Pouring Ribbons, Slide Show, New York City, Manhattan, East Village, Avenue B, Bar, Photos, Bartender, Where to drink, Cocktails, Bartender Toby Malone, Alchemy Consulting, Joaquín Simó, Troy Sidle, Violet Hour, Chicago, IL, Illinois, Milk and Honey, Pegu Club, Vintage Chartreuse, Bar Setup, Bartenders Recs, Where Bartenders Drink,
Bar
Pouring ribbons
East Village
Cocktails
225 Avenue B
New York, NY 10009
T: 917.656.6788
Website:
Pouring Ribbons | Bartender Toby Maloney
March 11, 2013
East Village - New York, NY
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Photo Credit: Troy House
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Bartender’s Recs | New York, NY
Find | Cocktail Tools
Bowery Kitchen
I love shopping here for cocktail items. It’s huge and it’s well organized and they have just everything.
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T: 212.376.4982
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McSorley’s
Abraham Lincoln drank here for Christ’s sake! How cool is that? In the afternoon, you’ve got the bartenders and their garbage bags, aprons and the sawdust on the floor. It smells like a bar and it is the quintessential bar. You can order two beers at a time. It’s the history of drinking.
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T: 212.473.9148
The Dead Rabbit
Photograph courtesy of Dead Rabbit
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Courtesy of Evelyn Drinkery / Paloma Pargac
Drink | Cocktails
Evelyn Drinkery
Great cocktail bar, very relaxed, unpretentious and with a great vibe. The guys here are just incredibly talented and they’re really nice.
171 Avenue C, New York, NY 10009
It’s one place I have been looking forward to opening.
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T: 646.422.7906
Flatiron Lounge
I always send people here. They’ve been doing it for so long and at such a high level and volume. I worked here for a few months back in 2004, 2005 and you would just be crushed. It was like working on a club volume-wise, but you were making craft cocktails. Owner Julie Reiner is just awesome.
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T: 212.727.7741
The Shanty at the New York Distilling Company in Brooklyn
Photograph courtesy of The Shanty
The Shanty
It is a cocktail bar and kind of a dive bar. It smells like a distillery because it’s in a distillery. You can order your impeccable martini and turn around and see the alembic still that that gin was made in. Talk about local drinking when you’re actually drinking something that’s made 20 feet from where you are sitting, that’s pretty cool.
79 Richardson Street, New York, NY 11211
T: 718.878.3579
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Recommended By
- Bartender David Kaplan of Death & Co.
Q & A with Bartender Toby Maloney
Q. Tell us about Pouring Ribbons.
A. Pouring Ribbons is the fourth bar that Alchemy Consulting has had this level of involvement in. This is the first one which is a much larger creative collaboration with myself, Joaquín Simó, Troy Sidle and Jason Cott. It’s been wonderful, but very different in that there are two other people with such varying experiences, palates and thoughts. Our creative meetings are just incredible in how far we can push each other with the different cocktails that we’re working on.
Q. Looking back to your first bar, The Violet Hour, what’s the difference in the perspective and point of view of having less voices weighing in versus today?
A. It’s a completely different animal. The Violet Hour was one of the first cocktail bars in Chicago and it’s been around for almost six years now. So being in that market at that time, we were much more minimalist, we were much more rooted in the East Coast traditional mindset, which is where I’d come from -- Milk & Honey, Pegu Club, etc. The Violet Hour was the first bar that I opened. That was an amalgamation of all of my knowledge and experience up until that point. Pouring Ribbons is an expression of where we all are at this point in time. Each bar you have to look at where they are geographically and where they are in the time line of where the creative person is and also where the patrons are.
Q. One of the things that struck me about Pouring Ribbons is the friendliness. Dialing back, not that Milk & Honey wasn’t friendly, but it wasn’t as open.
A. I would agree with that 100%. A lot of people are getting down on the speakeasy and these small cocktail meccas. I think people are not putting that in context of where, literally, the customers were. We were coming out of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which was the birth of the horrible flavored vodka.
Bartender Toby Maloney at Pouring Ribbons
Photo Credit: Troy House
Q. The Tom Cruise era of cocktails?
A. Exactly. Where the drinking culture had really slid back and everything was artificial. Everything came off the gun or out of a bottle and was green or bright red. Obviously every bar had 47 flavors of vodka. So when Milk & Honey opened they had to make a statement on what type of bar they were. I think the Violet Hour is very much the same -- it’s not a woo-hoo bar.
Q. What do you mean when you say ‘woo-hoo bar?’
A. Like a really fun Irish pub sort of thing or Coyote Ugly type bars where if you are shouting it’s not really a big deal. The cocktail bar is a place that’s more sophisticated because the product that they’re serving is more sophisticated, so it deserves a more sophisticated atmosphere. Therefore, these bars had to lay down some rules on how you behave.
This is going to sound so pretentious, but we trained the patrons on how to act in a nice bar, because there wasn’t that sort of thing. Now when people go to a cocktail bar and see very little vodka, 25 different gins and 30 different agave products, they immediately know what sort of environment they’re going to be in.
Q. One of the things that I noticed about Pouring Ribbons is it’s less about sitting at the bar. What’s the thinking behind that?
A. We’re rethinking this phase and we realized that there are eight seats at the bar at Pouring Ribbons and there are 80 seats that are not at the bar. Obviously trying to reach those 80 seats with truly impeccable service is absolutely necessary. One of the ways we do that is no one here is a bartender or a cocktail waitress or waiter. Everybody does everything. Everybody has shifts behind the bar and on the floor. Everybody has the same exact same knowledge. They can really truly understand what’s going on with the customer and the bartenders because they have knowledge of both sides.
As a bartender you look out and you see the server is all of a sudden jammed up with a 10-top, you know not to shake their drinks because you know it’s going to be about four minutes before they get back to the bar to pick them up. So you move on and do something else. As a server it’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night, you don’t even mention a Ramos.
Q. What are you excited about that is new that you’re working with or you recently found?
A. The gentian liquors without a doubt. We’re getting more and more of them and it’s just so cool. Anything that’s bitter I would say is where drinks are going.
Q. Which ones in particular?
A. I love the Salers because of its balance and it’s a great lengthener. If you’re making a long drink, something refreshing in a long tall glass with some bubbles, the ancillary products don’t really matter. It has that lovely bitterness, which makes it just even more refreshing.
Maurin Quina is like an adult dessert. It’s bright cherry with a bing sort of flavor and a great layer of bitterness. You can substitute it in for a sweet vermouth in a Martinez or Manhattan or even a martini. I would definitely use either a really dry cognac or a rye over a bourbon. It goes great with gin as well because gin is so bracingly dry.
Bartender Toby Maloney is one quarter of the power consulting group Alchemy Consulting. Maloney, along with Jason Cott, opened The Violet Hour in Chicago where barman Troy Sidle joined them behind the stick. The fourth partner is 2012 Tales of the Cocktail Bartender of the Year and former Death & Co bartender Joaquín Simó. Their newest property is Pouring Ribbons, a second floor cocktail bar in New York’s East Village. Don’t be intimidated by the bouncer out front; he is just there for crowd control. This bar isn’t a Prohibition-style speakeasy, but a relaxed environment with a user-friendly menu that lists cocktails with a sliding scale -- refreshing, spirituous, comforting and adventurous.
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Recommended By
- Bartender David Kaplan of Death & Co. in New York, NY
