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Founder Dushan arrived in New York with a Degree from the University of Belgrade — which no one wanted to hear about. Desperate for work, he picked up anything he could find. After a stint as a doorman at a strip-joint in Brooklyn and several moving gigs, he landed a job behind the bar in Queens. 4,608 Followers, 823 Following, 278 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Dushan Zaric (@dushanzaric). The Gang In 2004, Dushan, Henry, Igor, Jay and Billy set out together to create a local bar with a focus on elevating the craft of the cocktail. Their hard work and creativity resulted in a new experience where one could enjoy the best drinks and delicious food, all served in a beautiful space without pretense. Dushan Zaric, based in Los Angeles, is best known as a co-owner of Employees Only, which now has locations in Singapore, Miami, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Sydney. Experience Zaric has more than 20 years of experience as a bartender and 15 years as a cocktail consultant.

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By now it's fairly clear that the modern speakeasy has become its own antithesis. These dark, precise concepts, like the famed Death & Co. in New York City's West Village or Employees Only in the East Village, have garnered the most attention worldwide, not the least.

The latter of the two, Employees Only, is the project of Dushan Zaric. Both the man and the bar are legendary at this point in the cocktail story. Employees Only has won some serious awards, including Best Cocktail Bar in 2008 from New York Magazine, and Best Cocktail List and World's Best Cocktail Bar at New Orlean's annual Tales of the Cocktail (a major award celebration in the field) in 2011. In short, this place is as good as it gets.

In addition to co-writing two successful book on the trade, Zaric's latest endeavor is as co-owner of The 86 Co., which works with well-established master distillers to create spirits (tequila, rum, gin, and vodka) that intend to 'showcase the bartender.' The flavor dial is, by design, turned up to 10 — setting bartenders free to use some spirits that, frankly, were never intended to be mixed in cocktails at all.

On Sunday, July 26, Zaric will be slinging dinnertime cocktails from 6 to 8 p.m. at The Upton in Scottsdale. Some cocktails will be made specifically for the evening and following week using his product line. The lineup includes the Bashful Maiden made with gin, falernum, elderflower, lemon juice and cantaloupe puree.

'We're really wanting to be a neighborhood spot, so we're doing something during the summertime that should be really exciting,' said Sean Zimmerman, co-owner of The Upton. 'Nothing too over-the-top, just a really nice time for the locals. And, since we're a really small space, you'll get to interact with Dushan and just enjoy the evening.'

Earlier this week, we got to chat with Zaric about his spirit line and his upcoming cocktail dinner with The Upton.

How are you liking living in Los Angeles?

I’m loving it, I have to say. After 17 years of living in New York this is quite a beautiful change. The weather is predictable, the women are gorgeous, and I live a much healthier lifestyle, I have to say.

It does seem like a lot of people go out there for those reasons.

Yeah, and it’s not like I was really set out to just becoming healthier, but it just sort of happened quite naturally. You just take advantage of all of this nature around you and you go explore. It’s good.

What else is keeping you busy in L.A.?

Well being a co-founder of 86 & Co., I’m in charge of all of the West Coast markets, and Nevada, Arizona, and in the future hopefully Hawaii, too. That would be nice.

Dushan Zaric

That would be nice... From reading up on the spirit line, and having seen Andrew Knowlton’s review in Bon Appétit a while back, the takeaway seems to be that your spirit line is built by bartenders to meet the needs of bartenders: more flavor, more control over drink building, better ergonomics. Why haven’t spirit companies consulted bartenders to this degree in the past?

They did. They did but they never listened. They did. That’s why we would get so frustrated. They’d always include us in the focus groups and to help build the aesthetic, but at the end of the day it was always the marketing team that convinced the producers that consumer appeal is much more important than the professional trade appeal. And you know what? The professional bartenders of today are not the one’s from 10 or 15 years ago. We are a force now. We create trends and we bring trends into life. We can dictate the gastronomical experience as much as the chef does. So it was about time that somebody recognized the need of the professionals.

So who better to do that than the bartenders, and we didn’t do this by ourselves, obviously. We enlisted the help of nearly 250 bartenders to contribute and we set out to find the best distillers who could do these products with us from scratch. We knew we didn’t want to buy somebody’s overstock and slap a label on it. That’s not the point. The point is to create new spirits so that they function as liquid tools, or cocktail components. And when a master distiller creates a spirit, for them, when it’s distilled or aged or whatever, it’s the best it’s ever going to be. But bartenders look at spirits in a different way. We look at them as possible cocktail components or not. And when a spirit works it’s a coincidence, generally. It was never intended to be used that way.

So we wanted to be the first to intend to do that. To really play well with others. And I have to tell you I’m really happy that we achieved that. Bartenders are really our biggest supporters and fans, and precisely for the reason we intended. And with the way that cocktail culture is gaining momentum, purchases intended for bar usage just have to be becoming a bigger and bigger portion of the sales for these spirit companies, right?

You know, it is. We’re sticking to that and that’s also why we created the ergonomic design of the bottle, from scratch as well, for the professional. Like, the bottle is a tool itself, and the spirit is a tool of course, and then on top of that we give you a lot of information about the product that’s printed directly on the label, which becomes another tool. Because when the bartender has useful and relevant information about the spirit and they know how it was made, they can then relay that to the guests, who can then identify with the product and with the story, and with the professionality of the bartender. And then you have a true hospitality experience.

From your experience with the spirit line, what are some cocktails, classic or not, that really benefit from these exaggerated flavor profiles?

Well, you know, that’s a great question. It’s a tool, and it was designed to showcase you as a bartender. You can think of it as an electric guitar. You know, it can sounds like BB King is playing it, or it can sounds like fucking Angus Young is playing it. You know, you give it to the bartender, it’s still the same guitar, it’s the same bottle, but they can produce any sounds they want with it.

But the volume is turned up.

I really like to make that analogy. It really showcases the versatility available. They were really designed in the development stage to really work with certain groups of cocktails. With the rum, for instance, with every batch we made I had to make daiquiris right there on the spot, because we had to make sure it performed with the simplest of drinks. You know, with the daiquiri you have your sweet, you sour, and your strong, and those simplest drinks can come out full, complex, beautiful, so that you can rediscover it with every sip. Then, you can do all sorts of things with it. And then the more complexity will just be better, you know?

And with the gin we really wanted to cater to bartenders specifically. They needed a gin that could go well with all of the classic gin cocktails equally well. When you look at the great gin houses, they all really make one gin cocktail really well. For example. the gins with higher juniper content make great martinis, and the ones with lower juniper content make excellent negronis. So the bartenders asked for a gin that could work equally well with lemon or lime juice, which when you test all of the good gins, none of them really do both. So we had to do that, which was a challenge. We focused on gimlets, the Tom Collins, the negroni, and the martini. With the tequila, it was the of course the margarita and the paloma. And for the vodka, we had to just make sure the vodka paired well with food.

Yeah so was that tough, then, making the vodka? Because to the general public that’s almost a spirit that’s known for its lack of flavor, and that’s where it’s usefulness lies most often, it seems.

Yeah, no, that’s a misconception I think. That’s what the marketing teams want us to believe, I think, that vodka is better if it tastes like nothing, or that it’s just cold water with a kick. But that’s not what vodka traditionally is.

What do you look for out of a great vodka?

Grain. I look for the taste of grain. And I look for a lack of charcoal vodka, which ends up removing all of the flavor and ends up tasting like ethanol. I worked at a restaurant in the 90’s where I had to learn about vodka. I had to learn all about vodka. Vodka was, and few people know this in the West, developed as a food spirit. It was never intended to go into cocktails. It developed with the cuisines of the countries pairing it with the food. And it really works if it’s enhancing the flavor of the food you are eating, but if it’s just numbing your tongue then it doesn’t really work out. It’s not a good vodka.

So speaking of pairing alcohol with food, how do you go about pairing cocktails with food? Is there a progression or a pattern?

You know, I’m desperately classic in that respect. More European, if you will. I do not pair cocktails with food. I think that’s why we have wine. But with appetizers, I certainly like to pair aperitif cocktails or just the spirits themselves, neat. Like vodka (laughs). Tequila.

What can we expect then for the dinner Sunday?

Well, we will just be making cocktails, having fun. There will be no kind of formal pacing going on. We will probably go through the basics of the 86 & Co. portfolio and then we’ll just kind of open it up and bang out some drinks.

Good, sounds like fun. One more question: we’ve talked about ergonomic designs and spirit lines like yours really catering to the bartender so that they can have more control, but what’s the evolution for bartenders, or the next step? What’s going on out there?

Well, you know, and please don’t hold it against me, but I don’t think anyone truly knows where we are going. I could sit here and philosophize, but if someone told be 10 years ago I’d be able to sip on some cocktails that taste like liquid bliss, you know, and that bartender would start using all of these techniques and procedures, bars like The Aviary, or that people who barrel age cocktails would then have them on tap, ready to drink, or that there would be mass-production of bartenders bitters and homemade ingredients — I just think bartenders will continue to develop the craft in every way. And there are a lot of facets you hear more talk of these days, like of hospitality, and I think that’s a beautiful thing and certainly in line with our lineage. And, you know, you never know. But if we can judge by the past then we are in for a hell of a ride.

Dushan Zaric Wiki

You can catch Zaric at The Upton in Scottsdale this Sunday, July 26 from 6 to 8 p.m. Reservations are required and can be made online or by calling 480-991-6887.

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Originally from: Yugoslavia
Profession: Bartender
At: New York

The Employees Only co-owner won the Green Card lottery and left war-torn Yugoslavia in 1996 for New York, arriving with $2000 and little else. Some 15 years on, Employees Only was named World's Best Cocktail Bar at Tales of the Cocktail in 2011. How'd that happen, then?

It was an inauspicious start to a new life. Dushan Zaric's first job in the Land Of The Free was as a bouncer at a strip club in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. He landed the position courtesy of some dubious connections with Serbian criminals that knew the club's Russian owners. Wearing a tuxedo, it was his job to maintain order in the club and, at 4am every morning, drive the strippers home.

'That kind of ruined it for me. Some of them were seriously disturbed or addicts and some would have their kids with them in their dressing rooms. I was asking myself if I was on the right track. It was very hard.'

Still, it was better than the alternative. The bitter ethnic conflicts that epitomised the Yugoslav wars of the early-1990s, ended with the creation of three new nation states but their starting point was a decimated populace, with millions displaced, a battered geography and fledgling economies.

'It was unimaginable. I had seen the war and it was unbelievable how people could turn against their neighbours. A lot of my friends died - from all three nationalities. I'm Serbian but I had Croatian and Bosnian friends.'

He knew the consequences if he had joined the fighting. 'I was lucky to be able to have a wise father who told me not to respond to the call-up,' says Dushan. They called but I didn't go. Luckily, it was all so disorganised so if you didn't answer your call no-one would really look for you.'

Summer in the City

Dushan had other ideas. Before the war, he had been in a band and the prospect of trying to kick-start their lives in the post-war environment wasn't just appealing, it was unrealistic when people were just focused on surviving. 'We had had two records out before the war, but now there were no resources and I was ready for a new life. My girlfriend went to New York and went in for the green card lottery, and applied on my behalf. And we got selected - less than one per cent of US immigration comes from the lottery, but we were chosen.'

One of his fellow band members was already in America, and he picked Dushan, now 26, up from JFK in a beaten-up Volvo station wagon. 'You could see the street through the floor. It was humid and hot, and he had the radio on. Van Halen came on and he turned to me, grinning: 'Welcome to America'.'

He might have been starting a new life, but the going is tough for immigrants - no-one to fall back on, few friends, no family, no history, but Dushan managed to eek out a living at the strip club. Living in Queens he had to take three trains to get to the southernmost part of Brooklyn. Was this how the American dream is meant to be? The wealth and glamour of Manhattan seemed as far away as ever. Ironically, it was in one of the island's more salubrious parts that the next part of Dushan's destiny would play out.

'After a while I met a bartender who was working in the Upper East Side at an Italian restaurant. He said there were all these very wealthy American customers with a bunch of French and Italian restaurants. He said I should give it a try, that there were good cash tips.'

From Pravda to Lot 61

Up to this point, Dushan's bar experience had been on the Greek islands in his college summer holidays, pulling pints and serving shots of mixto tequila. 'So I really didn't know anything. I needed to learn, and my Albanian friend - they posed as Italians at the restaurant - agreed to train me, though they wouldn't hire me as they only hired girls. So I would drive the strippers home at 4am, grab a few hours sleep and then go train as a bartender at 9am.'

Welcome to America? Welcome to the world of Bay Breezes, Cosmos and Kamikazes, of Grasshoppers and Rusty Nails. He had no money at all for socialising, but one night, pooling dollars with a friend, they decided they would check out the city's hottest night spot (their $40 got them two beers, plus tip). Pravda was an underground caviar and cocktails bar that boasted a line around the block, a beautiful clientele and, the thing that Dushan was suddenly more interested in, a fresh juice beverage programme with drinks served by bartenders in white uniforms. The Rainbow Room, pioneer of Dale DeGroff's own fresh juice programme, had closed already and Pravda's approach to drinks and service came as a revelation to Dushan. 'That was really the point at which I realised I could make this a career. It was hottest place for years.'

Now he was on the bartending grapevine, Dushan's big break came in 1997 when the jungle drums beat for the opening of Amy Sacco's Lot 61, a trendy bar renowned for its modern art - so you could have Daiquiris with Damien Hirst, so to speak - and attracting an A-list crowd. He was finally able to quit his job as a bouncer.

'I was hired to be a waiter, but it turned out the bar staff she hired were fired they were stealing their asses off, so suddenly I was bar-backing and bartending at the same time. Because of my training, the bar fell on my shoulders and I was quickly asked to become bar manager.

'One night, Amy was booked by Giorgio Armani for a party where there were 600 celebrities. His designers redecorated the place to his specification and the next thing I knew there was Liz Taylor, Robert De Niro and Bruce Willis asking for drinks. Bruce tipped me $50 for a vodka on the rocks. It was a real wow moment. I regularly walked home with $400-500 in tips.'

Meeting Yoda

From war-torn Serbia to this, Dushan was experiencing total culture shock, and sometimes the contrasts were manifest. 'It was a time when our Wall Street customers were doing loads of blow - everyone was skiing in New York. There was even a special ledge in the bathrooms.'

This being the mid-90s, regular people were drinking one thing, and one thing only: vodka. Rappers were drinking cognac and coke. Single malts were 'window dressing' and as for gin: 'I never made a gin drink in those days.'

But as he began to understand the intricacies of bartending, essentially becoming more and more familiar with the classics and classic style, Lot 61 began to bore Dushan and, having been badgering the GM at Pravda for a job, increased his efforts to score a position back there. Four months later: success. 'Peter McNally [restaurateur Keith's brother] called and asked if I wanted the job. I called Amy and she was really supportive. She knew I would learn a lot from the most influential operators in the city. They had recently hired Dale DeGroff to train us and to this day I still regard him as my Yoda. It's almost like a spiritual thing going on.

With Dale training us and learning about the lineage of bartending, learning not just about drinks and service but how the best bartenders started as bar-backs and worked their way up, it became a legitimate professional in my mind.' With that philosophy, Dushan would rise to become group head bartender across all the McNally's restaurants.

Becoming a seasoned service industry worker, it was while he was at Pravda that Dushan uncovered a harsh truth about the industry - all those late nights make it hard to maintain a social life of your own, particularly after 9/11, when venues would close early and the atmosphere was generally very subdued. Amid this atmosphere in late 2003, while they worked at Pravda, Dushan and several co-workers, including Jason Kosmos, Igor Hadzismajlovic, Billy Gilroy and Henry LaFargue - the latter a veteran McNally employee), figured out there was a gap in the market and that they could conceive, build and operate a bar for bartenders, waiters and other industry workers - a bar that would open and close later than the rest. They worked for a year conceptualising everything.

The perfect bar?

On 5 December 2004, 71 years to the day after the repeal of Prohibition, Employees Only opened in the Village, just at the right time to become part of the new booming renaissance in cocktail culture. Milk & Honey had already opened and Julie Reiner had opened Flatiron Lounge a month before. Employees Only sported a sweeping bar designed so that anyone sitting at it could see everyone else there - this was designed to be a truly social affair. The team lucked out when the Daily Candy website wrote a glowing report on the first day, describing it as the perfect bar, and it's been busy practically ever since.

A novel aspect of the operation was EO's team of resident psychics - the neon light advertising their presence has a pseudo-speakeasy theme about it. So what did they see for the bar's future in their crystal balls? 'Ha, everybody was saying different things. We started with three psychics, though we have only one now. One of them said that by 2009 we would be millionaires, and although I can tell you now that we are busier than we ever were, that totally hasn't happened - at least yet.'

In the meantime, Employees Only has previously been rated as the highest grossing cocktail bar per square foot in the US - despite it occupying only 1,600 square feet, its barmen make 138,000 cocktails per year, a figure independently corroborated by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, not including spirit/mixer serves. On the menu, just as many wines as cocktails, which fall into the classic and classic-inspired school, with a focus on good quality ingredients and enough homemade stuff to look interesting. Bartenders go through two-year apprenticeship programmes. Fundamentally, it's about having a good drink that you don't have to wait ages for. Dinner's available until 3.30am for hungry workers after their shift.

Rock 'n' Roll

On our own visits to New York, Employees Only is distinguishable for one particular thing: sure, the drinks are good, the service is spot on, but mostly, it's about the atmosphere, a relaxed sense where nothing is taken too seriously, of a sense of fun that you don't necessarily get in spades at other more hushed or hallowed cocktail venues. It's an attitude that's led by Dushan himself, he the possessor of the world's biggest smile. 'If Milk & Honey is jazz, we are more like a rock 'n' roll band,' he explains. 'For me it's about being comfortable, classy and fun.'

It's a formula which won the bar its Tales of the Cocktail accolade last year as World's Best Cocktail Bar, beating off stiff competition from 69, Colebrooke Row in London, Barcelona's Dry Martini and Tokyo's Bar High Five, and won the Word's Best Drinks Selection category. It was also shortlisted for Best American Cocktail Bar, Dushan himself was shortlisted as Best Bar Mentor, and his book, Speakeasy, written with Jason Kosmas (the foreword written by 'Yoda'/Dale), was shortlisted in the Best New Book category.

Nearly ten years on, Dushan is rightly regarded as something of a veteran of the Manhattan bar scene. He's seen it change along with himself, so there's a chance to ask some searching questions: Is there a typical New York bartender? 'Yes,' he says, 'but it depends when. When I started there was the typical '90s failed actors with gelled hair. I knew a lot of them. By the 2000s we were slowly starting to get the professional bartender, with waxed moustaches and suspenders. Now that's all over the place and the new thing is about getting excited about obscure ingredients.

'I'm blown away by the creatively educated, smart people with college degrees that bartending now attracts. It's really refreshing to see the trade evolving so beautifully.'

What's the new generation good - and bad - at? 'They're really good at the theoretical knowledge, they read all the right books, they play with techniques. What they're lacking in is basic mileage behind the bar, and mostly they are lacking senior co-workers who have a lot of mileage themselves that they can learn from by example.'

What are the skills required for success today then? 'I've never seen anyone more humble than the greatest bartenders. Jim Meehan at PDT is about the most exceptional and most humble bartender I know and that says it all. Most of the kids coming through forget about humility and hospitality as the foundations for your job. It should be all about the guest: as long as they are sitting down and we are standing up it's what they say that goes and making them happy that counts. That's something I learned way back in Greece.

'Don't assume they want to know about cocktail culture and don't force your knowledge on them - it's your job to provide an environment where they become intrigued and ask you for your guidance.'

A growing empire

This all sounds strangely familiar, and Dushan acknowledges that he follows the Gaz Regan school of 'mindful bartending'. 'It's about taking the chance to learn, enrich and open yourself up. Happy bartenders make happy drinks and make more money. When you are content and don't want things to change, your service and attitude won't be angry or sarcastic or annoyed. The difference is felt at the ends of the night when you look at the takings.

An equally successful second bar concept in the shape of Macao Trading Company emerged in Tribeca in 2008. Fronted by a red light on the street, it boasts two floors of Portuguese/oriental escapism complete with a basement speakeasy in the vein of an illicit opium den/brothel.

Dushan, now 42, faces the prospect of spinning off his brands into something bigger. In fact, Dushan's about to become a national - and possibly international - phenomenon.

'We are about to start work on Macao Los Angeles, maybe this year, and if not, 2013 - my wife and I have been planning to move to southern California for some time. We're working on a location for Employees Only in Las Vegas and we've also had talks about opening Employees Only in Singapore.'

Next up is a line in premium well spirits - under the name Company 86 Noise and Spirits Company - '86' being the idiom for 'no-longer available'. It is launching a vodka, rum, gin and tequila in litre packages designed to sit in speed wells. First up is Aylesbury Duck vodka, made with Canadian winter wheat. Next will be Ford's Gin made with the help of Pernod Ricard's Simon Ford, to be made by Thames Distillers. Cana y Brava 'wild cane' rum, grown in Panama, with an iron-rich soil will then follow with No Mames, a 100 per cent agave blanco tequila.

Quite the entrepreneur, Dushan's mini empire might not be the rock 'n' roll lifestyle he wanted as an idealistic youngster, but then again it's definitely not the lifestyle he would have led if he had not left Yugoslavia, and he's certainly not complaining. 'I am profoundly grateful for all the opportunities I have had. You come from Europe, so you've got this emotional separation, and you've come from an environment when people are still dying of ignorance and hatred, and a few months later I was face-to-face with film stars.

'The war forced me to look for another outlet for my life: I couldn't have picked a better one.'