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Ever wanted to know what it's like on the other side of the bar? We asked some of New York's finest bartenders to get the inside word on the industry—and ended up hearing some pretty wild stories along the way.
Each of the bartenders we interviewed for this series are from venues who were featured in the prestigious Time Out Bar Awards in 2018. You can check out the full list of winners and runners up here.
This time, we got Charlotte Voisey from Monkey Shoulder to chat with the team from Mother's Ruin, which came runner-up for Best Crew.
Why we love Mother’s Ruin
New York bargoers have many reasons to thank Mother’s Ruin. Not only does the airy Nolita bar churn out some damn fine cocktails, but it also has played a large part in slackening the pomposity of the city’s “serious cocktail” culture. Since 2011, owners TJ Lynch and Richard Knapp have positioned their bar in the overlap where cocktail temple and local dive meet, serving equal quantities of high-end professionalism and devil-may-care playfulness. The skilled staff—which has included bar-world big hitters like Toby Maloney (Pouring Ribbons), Giuseppe González (Suffolk Arms) and Speed Rack champion Anna Wingfield over the years—combines cocktail-bar precision and high-volume output, cranking out an ambitious, weekly-changing bar program just as readily as it cracks open beer cans and pours crowd-pleasing frozen drinks (made in a slushy machine named Kathleen Turner, no less). Together, that crew coalesces to create the rare New York cocktail bar that’s all bona fide, no bullshit.