The Curious Bartender Podcast

Jeff Bell is the owner of PDT — Please Don't Tell — the hidden-phone-booth speakeasy that helped define modern New York cocktail culture, alongside Crif Dogs, Mixteca, Kees and the newly opened Highball Ltd inside Grand Central's 10 Grand Central building. We get into the arithmetic of running one of the busiest small rooms in the city — turning a 44-seat bar nine times on a Saturday night — and the guest-first heuristic he runs every new idea through: is this cool, tested against whether it's actually feasible, not whether the business can capitalise on it.
Jeff traces his path from a philosophy degree in metaphysics at the University of Washington, through a brief and unhappy stint selling annuities, to a barback job at PDT in 2010 under Jim Meehan. We talk about what it actually took to buy PDT and Crif Dogs from their founder in the middle of the pandemic — the year the bar sat dark, the unemployment cheques, and he's candid about how much harder ownership turned out to be than he expected, and the burnout of rebuilding a team from nothing.
That experience fed directly into Kees, his West Village bar built with longtime PDT colleague Victor Lopez: eight core cocktails, four variations each, and a menu stripped of anything that might confuse a guest before they've had a sip. We also cover the pitch that landed him the Waldorf Astoria's Peacock Alley and Lex Yard, and the story behind Highball Ltd, a bar named for a train signal a few hundred feet from Grand Central Terminal.
Along the way: fatherhood as bartending training, why the industry's best operators eventually miss being behind the stick, and why specialising — rather than trying to be everything to everyone — is what keeps an old bar alive.

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We're doing something different this time: a special edition replaying the Liquipedia seminar we delivered live at Tales of the Cocktail 2026 in New Orleans, sponsored by Belvedere — forty-five increasingly unhinged questions about liquids, alcohol and drinking, answered (mostly correctly) in just under two hours. Jake Burger returns as the show's first repeat guest, joined by Mike Foster running the questions and Matt Pomeroy handling demonstrations, both from Belvedere. We test whether vacuum ice buckets actually chill wine faster than a plain ice bucket, work out why Bloody Marys taste better at 35,000 feet, and establish that you'd need roughly half a million licks — or five thousand people — to get drunk off other people's sweat. We go deep on water's age (some of it in your glass may predate the sun), whether climate change is quietly reshaping the world's great spirits regions, and why a Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew is pound-for-pound a more accomplished drinker than Andre the Giant. There's a live blind taste test where Jake and Tris try to identify beer brands purely by the sound of the bottle opening, a full run-through of the maths behind why champagne towers waste hundreds of litres of fizz, and a proper history detour into the life and death of Mad Jack Mytton, the Regency-era MP who rode a bear into a dinner party and set fire to his own nightshirt to cure hiccups. We track down the world's most expensive liquid (spoiler: it's either horseshoe crab blood or deathstalker scorpion venom, depending how you count), debunk the myth that Ian Fleming actually drank his martinis at Dukes, and finally solve the mystery of why Jack Daniel's and Coke gets that strange white foam that no other whiskey and cola does. We close out with the story of Alfred Barnard, who visited 162 distilleries by horse and carriage in two years, and the real reason 19th-century restaurants had to lock up the Worcestershire sauce.

A few sound and video issues in this episode due to the intoxicated state of the producer and cast. Hope you enjoy it though!

David Wondrich is a drinks historian and author of Imbibe!, Punch and the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, and The Comic Book History of the Cocktail.
The conversation runs from a $3,000 freelance gig in December 1999 to four centuries of drinking history. Wondrich left academia, almost by accident, to become Esquire's drinks editor, and that training in chasing sources and revising a story when new evidence turns up has shaped every book since.
We get into how The Comic Book History of the Cocktail came together and what a graphic novel forced him to cut that a straight history wouldn't. From there we go back to the beginning: what punch actually was before it became shorthand for a bad party bowl, the unresolved fight over where the word "punch" comes from, and the likely, disputed origin of "cocktail" itself. We spend real time on the people usually left out of the story: William Schmidt, "the only William," New York's most famous 19th-century bartender, buried without a headstone; and Ned Stokes, who reinvented American bar service after doing time for murder.
Along the way: the birth of the American ice trade and why George Washington's "wine and bitters" might be an early cocktail. We didn't get past the early 20th century, so we'll be back for a part two, picking up the mid-century, the dark ages of the cocktail, and tiki.

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Julie Reiner arrived in New York in 1998 after a stint bartending in San Francisco, following her wife to a city she'd always wanted to live in, and found a scene stuck on sour mix and nothing fresh, years behind the coast she'd left. In this episode we trace the accidental, instinct-led arc of one of modern cocktail culture's defining bar owners: from cocktail waitressing in Waikiki and freewheeling San Francisco service through to Flatiron Lounge in 2003, the bar that introduced her to jiggers, consistency, that spearheaded the culinary cocktail movement, and that ran almost entirely on female talent in a scene that had never seen anything like it. We talk about the partnership with Dale DeGroff and Audrey Saunders that led to Pegu Club — a training ground that sent bartenders like Phil Ward, Sam Ross, Toby Maloney and Jim Meehan on to shape the industry's next chapter — and the move to Brooklyn for Clover Club, built around a 130-year-old antique bar and a classically-focused menu, nominated five years running before finally taking Best American Cocktail Bar. We get into the ventures that didn't survive too: the ahead-of-its-time tropical concept Lani Kai, and Leyenda, built around Ivy Mix's expertise in agave spirits, which closed after a ten-year run. We finish talking about Milady's, the revival of a beloved 70-year-old Soho dive bar, why nostalgia has to be earned rather than just served up, and how, after roughly ten bars and twenty-five years, she's settled into running the ones she loves rather than chasing the next opening.

Grover Sanschagrin is the co-founder, alongside his wife Scarlet, of Agave Matchmaker — the platform, formerly known as Tequila Matchmaker, that has spent over a decade cataloguing how tequila and other agave spirits are actually made. Grover found tequila through Scarlet, who discovered it while working as a journalist in Mexico City, and the pair went on to live in Guadalajara, at the heart of Mexico's tequila region, for eight years, visiting hundreds of distilleries and eventually building an app now used by over 400,000 people to navigate a notoriously opaque category. Grover walks us through how additives — both the legally permitted abocantes (glycerin, caramel colour, oak extract, sugar syrup) and a wider set of undisclosed synthetic ingredients — found their way into a huge share of the market, which by his and Scarlet's own estimate runs as high as 85%, and how their attempt to flag which products were additive-free grew from a simple checkbox into a full verification programme built on sensory training and, eventually, laboratory testing. That work made them two of the most influential, and for parts of the industry most uncomfortable, voices in tequila, and in March 2024 their home in Guadalajara was raided by federal agents while they were thousands of miles away in New York — an experience Grover walks us through in detail. Their legal situation is still working its way through the courts, so there's a fair amount here we've had to leave out or keep light on for now, and we've deliberately avoided naming the parties involved directly. Grover also gives us his read on the recent wave of US class-action lawsuits alleging that some major tequila brands, including names linked to Diageo, Costco and Michael Jordan, fall well short of their 100% agave claims, and we close out talking about where tequila and the wider agave spirits category — now expanding well beyond Mexico's borders — goes from here, plus a look at Rispetto, his own traditionally-made agave syrup.