The Philip Duff Show

Me and Erik go waaaaaay back, to when I taught a class on the IBA's elite John Whyte residential training course in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, before Erik moved to London to start his stratospheric ascent to the top of the bartending world. We sat down during Tales of the Cocktail to talk about all that: awards, scalpels vs. hammers, how cities like Mexico can suddenly appear on the cockta...

Simon's been a mate since the late 1990s, when he created CLASS (standing for C ocktail L iqueur A nd S peciality S pirit) magazine, the print forerunner of Difford's Guide and, in a pre-Internet world, just about the only way to learn about the revolution in cocktails that began sweeping London in the mid-1990s, which we both agree dates to the opening of the Atlantic Bar & Grill th...

I've known Natasha for ages and it's no exaggeration to say she's changed the landscape of gin consumption in her native Missouri, and indeed in the wider USA as well. Much as Julio Bermejo built a dedicated band of fanatics drinking 100% Blue Agave tequila at Tommy's, a suburb of San Francisco, Natasha did the same with gin, in her family's restaurant in St. Louis. Today,...

Zev's had one of the most interesting career arcs of any bartender I know, but when we finally sat down to tape an episode, it turned out to have even more twists and turns than I thought! From Brooklyn to Melbourne to Montreal and back to NY, and from bartending for Heston Blumenthal Down Under to manning the shakers in the Meyerverse* that is Union Square Hospitality Group at it's Mich...

Anna is brilliant and this episode - taped partly in a hotel lobby in London, and then on Zoom - is just like having a drink with her, which is always great. She's not afraid to say the things others won't, and her goal is to elevate anyone she works with, and especially to make bars better and get more women to embrace hospitality as a career option. Enjoy! Anna on IG: https://www.insta...

Well, I've know Agostino since he was a fresh-faced young buck at Montgomery Place, one of London's best cocktail bars back in the day. I remember when he moved to take the reins at the Connaught when it reopened, and the dream opening duo that was him and Erik Lorincz. In the sixteen years since, Ago built a core around him with stunning professionals like Maura Milia and Giorgio Bargia...

Benji (whose actual name is Fabio), is a friend, and a tremendous host even among his fellow Italian bartenders, which is really saying something. After studing philosophy and being a professional soccer player (!), Benji went into bartending and is now a partner in the Farmily hospitality group that includes 1930 Bar, MAG Cafe and Tripstillery, all in Milan, as well as Bitter Fusetti, a bitterswe...

I kept bumping into David at events (like Philip Duff Show stalwart Tony Sach's regular get-togethers for writers and other waifs and strays) and he was always good fun to chat with, so me and him sat down in a shady spot inside Central Park* on a hot-as-balls day, on camp chairs, with a nearby wheelie cooler bag full of ice cold Negra Modelo beers and some 1960s IW Harper Whiskey (him) and s...

What to say about my old mate Gegam Kazarian? In his native Armenia, he studied biochemistry, then floral design, then silversmithing, started bartending, followed his passion for Spanish classical guitar by emigrating to Spain, started several bars and a mixology lab, won the Havana Club Rum European championships, the G'Vine Gin Connoisseur Program world championships, then moved back to Ar...

Shannon, a Charleston native, is a powerhouse: an artist who left art due to its restrictions, a New York City bartender who championed rum when no-one cared about it (spoiler: a lot of people still don't care), the award-winning author of "Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails" and a consultant and ambassador for brands including Denizen Rum, Privateer Rum and Myrtle Bank rum.  We sat do...

Me and Jim met in 2006, when he entered the Bols 200 contest I organised, and I dropped by Pegu Club to see him next time I was in New York (I was living in Holland at the time). He went on to open PDT (Please Don't Tell) in 2007, which almost immediately became the most famous cocktail bar in the world (and also served the best hot dogs to be had in any cocktail bar, too!) authored The PDT C...

Robb's been a mate for a long time - I think we met when he was a Tales of the Cocktail Cocktail Apprentice (CAP) - and the first event we ever did after I launched Old Duff Genever in Minnesota was at his bar, Meteor, which he opened in late 2019. Timing, eh! Robb and his business partners and staff weathered the madness of the 'rona, and recently garnered not just nominations from Tale...

Another first for the Philip Duff Show! Bianca, a Barcelona-based PR maestra, is a good friend and we were chatting about all sorts of things during the recent Paradiso Sustainability Summit* in Barcelona, and it turned out we both were interested in the practice and study of negotiation. So, we agreed she’d read a book on the topic that I recommended - “Getting More” by Stuart Diamond - and I’d r...

What to say about my mate Linden?  He built Caffe Dante, already a decades-old fixture in New York, into the #1 rated on the World's 50 Best Bars list, then opened Dante West Village in the teeth of the COVID pandemic, and recently opened Dante in the Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills. We talk about his origin story in Australia - I didn't know he was the son of a food critic - his forthc...

Mark is one of the most interesting people you could meet in the liquor business; drawing on his and his father's experiences importing and selling fine wines in his native England, he applied the logic of terroir to spirits, starting back in 2000 when he led a consortium of investors who bought the mothballed Bruichladdich distillery. Mark and the team he assembled built Bruichladdich back i...

He was a bit knackered because he just got back from consulting on  a banqueting event in the Middle East, but London-based Tallaght* bowsie Ciaran Smith brought the heat in this episode, from supplying me with one of his Bottle Cocktail Shop spicy margaritas all the way from London (plus a bottled negroni, and very tasty they both were too), to giving surprisingly insightful** opinions on red &am...

UPDATE SUNDAY 28 April - fixed the audio, which cut out at 15mins on Friday & Saturday. The full 1 hour 45min session is now live! Nick Papanicolaou just founded No Sleep Beverage, an innovative incubator taking minority investments in liquor brands in order to add value by combining his own entrepreneurial experience with big-company expertise,  in a unique, nimble company. Their initial port...

I was introduced to Amir a few years back by our mutual friend Oron Lerner, of Imperial Group in Tel Aviv. Amir came to New York decades ago to try his hand at acting, and began working in hospitality as a side hustle. Along the way he also worked as a special-education teacher, but he's now, in my opinion, one of the best mixologists in Manhattan, running the beverage program at Ophelia Loun...

I sat down yesterday with Philip Duff Show stalwart and drinks writer Tony Sachs to catch up, drink some of the colossal amount of booze he has in his apartment, and pre-game an event yesterday evening which saw New York bartending legend Brian Miller step back behind the bar. There's a celebrity rum-off, some tobala mezcal in a plastic water bottle, a mystery vodka that won't come out u...

Jillian's an old friend from her acclaimed days heading up storied New York cocktail bars such as Dead Rabbit, Death & Co, and Maison Premiere, to name but a few. She relocated to Charleston, South Carolina a while back to open her next project with Sean Muldoon, Hazel and Apple, so it was great to make time to meet up when we were both judging a bartending contest in Folly Beach, which i...

Well, I couldn't pass up this opportunity! I was at the third and largest edition of the Paradiso Sustainability Summit in Barcelona recently, organised by #1 W50BB 2022 bar Paradiso, which brought together speakers and bars from around the planet to share best practises on sustainability for bars, and have a bit of fun into the bargain. Margarita Sader, co-founder of Paradiso and Summit, was...

(In my voiceover I say this is episode 2 of 3 for the Agave Series, but we swapped it with last week's episode, to coordinate with the release of The Tequila Ambassador V.O. book, so this - episode 2 - is now coming out 3rd in the series.) Sophie Decobecq is a force of nature: from Lille,  France, she moved to South Africa to work on agave research after a university background playing rugby...

I first met Tomas Estes, a  West Coast American (who opened Europe’s first-ever Mexican restaurants starting in Amsterdam in 1976, and  co-founded Tequila Ocho in 2008) almost twenty years ago. We last had dinner and drinks in Athens in December 2020. The Tequila Ambassador V.O.(link to preorder below) is the "director's cut" of Tomas' book The Tequila Ambassador, first publish...

This is the first in a mini-series of three about agave spirits and the people who make them. (The WiFi wasn’t great, so sound quality is a little echoey at times and there’s the occasional pause in dialogue when Zoom froze, but that’s how it goes when you’re a 4-hour drive from Oaxaca!) It was great to catch up with Dani, who I first met when she was bartending in Vancouver, part of the first wav...

I sat down with the extravagantly-hatted Damon Boelte himself, founder of the longest-running bars & cocktails podcast The Speakeasy as well as owner of Grand Army bar in Brooklyn, musician, and bartender of decades standing. We talked about him going from never having worked in hospitality to being the bar manager in four weeks, did a Where Are They Now for the OG bartending crew of Prime Mea...