Bartender's Choice Josef Baczynski, Verve
Where the stars behind the bars reveal their favourite drinks, this fortnight a Dark and Stormy
Bartender's Choice: Josef Baczynski, Verve
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Josef at Verve was destined to become a bartender; working in a standard nine-to-five job was never going to be for him. “I did an office job when I was in high school, work experience for two weeks, and it turned me against office work. Just hearing 40 year-old women bitch about other 40 year-old women, just really backstabbing and…” he laughs, “you do get that in bars, but you’re drunk so it’s fine!”
A Yorkshireman with one Sicilian and three Ukrainian grandparents, Josef moved to Leeds from Huddersfield around 18 months ago. He worked at Verve’s sister bar Reform before making the switch to Verve nine months ago.
How do the two bars compare? “Reform’s bigger and very busy on a weekend, so it’s really good as a party bar. But in summer I love it in here – you can open all the front windows and it has a real continental feel, you know, like those little bars you get in Paris and Barcelona. And once it gets busy, you only get to a certain level of customers in the bar at any one time, so you get a chance to spend more time with people one-to-one, which is really cool. We do a 6am close once a month as well. Reform do theirs on the last Saturday of the month; we do ours on the first Saturday.”
What does Josef like to drink? “I’m a big rum fan. Rum and ginger’s a kind of go-to drink, you know, when you go to a bar and you’re just spoilt for choice and you can’t think of what to have. And my missus works at North Bar, so it’s often beer.”
Given his love of rum, Josef’s drink of choice comes as no surprise. He serves us the classic Dark and Stormy cocktail, an immensely drinkable and refreshing concoction that’s perfect for the summer months.
“The Dark and Stormy is a trademark of Gosling’s rum,” he says. “The company’s been in Bermuda for 200 years and they copyrighted the drink when they exported it to the US. That’s actually with a particular ginger beer made in Bermuda that’s just impossible to get, but it’s like the national drink of Bermuda. I think the original recipe was just rum and the ginger beer that was on the island, which is a raw, proper earthy drink that you couldn’t drink on its own, so this is a toned down version of the original. A dash of angostura brings in a bit of bitterness that just balances the flavour, as the sweetness of the ginger beer picks up the caramel in the rum, and there’s a lot of earthy notes from the molasses in the rum.”
It’s a good job we’re asking Josef for his bartender’s choice, and not a chap called Luke who he worked with in the past. Josef explains: “We’d work on a bar together and you’d get asked, as a bartender, what’s your favourite drink. And Luke’s stock answer was milk.”
Drink: Dark and Stormy
Price: £5.60
Ingredients: Dash of angostura; double shot of Gosling’s Black Seal rum; shaken with cubed ice; topped up with ginger beer and garnished with a lime wedge.
Posted on Wednesday 9th June 2010
SO'H
Verve
16 Merrion Street, Leeds, LS1 6PQ
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