Netflix’s Drink Masters Is a Revealing Look at Modern Bartending
One of the most emblematic scenes of Drink Masters, a cocktail-making competition series that debuted on Netflix earlier this year, could double as a cruel childhood prank on an unsuspecting palate. Into a stainless steel tabletop still went a mash of black olives—the foamy, drab gray sludge looking not unlike the burnt sugar that seeps out of a well-roasted sweet potato—and what emerged from the distillation tubes was a liquid as clear as crystal . It was the backbone ingredient to one of the most interesting cocktails made in the series: “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost,” a punch composed of rhum agricole, olive tapenade distillate, jerk spices and citrus.
Conceptualized by Tao, a Tunisian-born traveling bartender based in Montreal, the cocktail, and every shot documenting its construction, was precisely what I was hoping to see out of a competition series dedicated to the murky realms of mixology. Tao makes a fairly left-field connection based on the breadth of his globetrotting: The robust, earthy funk of olives provides structure to the similarly funky flavors of rhum agricole. “There’s no connection between olives and the Caribbean,” Tao says, albeit incorrectly, given the olive’s prominence in Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican cuisines. “There are olive notes that I personally pick up in those types of rums.”
With his wide-brimmed hats, septum piercing and a penchant for making even the wildest flavor combinations feel almost pragmatic in composition, Tao looks the part of a newborn star. That alone is noteworthy. While countless celebrity chefs have been made through televised exposure over the decades, even the best bartenders have stared through a glass darkly—their influence may cross over, but their names and visas never quite materialize in a mainstream context. Drink Masters’ contribution to modern bartending is unlikely to be its ability to churn out celebrities, or even offer an accurate depiction of the upper echelons of mixology. The question, perhaps, is whether it can give shape to the bartender as a keenly creative force, and not an object of ridicule.
“Suddenly we’re transported back to the mid-aughts, to the heart of what made the molecular mixology trend so repulsive, even though the contestants themselves have clearly moved beyond that ethos.”
Drink Masters isn’t the first drinks-based competition produced for video, but it might as well be. In 2008, Absolut sponsored a shoddy Top Chefs knockoff called On the Rocks: The Search for America’s Top Bartendersproduced by LXTV, the company responsible for those lifestyle and human interest shows that air on NBC on Saturday afternoons. It was an online exclusive back then, but if it weren’t for a trailer available on YouTube and an IMDb entry, you’d be forgiven for thinking it never happened. One of the few things Drink Masters and On the Rocks have in common is the same $100,000 grand prize, despite more than a decade of inflation and an almost incomprehensible boost in production value. Alas, in a boozy competition, it’s not the competition element that requires proof of concept, it’s the mixology.
The form of Drink Masters should register as comfort food for anyone who has watched any kind of popular food programming over the past two decades: Twelve contestants compete in various themed challenges, each with an all-but-impossible time limit. Every week, one bartender is eliminated. It is a time-tested formula, and Drink Masters succeeds because it’s based on a can’t-fail template of TV-making, combined with Papa Netflix’s arsenal of the latest high-speed imaging technology to make garnishing a cocktail look like placing the finishing strokes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
And like other Netflix reality shows (eg, The Circle), there is a notable punching bag, the contestant whose book bags to be judged by its cover—and who is swiftly eliminated as a result. It’s no big spoiler to say that the first person was eliminated on Drink Masters is an Instagram influencer. Her first drink is a Margarita inspired by the Aperol Spritz. It bores judge and renowned New York bar owner Julie Reiner to tears, but it’s crushable, because of course it is; her redemptive shot to stave off elimination is a staid variation on a Negroni, because of course it is. The first send-off serves as a sort of mission statement on what the judges are not looking for, and what the show as a whole hopes to surpass.
Yet, somehow, for all the “elevation” that the judges are seeking out of the contestants, Drink Masters feels largely paint-by-numbers, lacking the specificity of vision that some of the best cooking competition shows exude. It doesn’t showcase the heartwarming charm of human foibles like The Great British Bake Off; it doesn’t have the drama or game theory of Top
