On the menu, under the banners of “Strong & Stiff” and “Shaken & Refreshing” are throwbacks like the Singapore Sling and Tequila Sunrise along with the Rusty Nail and Brandy Alexander. Johns uses the original names and many of the core components of each drink as familiar signposts, but employs unexpected ingredients and techniques that would be foreign to a bartender who pulled shifts at Studio 54 back in the day. 

That many of these oft-dismissed drinks are no longer ordered by cocktail enthusiasts is what makes them so special to Johns. “Keeping the original names helps put guests at ease and not feel intimidated by the modern twists, techniques and ingredients we’re incorporating,” he says. “The best compliments we get are that these drinks remind people of their past but in a new way to experience them.” 

Over several visits I’ve had the chance to sample my way through all of the drinks, but the one I can’t stop thinking about is the White Russian. I wondered whether you could really call a cocktail a White Russian if it wasn’t made with vodka and Kahlúa, but after trying it, it instantly won me over.

The Martini-on-the-rocks bravely breaks the rules (or at least turns some heads). So we thought it was a good time to revisit some other nonconforming cocktails whose creators—all trailblazing bartenders—had to break a rule or two to develop. Here are three ways that you, too, can go off the beaten path:

Traditional bartending wisdom would have you shake, not stir, drinks with juice. But drinks expert Al Sotack wanted to push back on that. For his South Bronx, a riff on the Bronx cocktail, he adds a tiny bit of pineapple and orange juices to make something close to a Martini with just a hint of citrus. His Algonquin, meanwhile, reads like a Manhattan. “A little tiny bit of juice doesn’t change the elegance,” he says.

(No, really!) It sounds like sacrilege, but “sugar is not the enemy,” says bar legend Joaquín Simó. With a light hand, a touch of sugar can add balance to drinks and bolster those that feel too much like “watery booze.” It certainly doesn’t work in every cocktail, and it should be used sparingly, but it’s worth a shot if you’re R&Ding and feel like your drink is too flabby or astringent.

The ingredients list for the Trinidad Sour does not contain a typo; it really does call for 1 1/2 ounces of Angostura bitters. The drink achieved modern classic-status for the shocking, flavor-packed move, and, like the similarly constructed Angostura Colada, has become an industry favorite. In bar settings, these cocktails are often prohibitively expensive, but if you’re looking for a one-of-a-kind at-home drink, put these recipes on your bucket list.

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Then I walked into Kansas City’s Varsity Club, a neighborhood basement bar with a ’70s feel, where I spied the Grilled Martini on the menu. Made with gin, dry vermouth and smoked olive brine, it’s garnished with a grilled olive. It sounded like the perfect summer Martini, something I could envision serving at a backyard cookout. Plus, to keep things cool, it’s served on the rocks.

When Caleb Roye, who owns the bar with his brother, Levi, opened Varsity Club, he “wanted to reconfigure classic cocktails and present them in an approachable way,” he says.

For their dirty Martini variation, the brothers tapped Turkish grilled olives, which they use to infuse a gin blend and garnish the drink. After attempting to grill olives themselves (“you have to borderline dehydrate olives before you grill them or else they just blister, and then you have to rehydrate them through marinating them,” says Roye of the complex process), they discovered grilled Castelvetrano olives from the brand Fora (you can buy them online). Grilled with char marks, the olives had the ideal meaty texture and natural smoky flavor they were seeking.

The base of the cocktail is a 50-50 blend of Citadelle Gin, which adds floral citrus notes to the drink, and Prairie Wolf Dry Gin, which provides structure and balance. To impart that savory grilled flavor, they sous vide the gin blend with olives and smoke olive brine with hickory. At the bar, they batch the gin and brine with dry vermouth and store it in the refrigerator, then shake and pour Martinis over ice for service. 

While true opponents of Martinis on the rocks can request the drink served up in a coupe, for Roye, the presentation is a key component. “I think serving a Martini on rocks makes it more approachable,” he says. The bar shakes the drink just briefly to “minimize dilution before it hits the glass and slowly dilutes in the guest’s hand.” And that makes it just the right drink to linger with over a lazy summer afternoon.

The Pago Pago, essentially a Daiquiri made with Chartreuse and crème de cacao, was created by the rum brand Ronrico in the 1940s, and it appears in the second edition of Hyman Gale and Gerald F. Marco’s The How and When. While it’s not a tiki drink, the cocktail—which shares a name with the capital of Samoa—has some of the hallmarks of the genre. Paul McGee, who has revived the drink at Echo Lake, likens it to Donn the Beachcomber’s style.  “He’s best known for using dual citrus and layering a lot of different flavors,” McGee says. The cocktail has become a favorite among both rum nerds and those new to the spirit. “That’s the genius of this drink,” he says. “It’s so approachable, yet, if you look for it, you find the layers.”

Watts is not alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 36 percent of service workers in the U.S. have access to employer-sponsored healthcare. Now, at his restaurant, Watts has prioritized “providing inclusive, all-encompassing care,” including by offering physical and mental health insurance to staff, hosting annual healthcare education sessions and partnering with local businesses on everything from spa visits to tattoo days (more on that in a bit!). 

In an industry where even basic benefits are hard to come by, there are a handful of bars, restaurants, and cafes that have taken a thoughtful approach to taking care of their staff, in turn attracting and retaining workers along the way. “You can’t pour out of an empty cup,” says Watts. “How can [hospitality workers] take care of others if they aren’t taken care of? This seems like such basic hospitality to me, yet few adhere to it.”

This week in Pre Shift, we’re bringing you some of those out-of-the-box ideas, from innovative pay structures to staff travel opportunities to local discounts. If you’re an operator looking for more ways to support your staff—or a staffer looking to advocate for your team—read on for those ideas, plus an update from last week’s newsletter and a handful of the hottest hospitality jobs right now.

Royalties, but for cocktails. Bar Bambi in Chicago has a unique approach to recipe crediting—something we’ve covered in this newsletter in the past. Bartenders who create cocktails that make it onto the Bar Bambi menu get a quarterly bonus based on sales of those drinks. “Basically, royalties for your creative work,” explains owner Katie Renshaw. 

Benefits that also benefit local businesses. Every month, the team behind Cesarina and Elvira in San Diego picks a nearby independent restaurant and opens a tab for staff to enjoy a meal. Also, once a week, employees can attend a complimentary yoga class across the street from Cesarina as a convenient way to recharge.

An exchange program. The restaurant Smoke Door has two locations: one in Lake Tahoe, California, and another in Yokohama, Japan. Owners Ryu Amemiya and Tyler Burges regularly send U.S. kitchen staff to stage at the Japanese location so they can learn more about Japanese flavors, techniques, and ingredients.

Covering the bases. Mark Okuda, chef-owner of LA’s The Brothers Sushi, gets his team tickets to watch the Dodgers on Japanese Heritage Night. Because the stadium allows fans to bring their own food, the staff brings homemade meals and hangs out for the night.

An underrated healthcare benefit. The New York nightclub Mansions offers its staff custom ear plugs.

An opportunity to level-up. Ayu Bakehouse in New Orleans created “Ayu Schoolhouse,” a paid educational program for employees that offers business (for example, a “How to Open a Food Pop-Up” series) and culinary (“The Science of Bread”) classes.

The dining room at Rosy.

A team break. Twice a year, Birdie’s in Austin closes for a two-week period. Staff can take the time to rest and recharge, and they’re paid for the full four weeks. 

The team that forages together, stays together. At Bosq in Aspen, chef Barclay Dodge leads the team on an annual research trip to different food destinations to explore local markets and forage. The trips are a chance for team-building, but they have also provided inspiration for R&D on Bosq’s menu.

An on-theme perk. The Museum Bar + Gift Shop, a recently opened NYC bar modeled after a natural history museum, plans to bring its staff on educational field trips (fittingly, to local museums).

Is there an award for best benefits? When Vinnie Cimino, chef at Cordelia, was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2024, Watts purchased tickets (which are hundreds of dollars) for any manager or sous chef who wanted to come celebrate. “We set up hosted events by doing collabs at a couple spots that made great spaces for our team to gather and celebrate with us,” says Watts. This year, 30 members of the team attended the ceremony, while more than 30 supported outside the theater in Chicago.

Cordelia and Rosy have also secured discounted spa services for staff by trading discounted meals with a local wellness studio and hosted free tattoo days with local artists. “I’ll always ask friends and fellow businesses to see how we can help each other,” says Watts. “We host collaborative events on the regular, as it’s central to our mission to give others a platform and attention.”

These time- (and taste-) tested recipes for the Margarita are classic for a reason.

But gradually, over the past 25 years, the once reliable cultural norm has become, to some, a relic of a bygone era. As far back as 1999, news outlets have pondered whether tighter profit margins and declining bar patronage have spelled the end of the friendly freebie. Recently, bartender and writer Rick Paulas suggested in a post on X that the concept had “suddenly died” and wondered, “What happened!” Has the buyback truly gone the way of the $5 boilermaker? And if so, how are bartenders keeping customers coming back for another round? 

Paulas, a bartender at Oak & Iron in Brooklyn, first heard about buybacks while he was still living in Los Angeles, from friends who had spent time in New York. “It was always something that was dangling there as this fable: In New York City, if you go there and get three drinks, the fourth one is for free.” 

But now, he says, “the word buyback has lost a lot of usage.” At his bar, free drinks are “vibes based” and dependent on the sales for the day. To him, the concept lost its charm when social media made these if-you-know-you-know traditions more widespread: “It kind of went away when all the secrets became not-so-secret anymore.” 

Other bartenders cite economic factors for the decline in regularly comping drinks; many repeated some form of the adage “Don’t give away the bar.” Erin Gerety, a Richmond, Virginia, bartender with more than a decade of experience, says that one of her bars, the neighborhood watering hole Home Sweet Home, is “so cheap to drink at that it feels silly to give things away for free.” She hadn’t heard the term “buyback” before our conversation, but she was familiar with the practice in general. “That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally pour a shot a little heavy for a friend,” she clarified. “But I don’t do it very often.” 

For Matt Grimm, a bartender at the famed Chicago dive bar Rainbo Club, the fastest way to ensure you won’t get a buyback is “if you ask for one because ‘it’s my birthday’ or ‘it’s my friend’s birthday,’” he says. “If I buy drinks for everyone whose birthday it was, we’d be losing money.” 

Mike Sternfeld, who works at Shenanigans Pub in Kensington, Brooklyn (where I also work!), has put in nearly 20 years behind the bar. To him, the buyback began to lose its potency when bars began to process credit cards. He recalled the register at the original location of Freddy’s Bar—which was tragically demolished to build the Barclay’s Center in 2010—had just three buttons to ring in drinks: liquor, beer, and buybacks. At that time, he says, it was expected for 10 percent of your “ring,” or total daily revenue, to be buybacks. 

But fees for processing credit cards, along with the costs associated with point-of-sale software like Toast and Square, began to cut into the bottom line. “It costs more to do the commerce, so there’s less room for freebies,” says Sternfeld. And whereas cash-based buybacks leave customers with more money to tip their bartender at the end of the night, credit card freebies have the inverse effect, cutting into the subtotal that most customers will use as the basis for calculating gratuity. 

In the absence of the traditional buyback, bars are still finding ways to keep customers coming back. Rainbo Club will often invite regulars to private events, like its annual Kentucky Derby party, where they’ll give away free drinks and host a backyard potluck. One of Gerety’s fellow bartenders at Home Sweet Home keeps a “prize bucket” filled with dollar trinkets like heart-shaped sunglasses, finger puppets, and lipgloss that she will dole out to particularly affable patrons. At The Jasper, a cocktail bar she also works at, bartenders give out a flat 20 percent friends and family discount, and pour pre-bottled shooters for fellow industry workers. 

For Sternfeld at Shenanigans, the role of a bartender as a social interlocutor is its own reward: “It’s really personality management: You’re trying to get all these strangers to socialize [and] to utilize this space as they want,” he says, “and you’re trying to make a judgment call as to what level they want to interact and how you’re going to make that as comfortable as possible to hopefully get a better tip and to keep them coming back.”

Still, all the bartenders I spoke to say they continue to reward the people who make bars fun, sociable, and safe spaces with free drinks in one form or another, whether it’s a shot for the road or a draft beer on the house. “I think it is a crucial practice. It invites community; it breaks the ice,” says Gerety. “When I see a real slice of humanity, I get to say, ‘Good job, you get a gold star.’” 

One such combination merges any classic cocktail with the highball format. Lengthening the Manhattan, White Negroni and yes, even the Martini is fair game. Here are nine recipes to get started with.

Part of a long line of drinks named after iconic plays and movies, the Arsenic and Old Lace gets its title from Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 play and Frank Capra’s subsequent 1944 film starring Cary Grant. The theater connection makes perfect sense given that it was first published in Broadway producer Crosby Gaige’s 1944 book, Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion.

The plot of the black comedy centers a couple of murderous old ladies (the old lace) who believe they’re doing a service to the aging bachelors to whom they serve poisonous elderberry wine (the arsenic). Somehow, the purple-tinted, gin-based drink with crème de violette, vermouth and absinthe (which conjures poison-adjacent imagery) seems to embody the unseen evil in the play’s seemingly innocuous characters. “When people see the purple, they think, Oh no, this is gonna be too sweet,” says Shank. But he values the Arsenic and Old Lace for its complexity, describing it as “floral, bright, elegant, decadent and very, very drinkable.”

Shank first encountered the Arsenic and Old Lace through a former Nocturne bartender named James Sporer who was a connoisseur of old-school Martini riffs. Collaboratively, the bar team at Nocturne pored over lots of different specs, trying them all, settling on one and tweaking it.

The original 1944 recipe calls for three parts dry gin to one part absinthe, with three dashes each of dry vermouth and crème de violette. For their modern rendition, the Nocturne team went for a more traditional Martini build with two ounces gin, three-quarters of an ounce of vermouth, a quarter-ounce of violet liqueur, and just a rinse of absinthe in the glass. They also added orange bitters—an accent many older Martinis feature.