Danil Nevsky

There is a generational bartending war going on. The old guard versus the new. Each has a bone to pick with the other. I belong to the older group and it’s easy for me to say “it ain’t what it used to be”, but here’s how I see it - our old version of the bar community is dead. The new generation’s version of the bar community hasn’t been born yet. The life of a bartender is sort of simple. You’re born. You bartend. You suffer death by taxes.

Laura Grassulini:  In our previous column, we interrogated ourselves on the status of cocktail competitions and on the future of on-trade advocacy. We’ve set value as the ultimate, collective benchmark, so the question naturally arises: what value is advocacy supposed to deliver, and is it delivering it?

Danil Nevsky: No amount of googling or ChatGPT-ing has helped me find the first-ever cocktail competition, or at least one that was the first real game changer. So, I’m going to use my own bar industry experience to make the following claim: the golden era of cocktail competitions was 2008-2018. Anything before that can’t be remembered, and anything after is largely insignificant. But how did this once kingmaker for international bartending lose its relevance?