Sebastian Tollius, beverage director at NYC’s Eleven Madison Park and the recently opened Clemente Bar, grew up around the hospitality industry. But being at the helm of one of the most acclaimed bar programs in the country wasn’t initially the dream. “My father was the director of operations for a hotel group, and we moved around Latin America when I was young,” he says. “And then I went to college for hospitality marketing in Switzerland.”
Overseas, he moonlighted as a bartender at pubs and nightclubs to make ends meet, but it didn’t feel like a career move at the time. After graduating, he landed an internship in sales and marketing, but the office job route didn’t feel right, either. At that point he knew the future was somewhere in the food and beverage world.
“I loved going out to restaurants and trying new things,” Tollius says. “I remember coming to New York in the late 2000s and visiting all these cocktail bars before landing a job as a bar manager at a hotel back in Switzerland in 2012. I made a riff of a cucumber Gimlet with Hendrick’s, and I thought that was the coolest thing at the time.”
Staying in the hotel circuit, Tollius moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 2014, and that’s when he got bitten by the cocktail bug with full force — courtesy of the almighty Sazerac cocktail.
“Coming from bartending at pubs and clubs, making Jack and Cokes and punch shaker shots for college kids all night, that Sazerac cocktail really redefined the way that I was looking at drinking,” he says. “All of a sudden, I became obsessed with the history of bartending — so much so that it took me to one of the best restaurant bars in Boston at that time.”
That bar was Eastern Standard. After one visit and tasting through a few classic cocktails on the menu, Tollius decided to drop everything and pursue a job there, working his way up from a morning breakfast server role to becoming a full-time bartender. At that point he knew that bartending was his destined career path. After four years at Eastern Standard, Tollius moved down to NYC, inspired by his visits to institutions like Death & Co and Please Don’t Tell.
One interview at the NoMad led to another at Eleven Madison Park. “After my interview with the GM at the time, I asked her if I could just come and sit at the bar,” he says. “The experience was incredible. I thought a fine-dining restaurant would be much different — very simple drinks, nothing too exciting.” Just like at Eastern Standard, Tollius took an entry-level serving position at EMP, quickly moving up to the bartender role in 2019.
The pandemic hit soon after, but when EMP finally reopened in 2021, Tollius was invited back to be the head bartender. Within a year, he got promoted to his current position. “We were shifting into a fully plant-based vision at that time,” Tollius says. “I was like, ‘How do we reshape the program? How do we rethink the way that we make cocktails, but also how do I make them mine?’”
What was essentially a limiting factor for the bar and restaurant turned out to open up a world of opportunity. The food and cocktail menu changed every four months, drawing inspiration from the produce coming and going with each season, and striving to tell a story between the kitchen and the bar. The new EMP ethos also had a big focus on sustainability of ingredients, which pushed the bar program to use a lot of byproduct from the kitchen and experiment with fermentation techniques to develop new, unique flavor profiles.
Within a few years, the EMP team started to reconsider the restaurant’s space, seeing an opportunity to turn the private dining area into a sister bar. From the get-go, Tollius and co. knew they wanted to build a program that still had the EMP fingerprint on it, but with its own identity. They worked with Italian artist Francesco Clemente, the bar’s namesake, to turn the space into what it is today.
“We were able to develop a vision for what we wanted to do, and that was dissecting what we felt art was: color, light, texture, but more so emotions,” Tollius says. “So we created a lot of drinks that were nostalgic flavors to us and other people, like a cocktail that was reminiscent of an orange Creamsicle or a Samoa Girl Scout Cookie.”
Still, achieving said flavors had to be done with vegan ingredients, which led the Clemente Bar team to look to time and fermentation to manipulate flavors. As Tollius explains, they discovered that time was an ingredient that could add a level of luxury to their drinks.
It manifested in Clemente Bar’s miso fermentation program and the use of koji, a culture used to ferment many Asian ingredients like soy sauce and sake. The team has anywhere between five and eight misos fermenting at any given time, with some taking up to three months to develop. The koji adds savory, umami qualities to various ingredients — similar to how MSG would — and permeates the entire beverage program.
“Koji is really a collaborator in all of the things that we do for our cocktails,” Tollius says. “We’ve also developed ways to clarify things through nut syrups rather than milk washing, to stabilize creams and oils within cocktails so they don’t separate. The whole program really allows us to develop flavors that you simply can’t buy.”
Functional garnishes are also crucial to the Clemente Bar ethos, especially in terms of implementing ones that transform a drink from first sip to last. For instance, Tollius decided to put a frozen red wine disk on top of a Margarita riff. By the time a customer is halfway through the drink, the disc melts and turns the cocktail into a New York Sour variation.
In just over a year since opening, Clemente Bar has already been named the 11th best bar in North America by The World’s 50 Best. The team has even recently established a second bar within the space called The Studio in which diners can enjoy a five-course tasting menu complete with cocktail pairings prepared à la minute. Yet, Tollius thinks that the bar is only starting to scratch the surface of its potential.
“Even though EMP recently took away the restriction of not using animal products, I think we’re still finding better vegan alternatives,” he says. “The layers of complexity we’ve been able to achieve — it’s still endless for us.”
