Though I have come a long way from how I discerned flavours at the start of my bartending journey, my childhood continues to shape my taste and my standards of flavour. When I was a kid, we travelled every year to Puglia, in southern Italy, where my uncle maintained a piece of farmland. He grew tomatoes, olive trees, fig trees, watermelons – all sorts of traditional fruits and vegetables. Running around in the dusty red soil of those heat-baked fields and climbing trees to catch the summer breeze was my normality. So was working the harvest. 

My heart still brims with the magic of those days: that sunlight, the air filled with fruity aromas, the sweetness of those tomatoes, the resin from the trees we climbed and that stuck on our hands – treasured in antiquity as myrrh. What I hadn’t realized until recently is that my senses are still saturated with those memories. This charivari of flavours and aromas is so strongly rooted in me that it has become a sort of sixth sense. 

It is this sense that guides me to discover new ingredients and to create new and different styles of drinks. It’s this sense that tells me that something is authentic and delicious. Or not. And it’s my childhood experiences and my Italian background that have set the foundation for my standards of flavour – the ones I apply to making cocktails. 

While I could not possibly do what I do today without all the wisdom and brilliance of the people I have come across during my years as a mixologist, equally I could not do it without the sensory deluge of my childhood. World travel, a love of photography, contemplation about emotions, sights and sounds, plus encountering a diverse range of guests help evolve our concept to include the visual nature of a drink’s presentation and inspiration with ingredients from many countries and cultures. Introducing our guests to chicha morada from Peru, amaros from Italy, umeshu plum wine from Japan is our shared journey. We change our menu each year and continue to evolve what we present in subtle ways from these inspirations now that more and more of our team is involved in a collective way of thinking about the drinks we make and how we serve them.