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Stopped by @pepelemokopdx last night and @kelinpdx convinced me to try a Jägerita. So good. She described it as magic and she was exactly right. Jager, cointreau, lime, & simple. #craftcocktail #pdxcocktail #pdx #jagerita #pepelemoko

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I finally watched “Pépé le moko”!

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Bartender Interview: Daniel Parker Guidry

While in Portland for Portland Cocktail Week, I had the opportunity to wander around to some cocktail bars. Thankfully, I found my way into Pépé Le Moko where I was able to try a couple of cocktails by bartender Daniel Parker Guidry. Through a rapid recharge of my phone and an hour or so of time, I was able to snap a few photos of Daniel doing his thing. Take a look at the interview below and make sure to give him a visit soon.

Where are you from and what brought you to Portland? I was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon. It’s a college town near the southern end of the Willamette Valley two hours south of Portland. As a kid, I rarely visited Portland, so it wasn’t until college that I got to know more about the city. I had transferred to George Fox University to study philosophy and my girlfriend, Chelsea, was studying art. We would travel to Portland to see shows, visit the museum, and eat at various dives. At the time, everything in Portland seemed like a dive. It was great. We had it in our head that we might move here after College to find work, but we weren’t sure how to make it happen. I had friends who had moved to Portland, and they would tell us about how hard it was to find work without connections. Long story short, we moved back to Eugene in 2006. We planned to work for a year, reconsider our goals, and potentially transfer to the University of Oregon, but that year the financial crisis hit and we failed to secure decent jobs. Things were looking pretty bleak in Eugene, so it was really fortunate for us when Chelsea was offered a job letterpress printing in Portland. We moved that summer to work and finish our studies at GFU.

What do you love most about Portland? I love Portland’s craft culture. My mother and father were big influences on my respect for working with your hands. Craft has always been important in Oregon, and it really bloomed in Portland. Even during the economic crisis, Portland was exciting because there was this a strong Do-It-Yourself approach and a serious interest in creativity. The economy was shit, but people were working hard to make something out of it. The craft movement brought industries together and really gave Portland a sense of culture.

What are you looking forward to most in 2015? Personal jet packs. Really it’s getting through the first year at Pépé and seeing what the world has in store. Opening a new bar is hard work, and I really appreciate the team work and focus we all share, especially Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Sami Gaston’s work (Pépé’s management team). We’ve started off with a bang, and I’m excited to see where we go from here.

What time do you usually wake up in the morning? When my dog decides to bite the shit out of my head. This is usually around 9am. On nights when I close Pépé, I don’t get home until about 4-5am, so I occasionally sleep through her biting, barking and jumping until roughly 11am. I like taking naps or looking exhausted.

Describe your bartending path that led to Pépé Le Moko. I had server experience, but there weren’t many jobs available in Portland, so I kind of started over on my career path. I got a job working maintenance out of college at McMenamin’s Kennedy School (a small hotel that rewrote what it looks like to be a hotel). I transferred to catering as a way to get into Small Bars at the Kennedy School. I knew that if I was going to continue in the industry, I wanted to bartend. I started bartending various catering events at the Kennedy School. I poured lots of beer, wine, gin and tonics, and I’d make a few old fashioned, lemon drops etc... After a few years, I transferred to small bars. It was great experience because the Kennedy school has six bars that have their own energy and service style. The drinks and product are the same but your role as a bartender can be unique from one bar to the next, so you can see what style works best for you. It’s hard work bartending there, but you can learn a bunch about how to flourish in a frenetic and mildly hostile environment.

After just six years at the K-hole, I was hired at a cajun/creole joint with a serious oyster program called The Parish. My last names Guidry, so I think they took me on for my cajun ancestry. It was just opening, so other than some stand-bys from their first restaurant Ethan and Tobias (the owners) wanted the bartenders to work as a team to build the program. Just after a year we were a small team of three bartenders responsible for the entire program, so I spent a bunch of time researching how to build a menu from classic cocktail recipes to innovative drinks. It was really fun work and helped me think more broadly about what it means to be a bartender.

At the Parish, I had some more exposure and made more friends in the industry including Freddy Tincher (bartender at Clyde Commons). Just short of a year ago, he introduced me to Jeff after telling me about Pépé le Moko. We sat down to talk about the details and short of a year ago just before opening they offered me a position.

What was your introduction to cocktails? Hell, I don’t know. Like what was the first cocktail I drank or when did I start learning about cocktails? I mean my mom comes from a family of good Douglas County tee-totalers, so we didn’t drink much. I do remember my dad letting my sister try a margarita at a Mexican restaurant, but hard alcohol was mostly anecdotal story’s about family drunks, distant scottish relatives with distilleries, and how gross whiskey tasted.

Honestly, I kind of avoided alcohol until I was twenty-one. The thing to know though is that outside of PDX, Oregon consumes more beer and wine than hard alcohol. So even by legal age, I spent my early twenties drinking through Pinot Noir and IPA. I didn’t really get into cocktails until I moved to Portland.

The first cocktail I got drunk as hell off of was a Black Opal. My friend’s sister bought me a couple rounds for my twenty-first. It was at a bar in Eugene on the west side called The Wetlands. The bartender free poured the ingredients over ice and by the time he was finished it was full of a third a pint of ice and two thirds booze.

When I moved to Portland, I started reading about cocktails. I lucked out because I knew how to research, so I found some sites online (including Jeff’s blog), and they all recommended “The Joy of Mixology” by Gaz Regan. I started working my way through it. The first drink--besides highballs and white russians--that I learned to make was a whiskey sour. It probably sucked, but from there I hit the ground running.

Where do you draw your inspiration from? Any mentors along the way In the industry, Holly and Matt Kinne. They were my first bosses, and their work ethic has always stuck with me. They own McKinlay Vineyards, a winery, where Matt has been making Pinot Noir since 1987. Some time in 2001, Holly opened up a little bistro cafe. I started working there in 2003. Initially, it was a sandwich/deli counter by day, but they expanded in 2004 and we started serving dinner at night. We were all novices and every day seemed near catastrophic. Chelsea also worked there as an on call server for dinners. I had default seniority at the time because I had been there the longest. We were all kids with alcohol, so Matt and Holly had a hell of a time keeping us focused. Holly sold the restaurant in 2006, which explains, in part, why we moved back to Eugene that year. I worked my ass off for the Kinne’s because it made me happy. They taught me that there is no substitute for hard work, humility, and kindness.

It seems like most cocktail bars avoid drinks like the Long Island Iced Tea. What led to having that drink on the menu? It’s a modernist approach to craft cocktails where form follows function and the function of bartending is hospitality..... That’s an architecture reference for Jeff. Really, Jeff saw a gap in the craft cocktail scene. A bunch of studious nerds were nose deep in Jerry Thomas’s mustache wax, but connecting their knowledge to guests often times came with a sermon. Don’t get me wrong, I get stuck in books too, and all the research has really benefited the craft movement. It’s just hospitality is about people and education is only part of the equation. Another part is having fun and indulging yourself. This is where the L.I.T. gets involved.

The L.I.T is king cocktail of a drinking culture “craft” bartenders profess to hate. I’d crossed paths with some geeked out cats who refused to make them because they thought that it was an inherently bad drink. I never put much thought into it because I even thought it was an inherently bad drink, but as Pépé’s shown it’s not. I think that was the source of opportunity. Craft methods could be applied to ‘bad’ drinks, like Amaretto Sours, to make them good. So to match form to function, he started improving on guilty pleasure drinks because they’re fun and about indulging yourself to make drinking in a craft bar fun and our overall purpose hospitality.

What is one of your favorite cocktails made by someone else? I like it when my wife makes me an old fashioned at home because she’s great. It’s also one of the few drinks she knows how to make which is perfect. It’d be horrible if I came home after a night of making cocktails, and she was like “check out this new tequila, strawberry shrub and mole bitters drink I’ve been working on.” I’m sure it would be delicious, but I just want to relax with something simple and classic.

What is one of your favorite cocktails made by you? I had a Creole Daiquiri by Chris Hannah at the French 75 bar. I loved it so much I really wanted to try my hand at something similar. I came up with my own variation based on my travels in New Orleans. Everywhere I went in Nola people were making hibiscus drinks, so I made this Creole Dram at the Parish. I was pretty proud of it. I even sized it with albumen (an old clarifying technique with egg whites). The base was Bacardi 8 and lime, and the sweet was the Creole dram. I blended a mixture of house made Creole Shrubb (spiced orange liqueur), allspice dram, and hibiscus demerara syrup. It was a deceptively simple drink with lots of aromatic flavors. The dram was also really good in Toddy’s.

Where are some of your favorite places for cocktails (local or not)? I’ve never been disappointed at Radar in North Portland. They have an american tapas menu with a clean approach to a bar. I usually start with an old fashioned, Negroni, or a simple cocktail off their list, a glass of wine with dinner, and Fernet and a little stout back for dessert. It’s amazing. Otherwise, I’m a fan of Interurban, Rum club, and Tear Drop, and Jordan Felix’s work at Multnomah Whiskey Library is great. Back home in Eugene, Izakaya Meiji is a cool joint to get a cocktail or sip on some Whiskey. It’s a rad little liquor refuge in a town of beer drinkers.

What is the most difficult cocktail ingredient to pronounce? Orgeat. It’s not difficult to pronounce. It’s just everyone has an opinion and some folks act snooty as shit about it. I studied linguistics for a brief period, so I’ll be damned to prescribe a proper pronunciation, and I can surmise a reason why we have variation, but hell--get over it.

If given $100 and asked to buy all spirits/ingredients needed for a cocktail of your choosing, what would you purchase? Pernod Absinthe, Benedictine, Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters, Sweet Vermouth, and a strong rye whiskey. The Cocktail de La Louisiane knocked me off my socks the first time I made one.

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