This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.
Erick Castro has carried several titles over his 20-plus years in the drinks industry. There’s co-founder of iconic San Diego bars Polite Provisions and Raised by Wolves, owner of cocktail bar-dive bar hybrid Gilly’s House of Cocktails, and brand ambassador. Host of the award-winning podcast “Bartender at Large” is on the list, too, along with co-founder of the popular industry networking event Bartender’s Weekend.
His preferred title? Bartender.
This isn’t lip service. He can be found behind the stick at San Diego’s Gilly’s when he’s not traveling to a bar-focused event or award show, which causes the occasional double take from guests who know his pedigree.
“People are surprised that I still take shifts,” Castro says. “But it’s important for me to keep bartending. It helps keep my skills sharp, and it also helps me keep engaged with the community.”
Gilly’s affords Castro the perfect spot to lean into his bartender designation. The bar itself was born in 1968 as a neighborhood dive called Gil’s. When Castro bought it and relaunched it as Gilly’s House of Cocktails in 2023, he added modern touches but kept its unfussy, ramshackle soul intact. The result is a place where guests can chill at the bar with a fancy drink or play a couple rounds of pool over a few Miller High Lifes. It’s a spot where hard-working bartenders work, not fancified mixologists.
In a way, Gilly’s atmosphere and ethos symbolize Castro’s career coming full circle. The Southern California native made his bones bartending in the casual environs of San Diego pizza parlors and bowling alleys. He moved up to Sacramento in the mid-’00s and began cultivating a strong interest in the slowly emerging craft cocktail scene. By the time he arrived in San Francisco in 2008, he knew he had to sell his passion to a tough crowd.
“I came to San Francisco with a chip on my shoulder,” he says. “People looked at me and thought, ‘ah, what does he know?’ I felt like I had to prove myself 100 percent.”
He’d prove the doubters wrong through his seminal work at the bars Rickhouse and, later on, Bourbon & Branch. While his menus demonstrated an appreciation for classic builds and what bartenders in New York City were doing at the time, they also reflected a deliberate regional spin that expanded the possibilities of 21st-century drinking.
“At the time, there was a joke going around that the cocktails made in California were just a salad in a glass. That made me angry,” he says. “My goal as a bartender was to cement San Francisco in the classics, but also take advantage of California being this bread basket filled with great fresh ingredients that were available throughout the year.”
Castro returned to his SoCal roots and joined forces with San Diego-based hospitality group Consortium Holdings, opening Polite Provisions in 2013. While he’s quick to acknowledge the impact that the consulting work of bar luminaries like Sam Ross and Phil Ward had on the San Diego scene prior to his arrival, he brought plenty to the table. His work as a brand ambassador for Beefeater between his San Francisco and San Diego stints afforded him the opportunity to travel the world and scrutinize techniques and trends, and he’d infuse what he learned into his menus. Accolades followed — a James Beard nomination and several Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, to name a few — further proving that a killer cocktail scene was no longer the strict domain of NYC and other cosmopolitan behemoths.
Projects like Polite Provisions and Raised by Wolves showed off Castro’s drinks in whimsical environments. His concurrent New York project, Boilermaker, flipped this vibe upside down. The now-shuttered East Village spot delivered a no-nonsense, dive-like corner bar. And while it’s tempting to compare it to Gilly’s, Castro doesn’t draw such parallels. “The two bars are a little different,” he says. “Boilermaker was about sitting down and having a drink. Gilly’s is about walking around and having a drink while you’re shooting pool, playing darts, or hanging out on the patio.”
Gilly’s also allows Castro’s to acknowledge how much drinking philosophies have changed from the heady days of late 2000s San Francisco.
“If guests are under 30 or so, they’ve grown up in this environment when craft became mainstream,” he says. “They don’t understand why you can’t get a Negroni everywhere. What we’re doing at Gilly’s is trying to bring what we’ve learned at all of these upscale bars into a fun, neighborhood environment.”
This may serve as the ultimate testimony of Castro’s trade prowess. Rather than balking at the industry’s ebbs and flows, he chooses to work within its fluctuating confines in a way that simultaneously keeps him in step and one step ahead of the current scene. His decisions made throughout his career have always seemed to anticipate the customers’ needs, which makes sense. After all, that is exactly what a good bartender does.
