Pour One with Lynnette Marrero

The marvelous maker and shaker shares her perspective on the evolution of mixology and how we can continue to raise the bar.

WORDS Lauren Buzzeo

Lynnette Marrero has seen some spirited things. As a decades-long bar and hospitality industry veteran, Marrero has seemingly done it all—she’s been behind the stick at some of NYC’s hottest spots, worked alongside many of mixology’s greats, opened locales of her own, consulted at others, started a female-focused spirits competition phenomenon called Speed Rack, hosted a MasterClass and created a ready-to-drink bevvie brand, Delola, with Jennifer Lopez. Yup, J. Lo.

Clearly, Marrero’s got some serious skills and knows just how to use them.

But unlike some other icons of the industry, Marrero isn’t all about Marrero. Actually, very little of it is ever just about Marrero, but more about what the bartending guru can do to give back in enduring and meaningful ways. The bartending roles, beverage director accolades and numerous industry awards are all awesomely impressive, but when you dig into what really makes Marrero tick, it all comes down to paying it forward, whether that’s through mentoring and empowering other women bartenders through the Speed Rack forum, educating future generations of mixology masters through her MasterClass series or contributions as Head of Education at Bar Convent Brooklyn, or advocating for a better, more inclusive industry nearly every chance she gets.

Marrero and her takes are the real deal, just like her drinks. We had a chance to catch up with the Speed Rack cofounder and Delola partner and chief mixologist to chat about her experiences, how she’s seen bar culture evolve and what the current beverage landscape says to her and our drinking future.

You have been in the biz in a variety of roles and capacities for decades. How have you seen bar culture evolve throughout your professional career?

It’s interesting. You see things come back, little by little, in waves and cycles. What I love to see that has perpetuated throughout the change is the community spirit, the community vibe, on really seeing, even going to smaller markets, how there is just a family vibe within the industry. And maybe that comes from, like, my circle is more focused around who the Speed Rack community is and what we’ve built together, so that stays strong, but you definitely see people investing and going into different markets and wanting to help and support each other. And I think that vibe, as opposed to like, my city versus your city, there’s more of a communal, everyone working together, and I love seeing that fluidity happen.

I think early on, it was a little bit more sectioned out, because people had their different mentors who were raising them up. And there wasn’t as much opportunity for sharing—it was like “we do it this way in New York,” “we do it this way in San Francisco,” “we do it this way in LA” and this way in Chicago, and Texas has its own thing, whereas now there’s just a beautiful sharing, and that makes our community stronger.

A lot of that seems to have been driven by mentors that really uplifted and brought people into the space to build a community of openness and accessibility, and perhaps less a call from those coming up in the industry.

Yeah, I mean, I think that was a change in the cycle, right? There was just a point of like, well, I didn’t have this information, and it’d have been really great if someone gave that to me. And that’s what I love seeing now.

It was funny, because specifically, we were in Charleston doing a demo for the new Speed Rack book [A Quick Drink: The Speed Rack Guide to Winning Cocktails for Any Mood], and one of the bartenders there, Fabiana, she had been in her own little bubble, was working and loved it, but didn’t really have a craft community until she did Speed Rack and then got really involved. And at one point she thought she was gonna leave Charleston, and now she’s actually opening her own bar there. It was one of those things where she’s like, “Oh, wait, I can change my community. I can bring it up, because this is what I’ve been shown of how I can do that.” And even with that, she called up Ivy [Mix] and was like, hey, what does it look like to go bar owner? To participate in equity? What should I be asking for?

There were times it felt like, early on, maybe people weren’t always willing to be so open about those things. No one would tell people what their day rate or range was or how to price out a consulting gig, so everyone was trying to figure it out. That wasn’t helpful. It’s like, listen, if we all just talk to each other, it’s a lot more helpful.

Making great drinks isn’t easy, and education goes a long way in this space, both for professionals as well as the at-home bartender. You do a lot of work in providing training opportunities for others—how has education come to play such a significant role in your career?

I mean, it was the foundation, you know? I was not intending to get into this world. I was doing musical theater and in the New York scene, and my whole world was doing that and studying and practicing techniques in a different way. But I think because of the education that we had when Flatiron Lounge first started, really into craft cocktails—I had a little bit of experience before that working in a wine bar and then I was a server at other places before I got to Flatiron and then Julie [Reiner] put me behind the bar—there was a bit of like, every day, I had to learn three new drinks and I had to learn why they made sense and, you know, obviously building things and dealer’s choice styles. When you’re a young bartender, it’s hard if you don’t have a deep core of classics or don’t know how to create something new, so for me, it was a lot of learning by the people I was working with.

So when MasterClass asked me to do the class, I was like, here’s all the basic things I needed to learn, and I was fortunate enough that I had people walking into my bar like Gary Regan and Dave Wondrich and Dale DeGroff and Audrey Saunders, and I could ask those questions. But there’s so many simple basics you need to know.

When I left Flatiron, and started working at Freeman’s and then started doing more restaurant bartending, that’s where I was able to take those core principles, then learn from chefs a lot of new ways to extract flavors, new flavor combinations, and layer them into the classics until I found what my voice and style for cocktails was. That was a really useful tutorial and a good pathway, like everything just built and built and built. When it was the beginning of this kind of movement, we had less things because we didn’t always have the different amari and all the different stuff that were in those old books, so we were trying to figure out what was close enough to it. We actually had to learn classics, understand the base root of what that ingredient might have been adding and then find a substitute for it. So it was a lot harder, but I love that now we can actually make these drinks the proper way.

Let’s talk Speed Rack. I’d love for you to talk about how and why you and Ivy Mix started it, and how you’ve seen that intent and impact shift over the years since its inception to what it stands for today.

It comes in different places, like what it meant to me and what it meant to Ivy were two different things.

For a small amount of time, I was a full-time brand ambassador. In 2008, I worked for Zacapa Rum full time, and I was given the list of accounts to go to. And initially, I had been going to all the bars that were people from my generation, my cohort, people I met at Flatiron who were now at Pegu Club and other bars and I realized at that point, most of the people who had gone on and done other thing were the guys. And so, there was a whole group of women in this space that I didn’t know well.

I started going to those accounts and I met Eryn Reece—she was working at the East Village bar called Louis 649—and she was working on her cocktail submission for the annual Tales of the Cocktail. And I was like, oh my goodness, she’s so talented, this is the coolest thing! Why don’t I know who she is? To me, it just was a light bulb in my head. I was like, why wouldn’t I? How did she not come into my circle in my life sooner?

And Ivy came into that with another woman named Rachel Shaw from San Francisco, who was her friend, and so we’re all doing the event, and at one point, she and Rachel were outside and there was a video series happening that they were like, oh, we need people to do this, we don’t have any women, there’s no women here. And Ivy was like, yeah, there’s literally 20 women running this entire thing, you just didn’t know. And so she and Rachel did this thing and they laughed—they were like, no one knew who we were, we weren’t named, they were just women, they were just getting tokenized to go do this video. And so they laughed, and we were like, oh, yeah, we’ll just call it speed rack and do something that’s just about women. And that’s where that spark came.

Then Ivy came back and talked to me about it a few months later, like hey, what do you think? And I’m like, yeah, let’s do a competition. And then we started building it. I’m a big fan of Food Network shows and it sounded like it needed to be built kind of like one of those Chopped kind of things, but we’ll go classic. So it’s classic recipes. And so we did the four drink rounds, and then came up with this concept of where most of the women were— most of the women were in the service bar or pushed off to the side. The famous male bartenders at the time were holding court, in the front, and so you were stuck in the position of like, I need to crank out all the drinks for this entire room. And then the three seats or four seats in front of you, in front of your service well, were like, what if the luminaries come in and sit right there, and you have to make them four drinks while then getting back to the 70, and that’s kind of how we started with the competition. So it’s literally a stage to stand on and be like, here’s what I do every day, and I’m really badass.

When you think about Speed Rack, what are you proudest of?

I mean, I think it’s the idea of the community that builds. We’ve been going for 12 years, we’re doing our first cocktail book—the fact that we’ve even gotten to that point is because of the community. We always kind of had this thing where I’m like, we would stop doing it if they no longer wanted it, right? But they keep wanting it.

Given all your varied experiences, what drove you into the maker space now with Delola?

I mean, it’s one of those things that’s super interesting. My first hand at doing any product, again, randomly came out in 2019. To create Aplós, a non-alc brand … they were like, we want to start—at first it was—a CBD-based product. And I was like, listen, I don’t know much about the cannabis space, but I do know what I want and don’t want in a non-alc. I want to make a product that’s going to have all the things I’ve been missing and what I manipulate non-alcs currently into. So creating an adult beverage was really cool. And then we’ve now expanded to non-CBD but just thinking about functionals, and so it taught me a lot about consumer culture and what drives people when they’re at home drinking …

So when another project with somebody [then unnamed] came up to me, I was like, great, I’ve already learned in a lot of ways that there’s a drink better movement, and that people want a better product—if they’re gonna buy it, they want to have it at home, they want it to not just be distilled water. This [RTD, or ready-to-drink] is a great challenge—not everyone’s gonna have the time to go buy six bottles and then have them in their house, it’s just not it. So the challenge to look at the ready-to-drink space was great. But then the vision obviously—eventually found out it was Jennifer Lopez—was that, okay, we want these to be light, refreshing, lower proof, and they have still have to have full flavor. And it fits this vibe and this lifestyle, like, specifically we want one that’s very Italian spirits, and then the other two we can be more creative with. And so it just kind of opened up a lot of the different things that I brought together, even just learning from my chef world and ingredients.

What I love is that when you look at our flavor combinations, they’re not basic. Even though they may seem to appear simple, they’re not basic, and there’s a flavor building and there’s nuance and that’s the detail. Being empowered to have that creativity was really incredible. It wasn’t like, “here’s exactly what I want, execute it.” I was actually given a lot of creative freedom. Jennifer Lopez was the best dealer’s choice. She like, here’s the kind of drink I want, and I’m like, okay, here’s some ideas.

It’s not always easy working on a celebrity-based product. How do you maintain an authentic approach and a position with the brand, inclusive of the caliber of product?

We could just pop out a product, you know? … If people want to make a bottled RTD, you can do it. But if you want to do it the right way, and you want to maintain your core values? 

For Jennifer, it’s very important to have all natural ingredients and making sure we’re using the best botanicals and not having something that was just with a bunch of filler and all of that. And that’s harder, and it takes more time for you to actually do that, right? Because you have to chase through lots of different things and getting to that process was really good, but it was important to do it the right way, not just to get it out there and without that authenticity. So I appreciate that was always the core of what the company wanted to do, make sure this is a premium product but in this accessible point for people because you shouldn’t have to only have crap, basically.

What is the most promising or exciting thing that you’re seeing in the drinks world today?

I love the fact that we can talk about cocktails in a much more sophisticated way, that we’re talking about non-alcs in a grown-up way, that there’s not this barrier to having those conversations. Consumers are more interested.