When debating the greatest sports teams in history, rabid fans always defend their hometown heroes. They don’t just anoint the Chicago Bulls the greatest basketball team of all time, they exalt the virtues of the indelible 1996 Bulls team with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman leading the charge. These spirited arguments often devolve into absurd hypotheticals about who would win between two great teams from different eras if they ever faced off against each other.
Now that the cocktail renaissance is well into its third decade, it feels like an appropriate moment to step back and consider the greatest bar teams of all time. The industry certainly owes a huge debt to individual revolutionaries who helped further cocktail culture in America, such as “King Cocktail” Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske, and Audrey Saunders — but what about the teams that collaborated to create iconic cocktail programs since the turn of the century?
“A great bar team is the key that opens the door to success, and they’re also the ones who literally lock the doors on the way out,” DeGroff tells me when I pose the question. “They are the reason we stay too long and come back often.”
Troy Sidle, a veteran bartender and former partner in New York City’s Pouring Ribbons, makes a convincing case for the crew at Cocktails and Dreams — the mythical island bar from the 1988 movie “Cocktail” led by (fictional characters) Brian Flanagan and Doug Coughlin — as the greatest bar team ever.
“What Tom Cruise did for the real-world American Navy Pilot Program, he also did for the American cocktail scene,” he says. Sidle argues that since Tony Yoshida, who founded the foundational cocktail bar Angel’s Share in 1993, was inspired by the movie, which in turn inspired Sasha Petraske to open Milk & Honey in 1999, Flanagan and Coughlin changed the course of mixology in America.
Despite the merits of Sidle’s argument, for the purposes of this exercise, we’ve decided to limit the recognition to non-fictional characters. And to assemble the list, we canvassed legends and luminaries from across the bar industry to find out who they consider the greatest bar team in history and why. Here are their answers, in their own words, edited for clarity.
Best Team: Pegu Club (NYC), 2005*
Key Players: Audrey Saunders, Toby Maloney, Brian Miller, Phil Ward, Sam Ross, Jim Kearns, Chad Solomon, Jim Meehan
“In 2004, Audrey Saunders and I were trying to put together what she called the ‘The Yankees’ for the opening of Pegu Club. I was running Flatiron Lounge, and Audrey was spending a lot of time working on drinks for the opening Pegu Club menu. She was a perfectionist, working on the same cocktail for months on end, and making 100 versions of a drink before settling on the final spec. I think the bar became a real think tank for cocktail creation, and they were some of the most creative bartenders in the country at that time. So many bar professionals wanted to be a part of the opening squad. I was also a partner at Pegu Club, and we sent some of the top talent from Flatiron down to Pegu, including Phil Ward, Toby Maloney (who would become the head bartender), and Chad Solomon. They all knew that Pegu would be a game changer, and they all really wanted to be there.” —Julie Reiner, Owner, Clover Club and Milady’s, NYC
Best Team: Milk & Honey (NYC), 2009
Key Players: Sam Ross, Michael McIlroy, Michael Madrusan
“I had been a bartender for many years but new to the craft cocktail side, and I considered my weekly Sunday night seat at the bar extended training. At that time, Raines Law Room closed early, so I would close up and yellow cab it down to Eldridge Street. I learned so many overlooked classics. Milk & Honey is the place I saw the same precision and care from opening until close, with each guest, round after round. This crew had a way of bringing the room together into the coolest, most elegant little cocktail party in New York each night. Before ice studios and custom ice became a major vendor to cocktail bars, Milk & Honey also made a lot of their own ice in-house to have larger cubes, Collins ice and so on. The crew was passionate about rediscovering forgotten classics in older books, which were not as widely available in reprint as they are now.” —Meaghan Dorman, Bar Director & Partner, Dear Irving and The Raines Law Room, NYC
Best Team: Angel’s Share (NYC), 2013
Key Players: Shingo Gokan, Takuma Watanabe, GN Chan, Shige Kabashima, Tetsuo Hasegawa, Ben Rojo
“The team at Angel’s Share two decades in was pretty much the 1985 Chicago Bears of bartending. A lot of bars you go to see that one person. At Angel’s Share it didn’t matter who was bartending that day — you went to see Angel’s Share. They were all super cool and slick and, of course, all the attention to detail. Looking at what they’ve done now, it’s incredible that all these people worked at the same bar at the same time. If you visit all their bars now, I think you can see traces of that Angel’s Share cool in their Japan-meets-New-York lineage. Martiny’s feels very much inspired by Angel’s Share. But for me, Angel’s Share was more than a Japanese bar — it’s a New York bar. You can also argue that the most successful bartenders and bar owners came out of the Angel’s Share system, many of them helmed and trained by my future partner Shingo Gokan.” —Steve Schneider, Co-owner, Sip & Guzzle, NYC
Best Bar Team: Death & Co. (NYC), 2007*
Key Players: Phil Ward, Brian Miller, Jim Kearns, Joaquín Simó
“While arguments could be made for more recent teams, it’s sort of like arguing which cast of “SNL” was the best, when the obvious fact is that the first cast was. What I mean is that the bar teams of the earliest craft cocktail bars in New York were clearly the best because the talent pool back then was so small and therefore so concentrated. The two that immediately come to mind are the opening bartender teams at Pegu Club and Death & Co. Death & Co’s opening staff was largely stolen from Pegu Club. Phil Ward, Brian Miller, and Jim Kearns came from Pegu, then they added Joaquín Simó from Stanton Social Club. In my book, “A Proper Drink,” Jim Meehan called them the New York Yankees because the Yankees don’t build championship teams from scratch, they just acquire great players from other teams. This lineup lasted about two years. Again, every bartender would go on to own their own bar. Also, several modern classic cocktails (like the Final Ward and Oaxaca Old Fashioned) were invented during this time.” —Robert Simonson, Journalist and Author, “The Mix with Robert Simonson”
Best Team: Heaven’s Dog (San Francisco), 2009*
Key Players: Thad Vogler, Erik Adkins, Jennifer Colliau, Eric Johnson, Jon Santer, Jackie Patterson, Erick Castro-Diaz
“This team would be impossible to hire back today. No one would be able to afford them. The opening crew there was so stacked, it was insane. It was so collaborative, too. We were all coming up together. Thad (Vogler) and Erik (Adkins) started Bar Agricole afterward. I went on to do Rickhouse. The entire menu there was based on Charles H. Baker’s “Gentleman’s Companion,” so we focused on classics. But it was also a restaurant that sat 180 people, and we had a “dealer’s choice” on the menu. This wasn’t like a Milk & Honey space where you had 20 seats in a small venue. So, you’d be working the service well with like 15 dealer’s choice tickets and get your ass kicked. Honestly, though, I can’t overstate the influence that working with all these guys had on me. I learned so much there.” —Erick Castro-Diaz, Owner, Gilly’s House of Cocktails and Raised by Wolves, San Diego
Best Team: Pegu Club (NYC), 2005*
Key Players: Toby Maloney, Brian Miller, Phil Ward, Sam Ross, Jim Kearns, Chad Solomon, Jim Meehan
“As a Midwesterner, I’m the last person to beat my chest about something, but I have to say that the opening team at Pegu Club [which I belonged to] is the best and deepest modern bar team of all time. Julie Reiner and Sue Fedroff were partners at Pegu — which frequently gets lost in the story — so we trained at Flatiron, which was huge. So many bars have to wait for their space to be ready to train; and most operators can’t afford to have a finished space that isn’t open. Toby Maloney was our head bartender along with Chad Solomon and Sam Ross, who all came from Milk & Honey. By this time, Milk & Honey was the best cocktail bar in the universe, so having three of their bartenders was a big deal. Brian Miller and Phil Ward — who departed with Jim Kearns a few years later to open Death & Co — were the workhorses of the staff who put in the longest hours and gave the most to the place. I only worked there one day a week during my two and a half years there. Watching Brian document everything — frequently erasing and updating specs in pencil in steno notebooks he stored in a canvas man purse behind the bar as the recipes evolved — eventually helped me realize that what was going on around me would be history.” —Jim Meehan, Author, “The Bartender’s Pantry” and “Meehan’s Bartender Manual”
Best Team: The Violet Hour (Chicago), 2007*
Key Players: Kirk Estopinal, Troy Sidle, Kyle Davidson, Michael Rubel, Stephen Cole, Toby Maloney
“We took an original approach when we opened The Violet Hour and hired folks with little to no bartending experience. Chicago, though it had a thriving food scene, didn’t yet have a craft cocktail bar, and it often felt like the city was hostile to what we were doing. We brought Milk & Honey rules with us (asked people to not stand at the bar, not talk on the phone, and not wear baseball caps) and were met with resistance. We fielded nightly requests for cranberry juice, olives, top-shelf vodkas — none of which we had to offer. That intensity and pressure pushed the team to double down on our concept and think more outside the box. Some of the modern classics we developed were absolutely off the wall, but the Bitter Giuseppe and the Art of Choke are the ones that most spring to mind. The bar team was f*cking with amaro early on, too, before it was cool — like the hipsters we were.” —Toby Maloney, Former Owner, The Violet Hour, Chicago
Best Team: Employees Only (NYC), 2004*
Key Players: Dushan Zaric, Igor Hadzismajlovic, Jason Kosmas, Henry LaFargue, Billy Gilroy
“In my New York days, I was working at this club called Level V in the Meatpacking District, and whenever I’d get cut from work, I would always run over to EO before they closed. To me, the bar represents a very critical juncture in the zeitgeist. The original bar team [the five co-owners] had a way of making you feel like you were in a clubhouse — like you were really a part of something special. They always put fun first and really connected with their guests. In the early days, the bar really was for employees only, a place that existed exclusively for industry people. It was always a party, but the drinks were really serious, too. Their apprenticeship system definitely influenced the way that many cocktail bars, including Cure, approached training and promotion.” —Neal Bodenheimer, Owner, Cure, New Orleans
Best Team: Mayahuel (NYC), 2009*
Key Players: Phil Ward, Jim Kearns, Eryn Reece, José Mena, Adam Ramsey, Rob Fuentevilla, Katie Stipe
“The focus on agave was definitely ahead of its time, and it was a study hall for me. They were bringing in incredible spirits from Mexico and had many producers come and teach about the category. The way the team worked with these spirits in new and interesting ways was unique, especially after a long period of the NYC bar scene being so deeply rooted in classics. It was the second wave of the cocktail revival, and [bartenders] were learning to break the rules and interpret the old drinks in new ways.” —Lynette Marrero, Co-founder, Speed Rack
*Denotes opening team
