Next Wave Awards Bartender of the Year: Garret Richard

This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.

“I am constantly looking for the intention of a classic drink and investigating what might have changed over time and how we can get back to that intention,” says Garret Richard, chief cocktail officer at Brooklyn’s Sunken Harbor Club since it opened in 2021. “That often requires looking at newer ideas to do so.”

Richard, perhaps better than any drink-maker these days, mixes the avant garde with the accessible, both through his work behind the bar and behind the keyboard in his writing.

Raised among the retro culture of Los Angeles and a tiki enthusiast before he was old enough to drink — he came to the culture via exotica music in high school — Richard ditched his focus on a radio career to get into bartending.

One year out of Fordham University, he started working at midtown New York’s Monkey Bar in 2011, where Julie Reiner acted as cocktail consultant at the time. A year later he started a “Tiki Takeover” series at Prime Meats in Brooklyn. He then helped open Manhattan’s Slowly Shirley, while simultaneously running his own tropical pop-up series “Exotica.” By 2018, Richard had been hired by culinary whiz Dave Arnold for the opening team at Existing Conditions.

“I loved how every serve was a surprise for our guests at that bar,” he recalls of his time at the now-shuttered Existing Conditions. Arnold, along with co-owner Don Lee, emphasized to Richard that they needed to make drinks that guests would want to return to every week as opposed to ones with more baroque presentations. “Those creations aren’t necessarily the drinks you want every Friday when you are done with work,” Richard says.

Credit: Jeff Brown

He has taken that philosophy to Sunken Harbor Club, perhaps the country’s finest tropical bar. A dramatically lit, snug space that resembles the hull of a ship, Sunken Harbor Club sits above the Downtown Brooklyn chop house Gage & Tollner, which won “Best Food & Beverage Program” at VinePair’s inaugural Next Wave Awards in 2021. There, Richard has infused his own personality through the use of vintage glassware and other subtle flourishes.

Take the bar’s The Funky Ti Punch, a blend of Clairin Vaval, lime juice, cordial, and gum syrup that’s served on big, clear ice in a vintage rocks glass. It’s still a minimalist drink befitting the Caribbean classic, but improved through modern technique via the use of acid-adjusting.

Or The Ginza Lights, a mashup between a Chu-Hi/Chūhai (shōchū highball) and a Wray and Ting (Jamaican rum with grapefruit soda). Made with Japanese rum, yuzu, and white grapefruit, Richard’s cocktail implements both soda fountain techniques from Darcy O’Neil’s seminal book “Fix the Pumps” as well as carbonation tricks learned from Arnold. “It is a love letter to all the canned cocktails of Japan,” Richard says.

While Nelson’s Blood may seem very classic in its flavor profile and presentation, akin to a drink from the golden era of tiki and evocative of pioneering tropical spots like the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, most of its ingredients are ultra-modern, like the acid-adjusted orange juice, lime punch syrup, and ginger ale extract.

Credit: Jeff Brown

“The other side of this coin is that over time many ingredients have changed since the golden age of the Mai Tai and Zombie,” says Richard, noting how grapefruits are less tart and rums are distilled differently. “Using modern techniques like acid-adjusting or measuring Brix evens out the playing field.”

In many ways, Richard believes he’s just following a longstanding tradition of the tropical drinks world in embracing technology, citing tiki pioneer Don the Beachcomber as one of the cocktail world’s earliest innovators. “His first location on McCadden Place was a complete upgrade of the entire setup of a bar,” Richard says. “Suddenly, drinks required electricity-utilizing blenders, freezers, and ice shavers. Drinks were sweetened with complex syrups rather than sugar or a liqueur. The acid of a drink transformed to a baroque layering of grapefruit, lime, and passion fruit. Don used the latest innovations to tell a whimsical story through crafting drinks and I’ve always thought that was inspiring.”

Credit: Jeff Brown

Last year, Richard got to put his own whimsical story to paper with the publication of “Tropical Standard” (co-written with writer and editor Ben Schaffer). If Arnold’s “Liquid Intelligence” (2014) was the mixology masters program par excellence of a not-too-distant previous era, “Tropical Standard” is the most ambitious cocktail book of this brave, new world — the post-pandemic landscape where at-home bartenders have boundless curiosity and a fearlessness toward trying more advanced techniques that had long been strictly the domain of the professional.

“Even before writing ‘Tropical Standard,’ I thought the drink world’s determination of what was classic in style and what was avant garde was an ever-changing conversation,” says Richard, adding that, while something like ginger syrup is considered “normal,” it requires a lot of heavy machinery for the average drink-maker to execute it properly; conversely, acid-adjusting a grapefruit is actually pretty easy to do at home. “I wanted to give all the information I could to the readers of ‘Tropical Standard’ so they can decide what works for them and what doesn’t,” he says.

And yet, Richard doesn’t encourage the use of these techniques in a “look at me” kind of way. They are not gimmicks; each technique is employed for no other reason than to make the best drink possible. Often, the techniques aren’t even mentioned on the menu at Sunken Harbor Club. The Ginza Lights and Nelson’s Blood and many others are enjoyable because they are great drinks, not because they have been tirelessly engineered to be show-offy “great drinks.” That allows them to appeal to both neophytes and cocktails connoisseurs alike.

“At Sunken Harbor Club we see our program as looking at the whole story of the tropical drink. Time is in a blender in that room. Drinks from the ’70s or ’30s sit right next to a stirred drink inspired by [modern bartending legend] Audrey Saunders,” Richard says. “We are lucky that we can take that approach and explore how recipes echo over the decades and how they can tell one large story.”

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