Daily Wildcat: What is your favorite drink to make?
Tiffany Eldredge: My favorite go-to drinks, if I’m at home and I want to kick back, I’ll probably do a traditional whiskey sour or an old-fashioned. But to make, I like shaking drinks, so most of the drinks that are up I have a really fun time making. If it has egg whites in it, sours and flips. I love making those just because I love reactions I get from people when they’re like, “Did you just put an egg in that?”
What’s the strangest cocktail you have in your wheelhouse?
There’s one with gunpowder. Mescal and gunpowder. It’s really, really smoky. It’s different, for sure. … I think it’s called a blazing barrel, or something like that. … It’s crazy. It’s almost, like, electric in the mouth, kind of like a Pop Rocks-y vibe.
Least favorite drink to make?
I don’t like making drinks that are — trying to find the PC way to say this — more traditional drinks, if you will, so like vodka cranberries. That bums me. There’s no playing around involved.
For those who don’t know, what is a speakeasy?
“Speakeasy” dates back to Prohibition when alcohol was outlawed and you had to basically bootleg it. What happened was they would build bars that were very hidden so that only-in-the-know could come. So, “speakeasy” means, “Be quiet about it; don’t tell everybody.” A lot of times, there would be passwords or code words or secret ways to get in as their way of filtering out who’s really here to party and who’s a cop. … We actually have these little coins that we give out, which is actually pretty traditional to how it used to be. It doesn’t have much, just our logo and our phone number to text to get in.
So someone texts the number, and then they receive a password back?
We’re not doing passwords, more like reservations, just because we don’t want to make it too hard. It’s not illegal to drink anymore.
Weirdest, strangest thing you’ve seen go down at the bar?
My last job that I was working at, we had a New Year’s Eve party, and somebody was [with] like sparklers at the bar. They were trying to put the sparklers with the champagne, but he held the whole batch and lit them all at the same time, and set his hand on fire. He had to go to the hospital, but in doing so, he also triggered our alarm system, so like sprinklers, like the ANSUL system, went off and he had to be rolled out on a stretcher. It was interesting, to say the least.
What can a customer do to make your job easier?
As a bartender, I like people who are not afraid to drink outside of the box. These are not the usual cocktails that people come across. I mean, this current menu, I’ve got one that’s made with celery juice, so I like people to come in and say, “Celery juice? Awesome, I want to try that!” as opposed to, “Celery juice? Gross. I don’t want that,” or, “You put eggs on this? I don’t want to drink an egg.” I want them to come in and be intrigued by it and curious, as opposed to afraid.
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