Vancouver bartender blends storytelling into the craft of cocktails
For Jeff Savage, there’s an art to being behind the bar
Jeff Savage, Botanist.
VANCOUVER’S JEFF SAVAGE remembers a night by the water a few years ago—one of those rare, magical evenings where everything in the universe seems to be unfolding as it should. The Calgary native, who started bartending while earning a double major in religious studies and political science at university and went on to work in parts of Asia, Europe, and the U.S., had made his way to the West Coast for the position of head bartender at Botanist.
The memory of that visit to the beach gave rise to a new smoky cocktail, one made with tobalá mezcal, highland añejo tequila, charred honey, mole bitters, and charred black cardamom, served in a small vessel over river stones. It’s a drink that the 2020 Canadian Bartender of the Year likes to serve with a story.
“I’ve had the privilege of moving around quite a bit in my life, and as amazing as some cities may be, they don’t always feel like home,” Savage tells Stir. “This cocktail is really based on feeling at home in Vancouver, which I can trace to a specific experience that happened a few years ago. I was invited down to a local, relatively hidden beach to have a bonfire with friends, and the whole experience was warming, and I felt embraced by a new city. The combination of new friendships, the warmth of the fire, smoke rolling out over the water, my dog happy and excited, and the beauty of the ocean and the surrounding mountains—it all sort of clicked for me and made me feel like I had made the right decision in moving to Vancouver.
“The cocktail is my attempt of bringing that warm embrace for my guests to enjoy,” he says. “The drink has notes of smoke and salinity to play into the experience, and it certainly does have a warming, spiritous element to it. Serving it on rocks I picked from the same beach really meaningfully rounds out the experience for me.”
If there’s an art to bartending, it goes beyond shaking and stirring of ingredients to come up with spectacular, tantalizing drinks. For mixologists like Savage, pros who reach the level of cocktail competitions at the global level, there’s another element that’s central to the artform: storytelling.
“Every cocktail I craft has a story to share,” Savage says. “I think it’s really important to be able to offer someone a little context for their experience.
“I suppose more than anything, I love being engaged and connecting with others over sharing stories,” he says. “Whether I’m the storyteller or the listener, I find the best part of storytelling is the ability to share and be shared with. It gives us the chance to learn, to grow, and to feel like others are going through similar things that I have. Telling stories is so integral to the human experience, and being a storyteller feels like I’m plugged into a primordial human experience.”
Savage is now pouring his drink-making and storytelling skills into a recently launched dining series at Botanist Bar. The VIP Cocktail Tasting experience features six courses of food and beverage pairings, with a twist. Unlike a regular tasting menu, where a chef creates certain dishes and a sommelier or other member of the restaurant team comes up with a pairing for each, most often wine, this menu works the opposite way, one in which Savage collaborates with Botanist executive chef Hector Laguna in a novel way.
“I take the lead, starting by creating a storyline of my current inspiration, then building a series of cocktails to tell that story,” Savage says. “I give those to chef and his team, and they create dishes to augment the story and highlight the flavours in the drinks. We come together and taste everything as a team, and we decide if anything needs adjusting….More often than not, they completely knock it out of the park on the first try.”
The menu for the six-course VIP Cocktail Tasting is revealed only at the time.
Designed for small bubbles of up to four people, the experience takes place at the private Botanist VIP table, complete with velvet curtains, with the menu revealed at the time. (Dates for 2022 are to be announced; Botanist is currently closed for its annual shutdown, a bit earlier than usual due to present circumstances, and is reopening on January 14.) Here’s an example from the series’ inaugural run: to go with that aforementioned mezcal-tequila concoction, Laguna cooked up a charred kampachi dish in a frothy broth of saffron, scallop liver, corn, and kohlrabi. And another: for Savage’s nuanced piña colada-esque cocktail that evokes the kind of faraway travel we’re all craving—a mix of pineapple-husk-infused Jamaican rum with coconut-infused vodka, dry Curacao, ginger, lime, sencha tea, oleo saccharum, and clarified milk—Laguna created a dessert of calamansi sorbet, passionfruit cream, pineapple, mango, and coconut meringue.
Savage credits his father, a mechanic and business owner who doesn’t drink alcohol, for instilling in him the beauty and importance of art not only in his work but in daily life.
“When I was younger, my father once told me that whatever I do in life, to bring out the art in it,” Savage says. “My father was never really an artist in the traditional sense; that being said, he’s incredibly skilled at what he does and regularly works on award-winning custom vehicles. He’s always taken pride in bringing a high level of art in what he does, even if it’s something that no one but him will ever see. He’s always encouraged me artistically - he bought me several guitars, and both he and my mother have always been supportive of me throughout my careers.”
With a keen interest in the history and lore of spirits, Savage has won numerous awards, such as Bombay Sapphire’s Most Imaginative National Bartender (2017 and 2018) and was a finalist in the 2019 Diageo World Class Bartender of the Year competition. An active supporter of community-garden work at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House’s Urban Farm, Savage has another creative aim in his work behind the bar.
“Cocktails provide such a fun platform to share an experience with,” he says. “No matter how much I love wine and the stories behind the bottles we open, it seems the stories we tell about wine often focus on the producers, the land, and the varietal. In comparison, there’s something almost democratic about the experience of sharing a story with cocktails. I try to tell stories centred around flavours that we can all comprehend and will trigger transcendental experiences. Guiding someone through flavours of the seasons or related to specific moments or spaces in nature is really rewarding and feels very intimate and connective.
“There’s certainly a beautiful art to crafting cocktails, sharing a story, and sharing the amazing food that our kitchen prepares,” he adds. “However, I do feel like those are all pieces of something more meaningful to me—that is, finding an art in hosting people.”
For more information, see Botanist.
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