Cocktail crusader

Dale DeGroff is the man of the cocktail hour.  He has mixed drinks in some of the world’s greatest bars.  Now he spends his days trying to teach the rest of us how to do it.  But it isn’t as easy as it looks, he tells Robyn Lewis

IT MUST BE A tough crusade, the cocktail revival.  Pulling the luridly coloured and preposterously named from their pit of paper umbrellas and maraschino-cherry-andtinned- pineapple garnishes.  But if there’s one man with enough zeal for the job, it’s Dale DeGroff, American bar supremo and selfproclaimed King Cocktail.

"It’s the cocktail rebirth and I’m the Billy Graham!" he preaches to the hotel coffee lounge. "Actually, I stole that from the London Times," he confesses.  "They headlined an article about me ‘Dale DeGroff: the Billy Graham of the holy spirits’. You’ve gotta love that." You do, and Groff also.

Evangelical in his desire to fill the world’s bars with top-notch, bone-fide classic cocktails made by well-trained and well-respected bar tenders, Groff spends his time flitting between the US and the UK.

He variously fills the roles of consultant, trainer, spokesman, author and also, it appears, drinks evangelist.  Here in the UK, Groff works with the Match Bar Group and is over at the time he meets me, not only to oversee the opening of the group’s new bar in Notting Hill, Trailer Happiness, but also to promote his new book The Craft of The Cocktail.

"I wasn’t going to call it that," he says, leaning towards me conspiratorially.  "I was originally going to call it Cocktails and Tall Tales, My Life Behind Bars but it was too tongue in cheek for such a serious book and someone I was working with at the time said, ‘Dale, there is only one thing you can call this book and that’s The Craft of The Cocktail.’

And I said, ‘Well, that’s kind of booky and I don’t know if I like it,’ but I thought about it and after a few days I went back and I said, ‘You know, you are right. It really sums up what I’m about. It’s about the craft.’"

This is how Groff talks – zero to 110 in point five seconds, zipping from subject to subject, he mimics the different voices and meanders with sub-clauses.  He remembers  verybody’s name from Tommy, the bar tender he trained at the Carlisle Hotel in New York, to Karen McNeil, an American journalist who was the very first to interview him.

And two weeks later, when we meet at the book launch, he remembers who I am. It is this affability and energy combined with the attention to detail, that he brings to his profession and the reason he’s come from humble barman to the transatlantic brand Dale DeGroff.

He started out as an aspiring actor and moved to New York because he thought it looked like fun.  He got his first bar job and got to know the trade well through working in various establishments until he met Joe Baum, his teacher, his boss and his mentor, a man he refers to constantly and one of those to whom he has dedicated his book. "Joe is a genius, as far as I’m concerned," he tells me.

"In the restaurant business anyway. Joe opened the Four Seasons in New York and a lot of people imitated what he did.  The restaurant scene has changed a lot from the ’50s, you know?

We were all about canned and processed foods then, we thought it was really cool to have canned greens – what a convenience! We lost our way and Joe changed a lot about that and it stands to reason that the love affair he started – with fresh, local, seasonal – that we have now would spill over into my business."  Though it wouldn’t have, I reflect, without men like Groff.

He says when he first started in the business, the cocktail was all about pre-mixes, invented after prohibition to prevent unskilled bar staff from making bad cocktails – you just added a measure and shook.

"And that’s how I was taught too, but then when Joe opened The Rainbow Rooms [in New York] he said to me, ‘Look Dale, I don’t want any pre-mixes, no soda guns.’  And I was a little taken aback and asked if we could keep some, just for when it was busy but Joe looked at me and smiled and said, ‘No.

Look, for 150 years in busy bars they knew how to do this. If you can’t figure it out, I’ll find someone who can.’  So, of course I was like, ‘No, no it’s no problem.’  And at Joe’s insistence I went back to the really old cocktail books and discovered this whole programme of fresh juice and simple syrup and that’s how we did it.

At the Rainbow Rooms, with thousands and thousands of covers a night, we squeezed it everyday and the reason it worked was because I chose 32 bartenders under me who were brand new to the profession.

Not many bar managers have the luxury of doing that, often you just inherit problems, but this time I had the opportunity to instil some real enthusiasm in these guys."

His role as a trainer is one that Groff takes very seriously.  I get the feeling he believes that even beyond his legacy of fresh juice and proper ice ("Don’t even get me started on ice," he tells me. "It’s the soul of the drink.") it is through teaching, that Groff thinks he can really change things.

To this end he is a prolific instructor, not only to professionals in the trade through his work with The Match Bar Group in the UK, the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and other commissions but through classes he runs for us laymen and, of course, his book, but even this is not enough.

"You know when you open a restaurant and a bar you’ll hire a chef before you’ve even built the place," he says.  "You’ll have meetings with the chef and discuss what kind of cuisine they want to have, what kind of kitchen they need and it’s really well thought out.

Now, two weeks before opening , ‘Oh! The bar?’ And the thing that really stuns me is that there is a lot of money in the bar, but places like the CIA, they turn out some of the finest chefs in America and yet in their four-year programmes they have one day – one day – where they talk about spirits and the bar.

This mystifies me and, you know, the only reason that they do these videos and seminars with me was because I went and badgered the hell out of them.  I said, ‘You’re crazy!’

You’ve got all these guys going out and running bars and restaurants and they don’t know what they are doing and this thing is perpetuating generations and generations of ill-trained and ill-conceived bars."

So Groff these days spends much of his time preaching the gospel to as many, "neophytes as I can and I try and give them a dose of what their profession is all about. Where it came from, what the cocktail is, how it emerged, what it means.  Stuff they’ve never even thought about.

Most bartenders don’t think beyond the last drink, don’t think about the history of it or of the profession.   It’s just a way to make money or meet women, a way to get through college or whatever but it wasn’t always like that.

It used to be a recognised profession, just like the Maitre d’ of a hotel and it should be like that, should be that specialised.  I mean let’s face it we’re dealing with flavour and taste, what people consume, just like a chef is but for some reason that’s been forgotten over the last 30 years." 

He thinks that a good bar tender should have complete training in the hundred or so classic cocktails, Manhattans, Martinis, sidecars, sours, Collinses and fizzes.  "It’s just a formula you know, like a chef learns a handful of great sauces and then adapts them.

I mean, let’s face it, a Margarita is just a sour with Tequila, a Tom Collins is just a sour with some soda."  However, Groff is unlikely to take on a commission that means he just pitches up and does a few seminars with staff about the formula of a cocktail (according to Groff it’s two parts spirit to one part sweet and threequarters of a part sour) so that the bar can got to have proper stations for the bartenders so that they can make these multi-ingredient drinks.

We need to train our bartenders not only in the spirits but in the equipment we use – and what equipment do we need? How much equipment do we need? What ancillary flavours and ingredients do I need, what are the best ones and where do I get them?

Finally you have to think about putting it all together and plugging all your staff into it." Good bars in the UK, of course, would be his own with the Match Bar Group, but also Peter Dorelli’s bar at the Savoy and Dick’s Bar at The Atlantic Bar and Grill.

"You know Dick Bradsell (of the aforementioned Dick’s Bar) has done more and been better for the profession in the UK than anybody else," he announces.

"He’s the Master and people reward him financially for his skills and I think that when the young guys see that they are going to say, ‘I want to be like that.  I want to rise to that level.’ As more guys do that, the bar will become more important and then