they could fill, or they needed to scratch that itch of making people happy. The industry is built on ego and vanity.

For years, we’ve had the same argument on a loop. Is this bar built for bartenders, or built for guests? That argument died somewhere around 2015. The bartenders’ bar, where cocktails were made for other bartenders, was a place that existed for one bartender to impress the rest – that was the only point. But bartenders are notoriously hard to impress, quick to pick holes, and they want everything for free. Bars built that way mostly went out of business, because you cannot run a business on the approval of people who don’t want to pay but love to scrutinise. Those bars died, but the impulse didn’t. The person who needed that room to turn and look, they didn’t go anywhere. They evolved, and their motivation found a different outlet.

And as the bar industry got bigger, the world got more competitive. Everything is a competition now. Love Island, MasterChef, competition shows for glassblowing and knifemaking. For bars, the rankings and lists are never going away and will keep gnawing at every element of hospitality.

In that environment, the people who rise to the top are the ones with the particular set of skills that demand attention. The market is now designed for ego to thrive.

The old metric was bartenders versus guests. The new one is both simpler and more complicated. Who is this new type of bar really serving? What separates a bar from a vanity project?

Call it pattern recognition. A vanity project can have every green flag you can think of. A great team. Great cocktails. A great room, a great programme. But where does all the attention flow?

The first sign is in the thanks. Godlike personalities in this industry will humble themselves in front of the microphone. Thank their country, thank their team, thank everyone. Does their modesty ever cost them anything? Real humility redistributes. It gives away equity, ownership, and the actual microphone itself. Performed humility just collects the credit for being humble, while all the power and attention collect quietly at the top.

And, when something goes wrong, watch which direction things travel. In a vanity project, blame flows down and credit flows up. The bad review was the team’s fault; the award was the leader’s achievement.

Just as the rest of us have been media-trained by social media to show the right thing at the right time, the cult-like personality has learned to cover its tracks. Press releases, content and the careful performance of all the right values.

Blurred lines

The lines are blurry on purpose. Look at the awards. Best bar team. Best new bar. Best menu. We all know the value of having a face for a bar. The problem is when the face is the only thing that is real. Take the best international bar team. I often see that and think, yes, but can anybody name four people on that team? Does anybody know who they are, or what they do? In reality, one or two travel. The rest have no real voice.

So, watch who is always travelling. Watch who is always collecting. There are two archetypes. The first is the high-equity owner. This is the person who made real money from a venue and still will not invest in the people who built it. If those people grow, they block some of their light. It gets wrapped in excuses. Someone is not ready. Someone is not good enough. Someone does not step up. But the experience required to step up is exactly the time and freedom they are never given, because they are too busy running your bar for you.

That is how partnerships quietly fall apart. The people who built the place were fed promises and then discarded. So, look at the diaspora. Where do people go after? A healthy bar throws off founders, people who leave and open their own places, often with the original’s backing. A vanity project produces no offspring.

The second archetype is the opposite. The low-equity one. This is the person who could never get real financial equity, so they put it on themselves instead. They feed off the attention and the brand work, because that is all there is. Every idea flows toward them as the sun that everyone else orbits. The ending is the same. The money is never enough. They get too big for their boots. They have a fallout with the investor who made the dream happen. Or they lose the team, because they cannot offer anyone anything real. If someone on that team ever gets as popular as they are, that person has to be sidelined.

So, the teams are isolated. They are taught to think a certain way and are given little freedom by the person at the centre. People inside start to see the individual, not the bar. And then the finish line starts to move. You are never quite ready. If you did everything that was asked, the standard quietly shifted again. A finish line that moves every time you reach it was never a finish line. It is a leash. Above all of it sits the belief. We are the best in the world. We are different. We are the only ones who still care about this craft. A little of that is healthy in any good bar. Turned all the way up, it stops being ambition and becomes doctrine. Once a team believes it is chosen, every sacrifice is justified in its name, and every outsider who questions it is a hater.

In a place built this way, the only metric that truly matters is the happiness of one person. In a bar that is not built this way, where the guests and the team are the point, the place itself, like a living creature, stops attracting the broken and starts attracting the well. People who want a healthy place to work. This is the difference that decides everything. A healthy bar slowly hands its magic over to something bigger than any one person, the magic lives in the bar itself, and so it can survive anyone walking out the door. It’s become an institution.

A great bar gives its magic away. A vanity project can never let the magic leave the person, so it guards it at all costs.

The risk is a whole industry learning to admire the wrong kind of venue, and the wrong kind of human, and mistaking one person’s hunger for the shape that greatness is meant to take. Vanity evolves. It always has. It went from the bartenders’ bar to the awards stage to the algorithm, and it will keep finding new outlets.

Somewhere, right now, a bar owner is reading this, quietly cross-referencing their own behaviour, and starting to sweat. Good. Because they have two choices. Carry on and become exactly the thing described here, or make amends. Redistribute. Hand the magic over and allow people to leave and grow.  The work you do to disguise it is the same that cures. There’s no faking giving away power without giving some away. So, for whatever reason you do it, by definition, you’ll have a little less of a vanity project than you did yesterday.