Behind the bar: identity, memory and technique in a new generation of bartenders
To understand where contemporary bartending is heading, it helps to look at some of the profiles drawing attention now: many begin with personal stories, family memories, places of origin or a single sensory impression. That does not describe the entire industry, but it does capture a clear pattern among part of the new generation behind the bar.
Génesis Gelvez, a Venezuelan bartender based in Barcelona and a mother, is one of the names worth following. In 2023, she was the first woman to win the Latin American Cocktail Championship representing Colombia. She is now bar manager at The Circle, a Barcelona cocktail bar run by an all-female team. Here, the bar is not framed as an abstract statement, but as a place where skill, leadership and point of view are expressed through service and drink design.
Her path shows how, for many bartenders today, the line between personal experience and professional practice can be thin without becoming rhetorical. Her relationship with cocktails began with a disappointment – an unbalanced drink she had as a teenager – and changed after meeting a bartender who altered the way she saw the category. From that point on, she says, she understood that a good cocktail depends on listening: understanding the person in front of you, reading preferences and guiding guests toward something they might not order on their own. It is an approach that starts with dialogue before technique.
Memories turned into recipes
This approach is not limited to Gelvez. In several of the most interesting bartenders emerging now, drinks are built from identity markers and memories that are translated into flavour: an ingredient tied to a place, an aroma from childhood, a habit observed at home, a beverage that carries a specific cultural context.
Laury Lopez Melon, who grew up in Puerto Rico, created a tequila-based drink with Malta India, a non-alcoholic malt beverage widely enjoyed on the island, together with espresso, coconut water and tamarind. The reference is not just technical: it recalls the coffee adults drank when she was a child, a world that was still out of reach. Princess Johnson placed mauby at the centre of a spirit-free cocktail, working with a Caribbean drink made from tree bark and spices that speaks directly to those who know it well, while remaining open to people encountering it for the first time.
In both cases, the point is not nostalgia. It is translation: taking elements rooted in a specific culture and making them accessible in a glass without losing their identity. That step is what turns a recipe into something more narrative, and often more memorable.
Other bartenders begin from very different sensory cues. Nikki Irvine translated the smell of wet earth after rain into a cocktail with woodsy gin, génépy and amaro, finished with a mist of absinthe. Miley Aryucharoen, at Tomat, a Los Angeles restaurant, gave leftover stilton scraps a second life in a dirty Martini finished with basil oil and Sichuan pepper tincture. Matt Huntley was inspired by the Hot and Iced Tea, a drink created at The Fat Duck in the UK, for a cocktail made with cacao-butter-washed rum, corn bourbon and a warm cornbread foam.
Technique without showmanship
What connects these profiles is not a single style, but a very deliberate use of technique. The process is never the star in itself; it is there to make an idea clearer, to give shape to a flavour or to translate an intuition into something readable in the glass.
Gelvez works in a similar way. Among her references are books about flavour combinations and perception, alongside classic bartending manuals: texts that encourage a way of thinking about taste as a language rather than a simple list of ingredients. It is a way of working that brings bartending closer to the kitchen, or at least to a form of thinking shaped by balance, context and coherence.
The same sensibility appears in cocktail programmes built around kitchen off-cuts, seasonal produce or local fruit turned into cordials. In these cases, the distance between bar and kitchen narrows not because of branding, but because the focus shifts to flavour and precision.
When Gelvez talks about her role, she uses a word that sums up this outlook: platform. The bar is not just the place where a drink is served; it can also be the place where a broader project takes shape. The Circle, with its all-female team, fits that reading as a concrete example of a bar that expresses a professional position before it expresses a symbolic one.
The advice Gelvez gives to anyone starting out is simple, but far from trivial: leave your ego at the door and share what you know. In bartending, knowledge travels faster when it moves freely.
