E165 Jonathan Mateer

This week's guest is Jonathan Mater, who joins us from St. Augustine, Florida. John is currently the beverage manager at TPC Sograss with the PGA Tour. John has worked in numerous bars and restaurants across the country over the last decade plus, and he places a major focus on craft cocktails.

John has also been selected as a top 100 bartender in the United States by the Agile World Class in 2022 and 2023, and he also claimed the title of US National Champion of the Jafarred West Cup and traveled to France to compete in the finals. In a spare time, John hosts a podcast called Bard Tenders that has a focus on the hospitality industry. Bard Tenders, that is B-A-R-D-T-E-N-D-E-R-S, is very unique as the hosts incorporate playing Dungeons & Dragons in mix and interviews, education and anti-notes on the hospitality industry during the show. Make sure you check out Bard Tenders wherever you get your podcasts or check out the show notes for the links.

Enjoy the show. Okay, we're back with another episode of the industry podcast. My name is Kip. This is Dan.

How is it going? All right, all right. Thanks. How about you?

How are things going with you? Doing good, doing good. Seems like we've been recording in a while, so apologies to our listeners because we've had some issues with travel, COVID. So we've had some flakeouts.

All the things that caused us to not record, but we are back. Yeah, back in the life now. Somehow. So yeah, great to be recording again.

You've got COVID, now you're over it, so you feel better? More or less, we want better now than it was, but a week ago, that's for sure. And you got it in Colorado. Yeah, thanks, America.

Perfect. Yeah, as you might have thought of it from my boss, who is from Europe, while he was in Colorado. So fuck them too. All right.

Well, yeah. So since we've last recorded, you've been to Colorado. Yeah, I went to, yeah, I actually, yeah, I was in Denver for a couple of days. They're a boulder for a bunch.

So while in Denver for a couple of days, I went to that River North district. And that was a lot of fun. I tried to drink all the beer in Colorado and I think I may have succeeded on the Friday. Good job.

Yeah, there's nothing left in the entire state. We dry after I was done. It was a great time with just all these small breweries and distilleries. I just got to pop from one to the other drink as much as I could.

That was a good time. And then Saturday to the cocktail tours. I started off with Deathico, which was terrific. You could tie into our guest who's going to be joining us shortly.

Yeah, that was awesome. I got a great, it was packed by the time I was by myself. I came in, they said, oh, we got to see just for you. So I got the cooler seat at the bar.

We got the same thing going on behind the bar. All the guests are super cool. I had a lot of cocktails while I was there. Nice.

Yeah. I don't know how I walked out of there. But I did continue to my more cocktails, more wine bar tour of Denver. It was fun.

All right. Well, sounds like a good time except for the COVID. Yeah. Okay.

Well, it ties into our guest today. John's material is going to be joining us in just a minute or so. He also worked at Doesn't Go in Denver. So that's exciting.

I think he was actually helped open it. So we'll bring him in shortly. Before we get to him, we should mention that if you like what we're doing here on the show, you should subscribe, rate and review. It helps out tremendously.

Zach Hannah at Zachana dot CO does the artwork for the Instagram and check out all his work. If you have any graphic arts needs and then if you're in the kitchen or what are you going to go to my bars, there's sugar on downtown Kitchener that's at sugar on bar on Instagram to find out all the things that are going on there at Babylon Sisters bar to find out what's going on in Babylon Sisters in uptown Waterloo and at our dial underscore arms underscore 2023 to find out what's going on at the R.L. Arms in Cambridge, Ontario. We have trivia nights.

We have music bingo. We have live music always something going on every night at that bar. And yeah, I guess that's about it. We just get ready to our guest.

We sure John's a material. Thanks for joining us on the industry podcast. How are you? Hey, doing really well and doing nice rainy Monday here at Florida.

Right. So yeah, we were talking briefly before you we started recording. You are coming to us. It was a part of Florida.

Same magazine. So just out of Jacksonville. So set of just of the Jacksonville and you are sort of based out of TPC Sogras, but you are the beverage director for the PGA tour and all the Florida events. Yeah, I run some golf tournaments.

The big ones, the players, it's the, you know, the fifth unofficial, you know, largest tournament. But we have, you know, 60,000 people that come in for the weekend and have a great time. That's crazy. So talk to me about like organization that goes behind something like that.

Like when you say you have beverage director, are there like future cocktails for the tournament? Like what are we talking about? Absolutely. So as far as the golf course goes, we have two golf courses, we have activation spread out across the entire golf course.

So there is way more than just myself that's involved with any of those things. You could couldn't do that by yourself. You'd be crazy. So there's a full support team beverage staff that comes with the entire TPC network, which is really great.

For me specifically though, we have a VIP area, which we call like the goat lounge because they're just the original greenskeepers of the course. Obviously that doesn't work out when goats jump on golf or golf guards and they're messing up your strokes and everything. It's a really, that was what we pay homage to them. So I run the IP area called the goat lounge where we have eight different bars.

We do a VIP appearance. I mean, last year we flew in a 500 pound tuna off the coast of Spain the day before we're doing like I'd be right up big shave right there for everything. But as far as cocktails go, they take the handcuffs off. We get as crazy as we want.

I think this year a little sneak peek. We're doing like fried chicken infused whiskey is like a Nashville hot chicken sour. They get like ramen, ramen cups and like go into town. So we have a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's crazy. Well, let's start here. You all you do you handle all of the golf tournaments for the PGA that happened in Florida? So I traveled to a couple of the ones, but my main focus is working with the players, the large tournament here.

And it's the one that pretty much kicks off like majority of the PGA tortillas. Right. So that's crazy. I can't even imagine how much work goes into organizing that whole event, but give us a little bit maybe of your like it.

Like what's going on say for you on the Thursday of the tournament? So that is like we are in thick of it. So essentially, whatever you start running like this large tournament, it happens every March. My meetings start planning at the end of April for the following year because you have to have an incredible run time to set up something like that.

That's so massive. But by Thursday, we've already brought in all of our 10 staff, which is around like 200 to 250 people that are helping out from the kitchen to the bars to serving helping guests in and out of their cars all the way through it. By Thursday, we've done friends and family Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or the practice rounds. The players start showing up.

They're out there on the course by Thursday. We are rocking and rolling at five o'clock in the morning getting ready to get breakfast ready for all the players and their families. And then the guests start showing up at seven and we are nonstop until 30 minutes after last but that's crazy. That's a much we such a long day.

Like what's your average? Say it was a like during the actual days of the tournament. What how many hours are you working? Usually show up around like four 30 in the morning to start getting ready for the day or like beginning prep people are there probably like two 30 in the morning because they have to start with cooking and everything.

But I get there on four 30 and I usually leave around like nine or 10 p.m. Oh, it's crazy long days. It's worth it. It's so cool.

Yeah. And like so when you say that the gloves are obviously you can pretty much do whatever you want cocktail wise. How do you try and come up with your concepts for a cocktail for a golf tournament? Like do you have specific themes in mind when you started out?

Obviously you have about a year to plan. So yeah, you have plenty of time. I travel as much as I can. I go to events like tells the cocktail and bar content Brooklyn or events like Campiran, Maken, Kentucky where I meet with other bartenders from all over the world and just pick each other's brains.

I mean, that's what we do. We sit down. We talk. We have a drink and like, Hey, what are you doing?

Oh, you're doing you know, gin, sour and little mini bathtubs. That sounds fun. Let's do that in Florida. Right.

So you start picking the brains of other people because other people essentially pay for the way for you. You don't have to do it all by yourself, but that's where it comes from. Yeah, that's crazy. So how did you get like, how did you get this gig?

Let's back up a little bit in your career. Like, because it seems like it was cool to get to talk to you because like we talked to people from all over the world doing different kind of gigs, but I've never and we talked I think the closest and then we talked to the guy who ran Rigley Fields cocktail program. Yeah. Hugo Gambino.

I believe that's the one. Yeah. So that's like kind of the closest one in proximity to sort of what you're doing there. But I'm just wondering just how do you get into that job?

Like I know you started in Denver or? Yeah. I've been bartending for about 13 years now. I've kind of run the whole gambit from working in private little clubs like Elks, Lodges and VFWs or American Foreign Legion type things started there, work my way into college bars, do some high volume bartending.

And then I found cocktails and fell in love with the creative freedom in the process, make my way to Deaf and Co. We tell that story later. It's a good one. Basically, COVID kind of hit and shook everything up.

You took the beehive of bartenders and we all went different places. But my wife and I decided we wanted to be closer to family. So we moved to Florida. Her family's about an hour and a half away.

We love St. Augustine. We used to vacation there and we're like, if we're going to move, let's let's go somewhere. We love.

So we're here and I just kind of fell into a couple of local bars, but they weren't really 100% the right fit. They're awesome locations, but it wasn't right for me. So I was getting up every single morning at like 7 a.m. and I was like, this is for Josh.

What can we do? Who's out there? And I saw them post the job for the TPC Sawgrass every manager. And I was like, let's see what happens.

Yeah. I got a phone call like half an hour later. And I'm like, hey, come for an interview. I was like, let's do it.

Absolutely. Hold on. Interviewed with them to the right place, right time. Amazing people, great personalities, you know, like great work culture.

I love it. That's crazy. I love hearing those stories too, because you feel like that would be possible fucking job to get. Obviously you had a pretty good resume, but like, but just the fact that you just moved down there and like after however much time you're next thing you're doing you're the beverage director for the TPC Sawgrass.

That's incredible. Like, yeah, I'm very, I mean, a lot of terrible things happen with COVID, but a lot of great things happen to it. And it opened up so many doors for so many different people, especially in hospitality world. And like I said, right place, right time, you know, a bunch of people left.

They moved on to retired and all of a sudden there's nobody. Yeah, it's interesting because we talked obviously so many people throughout the like this podcast basically started what at the beginning of COVID, right? Beginning of the pandemic. I'm very close to when the first lockdown started happening and just seeing, talking to so many people in the service industry and how their lives changed during the last couple of years and so many stories about like pivoting to doing online stores or becoming Instagram bartenders or whatever.

But the other side of this is sometimes people just fucking get up and move. Yeah. Denver is really expensive. I know you were just there.

That is not a cheap city to live in. And COVID was not friendly to industry. So, you know, we packed it up and we moved. Yeah, I took everybody about a homeless.

I saw that guy. I can totally see that. It's just happened sometimes in growing cities. Yeah, that's too bad.

Do you, okay. So do you grow up in the Colorado area? No, I grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania called the Indiana P.A. Small little like Division II college town, you know, maybe maybe 10,000 people max.

Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about how you got into the service industry and how you ended up in Denver. Yeah, absolutely. So once a college was a history major, so very lucrative.

Yeah. Yeah. Like many people that were liberal arts, I decided that I didn't have any career plans. I thought I was going to do, but I went to college and I knew how to drink and I knew how to have fun with friends.

Yeah. Let's bartend. Let's bartend for a year. Let's see what happens.

This sounds familiar. I feel like there's a lot of people out there. So I started bartending like a bowling alley where I had to like manually reset the pins every day. I think I will never again, but I learned a lot.

But you know, all that while I started applying to like graduate school, going to law school, I was kind of the goal after history major and got into the University of Florida and packed everything I owned and moved down to Gainesville, Florida and got through two, three years of school and decided, I don't like this at all. Why am I doing this? And I was working at a cocktail bar and I was like, you know what? Let's just make a run.

Like, let's just go for it. Let's see what happens and pretty much have fallen in love with the industry ever since. And so how do you get the Denver? Okay.

So I'm working at this college bar in Gainesville, Florida, good place to be right across from the football stadium, massive, massive restaurant. Got a lot of experience there, but I saw a death and go was hiring and I was like, I've read the book. It was the first cocktail book I ever read. I was like, the worst they can say is no.

And the answer is always no unless you ask. Right. So I applied and immediately got a rejection letter, like, absolutely not. We're only hiring local.

And I said, okay, well, I know somebody who lives in Colorado, let's steal their address. So I steal my business and submit the exact same application and resume, get a call and they're like, hey, can you come out and interview tomorrow? We have like two positions left in the building and I was like, cool. I'm in.

So I got on a plane and flew to Denver, Colorado, interviewed the next day. The only position I had at the time was a food runner position and I said, sure, let's do it. See what happens. Like, can you start in a month?

And I was like, absolutely. My, my then girlfriend now wife, we packed up everything and we moved to Denver, Colorado and started working for Deaf and go. What the fuck? And so your girlfriend was totally willing to take this jump with you.

Like that's pretty. And she ended up getting the other job that they had. Oh, okay. We both ended up working from them and got the last two positions they had for the opening of death and code.

Denver. That's crazy. That is a crazy story. So I'm actually kind of curious as why they give a fuck if you're local, like, if you're willing to commute or like if you're willing to move, what do they care?

So I understand the tactic. They had opened their first spot, you know, 10 years prior in New York City. This is their first time that they're putting another brick and mortar, you know, death at a location and they want to make sure that, you know, they're doing it right. They're paying, you know, the grande, grande, the local industry and bringing in people that are one talented, but who already have connections in the town.

You know, already have to build your clientele. You don't have to build regulars. You don't have to build as much trust because you have the people that are there already with their feet on the ground. Right.

I guess that makes sense. Yeah. At least you have people who have friends that they will come and visit them or whatever. Right.

Absolutely. So that's still a pretty big leap for you guys. I mean, whatever, if you were done with school, you're done with the school, but like to move across the country to take a food runner and host this job. I mean, it's a leap of faith, you know, sometimes it works out.

I could fall and flat on my face at any point. Yeah. It was hard to find somewhere to live. Oh, absolutely.

We crashed on our friends couch for like a week or two, found a spot. We, you know, like 30 minutes from working in the river North district and it wasn't too bad. Had our cars. So it really wasn't that awful.

Yeah. Having the cars makes a big difference. Yeah, absolutely. That's crazy.

So okay. So you get this job food running and like that's obviously not paying a massive. So neither is hosting. So you guys are getting by and but like you stick with it.

At what point do you like what was the process? Are you moving up? Like did you have to do a number of jobs there? So within like the first month or two, they provided us all with roadmaps of like how do you move yourself up with a company?

How do you get to the next step? It's a self-guided process with books, movies, cocktail classes, everything along the way that you would back from the world class bar. And they're like, this usually takes people like a year to do and I was like, okay, one fresh out of grad school. I'm going to complete it in like a couple weeks.

So I finished their bartender road map in like three or four weeks and they're like, well, I don't know what to do with you. So we're going to be able to bar back now. And so I moved up into bar backing within like a month or two of the opening from there was like another month or two and then I actually started bartending with them. So it really was a very fast transition, but that happens when you open restaurants.

There's always turnover. It doesn't matter what the restaurant is the opportunity exists. And for my wife, she went from hostess to lead hostess within a week or two and then they actually promoted her to the best manager. So she started running our events programs as well.

That's crazy. Well, that's a great success story because that could have gone really bad. But you can pitch an attempt on Broadway down there. All the shelters I want.

That's crazy. So so we interviewed Alex jump who was one of the women who opened that place. So you worked under her at the beginning? Absolutely.

She was she was lead bartender for a little bit and then they promoted her to full on bar manager and she was she was bar mom. She got so much. You know, she guided us really entire process. Absolutely love everything she did then and love what she's doing now with the industry too.

Yeah, great lady. So you also did you start entering competitions some point? I know you received awards like one D. I was top bartenders.

Is that accurate? Yeah, I've been doing competitions off and on over the last decade, you know, like a bunch of local ones when I was in Florida. And then, you know, as you keep doing it, you know, you kind of naturally move out of local competitions because you want other people to have those opportunities and you start doing some of the national ones. I was very fortunate last year to be the US champion for the catholic.

I got the flag of France to compete out there. It was really neat. And in the last two years, I was very lucky to be top 100 for the Azure world class as well. That's crazy.

Yeah. That's I mean, that's very impressive. Congratulations. So I learned from a lot of good people that like, you know, that was very fortunate that I didn't fall flat on my face and I got to be around all those amazing people, you know, in Denver that taught me a lot.

What's your favorite competition that you've entered? Oh, it was an one competition. There was a local one where you had to team up with another bartender and do a roller skate bartending like dance competition. I was like, so you think you can skate and me and my buddy dressed up in the blaze of glory matching skating ones with a little barrel and we did a whole like competition like that.

Just goofy. Amazing. Yeah. You're not having fun.

It's good. People are still coming with ideas like that, too, because really, after a while, all the competitions can get kind of the sort of way, like they're all the same, right? Like you. Yeah.

Yeah. Like so in some of these competitions, are you doing the speed element as well or is it mostly just crafting cocktails? I've done I did some speed ones when I was younger before my body started to say, I'm going to fuck it. My shoulders and my knees are like, please stop bartending like that.

So now I look for the ones that trigger my creativity. I look for competitions that allow me to do things that I haven't done in the past, whether it's trying to techniques, use new ingredients or thinking outside walks with the way I present cocktails. Yes. That's more enjoyable for me, like hitting that creative button in my brain and having a good time.

You think that these competitions are always going to have a place? Are we going to get to the point where they kind of like it's how much more can one do? You know what I mean? As long as the brand wants to pay bartenders money to advertise the brand for them, they will exist as soon as that culture shifts and they find another way to, you know, do a creative outlet, then it'll change.

But until that point, bartenders are still the ones that are selling your boots and slinging at the guests. So might as well invest in them along the way. And do you feel like we're like, are we getting near the end of what one can do with our cocktail anymore? This is something that I think we talk about a lot, like having travel and gone to these conferences and like, you know, you've seen a really big push the last couple of years to be like culinary driven, right?

Look at Double Chicken, please, in New York, they're doing awesome stuff with food cocktails. Love that. But being being culinary driven is where we're at now, being sustainable was definitely trending too. But I think next really big push isn't so much what we can put in the cocktail glass.

It's how we can make the guest feel and how we can create an experience for them that's meaningful, getting back to actually the roots of hospitality. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it's funny how the ship becomes full circle, though, right? Because when the sort of apex of craft cocktailing was, or the credit card that was out of its apex and we got into like the bartending stars sort of.

Yeah, you start tenders exactly. Then it was like, we became less about the hospitality more about like, come watch me work, right? Somebody is good that we're coming. I think it does come full circle because at the end of the day, there was a stretch where guests would be down for that being like, oh, I just want to go to the trendy spot with the awesome bartender's bartending and get one of their drinks and asking their glory.

And now it's like, well, I think most people are back to like, where can I get a good cocktail at a reasonable price? Yeah, and most bars can make an old fashioned. They can make that dream. They can probably go.

It's not like 10 years ago where like there was only like one bar in town that could make really good drink. No, I think that actually has happened is that this whole like sort of full circle that we're discussing here is like has sort of pushed the industry into an area where you really can't have a bar at all unless you know how to make the classics. Whereas before, if you had like a dive bar or a bowling alley or whatever the fuck, you could just like crack beers and whatever. But I don't think that I'm at least in my experience and here in Ontario that space doesn't exist anymore.

Like I just opened a place. Yeah, like it's like, I've got a good dive bar. Yeah, they gotta have the time to like they gotta know how to like people go to a dive bar. They still expect to be able to get in no fashion now.

I think it depends like having lived in Gainesville where it was a big college football town. The dive bars there, they're making vodka sodas and they're cool. Vodka is their crack of ears and they're doing just fine. But I do think as a whole few and far between compared to where we used to be right.

Like I just opened an Irish pub in Cambridge with Cambridge is kind of like the like a I don't know the armpit of our area. And you're being too generous. Yeah, it was like, oh, we're just going to be pouring pies and make a vodka sodas, right? Like, so I wasn't too worried about the cocktail program for it.

And people were asking like before we knew it, people were asking for like nicer wine and like an old fashioned and whatever. And I was like, it kind of caught me off guard. But my other bars are more geared towards that. Like this is certainly the certainly what I prefer more in a bar that I own.

But like I was kind of caught off guard by the fact that like even opening like what I thought was just going to be a classic Scottish pub. People wanted cocktails. Well, they did that too though. You know, you had people for the first time, you know, making drinks at home.

They found out that it was cheaper. So, you know, they got secreted out. But yeah, they found out that. But you know, you have bartenders teaching classes and people at home from all over the world.

You had a higher level of education and an easy way to consume it on your phone or on your laptop. So people were going to ask for things because they might not have known about it three years ago, but they sure do now. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

I find the sort of evolution of the industry so fascinating, which is probably why we do show like this and you do a show like yours. So let's talk about that a little bit. Talk about why you decided to start your own podcast. Yeah, of course.

So much like you guys kind of grew out of it. You know, it's connecting with people being there. You know, bartenders were social creatures. We love hanging out with people.

We love hanging out with our friends and we lost that. My friends and I that do our podcast together. We have a weekly game. We hang out and play board games.

We have some beers, have some drinks, you know, whatever else happens happens. But we lost that and we wanted to find a way to bring it together. And we know that bartenders were pretty nerdy. Even if you're not nerdy about, you know, playing board games or playing other games or video games, you're going to be nerdy about something.

It's some sort of book, some sort of TV show, something that's out there. And we thought, okay, how do we combine the things that we love with bartending? So we put together all those ideas. We sat down.

We had a bottle of Midwinter's Nightingram that we crushed and we started writing down notes like seriously. How do we do this? And we were playing D&D at the time, D&D at the time, in Dungeons & Dragons, which is incredibly and increasingly more popular as we continue to move on here. Nerd culture is real.

It's great. But someone made the joke. What if we're all bartenders? Because bards are somebody that class that you can play in Dungeons & Dragons.

And I write that down. I circle in a whole bunch. Go to bed and wake up the next morning. And I'm like, I think we can do this.

I think we can make this happen. So I kind of ran with it, developed, you know, a lot of the content. We brought people in to do interviews the same way that you guys are. And we alternate those interviews with actually playing D&D in between.

So every other week we alternate between playing Dungeons & Dragons as bartenders in a fantasy world, which is a lot of fun. And then the other ones we interview people about mental health, physical health, their cocktail bars that they have everywhere. Literally anything you name it. We'll talk about it.

Great. And so how many episodes in are you? We just recorded episode like 84, I think today. But as far as like the D&D side, we're at episode 33 and the rest have all been interviews bartenders.

Right. How do you go? No, I guess. Yeah.

So it's a lot of my friends that I trap. I say, hey, what are you doing next week? So that's really easy. I'll say that we've been doing this for about two ish two plus years now.

And we finally just got to the point now where people are going to reach out to us to be on the show. Yeah, that's what happened as well. Yeah, it took a while though. Like they've been same with us.

I started with interviewing our friends in the region and then slowly but surely we got, I would reach out to people more internationally. And then eventually we people started reaching out to us about it. So it was great. You know, it's great when they book themselves.

I mean, what are bartenders good at networking? Exactly. It's a real thing. You said my bar, I'm going to tell you the best of the places to go in town, the restaurants, the shows, these things, everything.

The same thing with podcasts. We all help each other out. Have you run into the same issues that we had with bartenders flaking out on you at the last second? No, but we're kind of used to it.

I don't know if you guys have ever played Dungeons and Dragons, but usually someone always calls out. Yeah. We're kind of ready for it. And we usually record like three or four months in advance because we know that something's going to happen and someone's got to pick up a shift.

It's almost going to have to go out of fire somewhere. It's just like. Like, there's flakes are interacted to the service industry. So I'm not that ever that surprised.

Dan got a bit of an eye opener when we started doing the show about like how many people will play good on you in the last second? Yeah, just classic. That was tomorrow. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, I don't have my phone on me. Sorry. I couldn't let you guys know I was going to be around.

Yeah. Well, this is what I go through every day with my employees. Don't change. Yeah.

Okay. So like working for the golf course, obviously you're in Florida. So probably golf year around there, but for the most part, of course, yeah. Okay.

So it's just for one month because it just gets way too hot and we need to receive the golf course. So we can get rid of your temperature changes and scorching everything out there. What month is that? July or August or June?

June is the hottest. Oh, wow. So it's exactly opposite from us as we close for four months because there's snow. But.

So you actually, so that's what's kind of interesting to us because like, well, I mean, it's longer than four months of the golf course. So anyone who works at a golf course in Ontario, it's like not a year round job. Right. So you have a year round position there.

And so when the tournaments aren't happening, you are also developing the core, like a cocktail program for the course in general. Yeah. Absolutely. So we're very lucky to have two golf courses.

So when one closes down, the other ones. So we do go all year round with having availability of golf, which is great. As far as cocktail menus go, I think golf courses are at a really, really interesting point as far as food and beverage. You know, the same way that hotels were, you know, six, seven years ago, people were finding hotel lobbies as like this place to connect it, you know, used to be a thing of the past, but has come alive again.

Golf courses got revived by COVID too. If people realize that they can start with this and they can play golf. So all of a sudden you have influx of money that didn't really exist or was dying for the most part. And now people are here to play.

So we have the opportunity to really reinvent the food and beverage need in a lot of country clubs that are rapidly catching up to modern times. And that's kind of why I'm very, very, very hard to work with DJ Tor, especially at DPC Sograss. You know, we do seasonal menus. I mean, when I did my first menu, like two years ago, and egg whip a kill was made blowing hours a point where we're infusing stuff for fat washing and the guests are ready for it, which is really, really cool.

See that transition over to your period. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because like to me, you come off 18 holes of golf in Florida, you're probably sweating and hot and like to me, it's like a fat wash cocktail is not what I'm looking for at that point, but like you're fighting that the program works still. It works. Absolutely works.

And you know, my drinks program that's like out on the golf course, we call it the Enghors program with the golf carts. That's still your classic, you know, transfusions, your vodka, great food, ginger, you know, it's light, it's refreshing. We have our own beers that we've worked with local breweries. So we're putting on our own beers on golf cars.

So if you get the full experience there, but inside the restaurant, where we're doing more fine dining sit down, your country clubs, dinners and things like that. That's where the cotton and you really comes to play. Most of the one they come off the golf course, they're still looking for, you know, like they're really merry, absolutely. Maybe they're celebrating.

So they're doing a whole bunch of whiskey or maybe they're doing the kill shot because they had a bachelor party because of the destination, you know, it's the top 10 golf course in the world. So people are celebrating. So there's a lot of different things that come into play when designing a menu at a place like that. And how many dining rooms do you have?

So our building is 80,000 square feet. It is enormous. We could probably run like two 500 person weddings and they would never see each other. It's really, it's really cool.

But we have, you know, 10 different event spaces, but we have one main one main bar downstairs. We have a whole bunch of mobile bars and activations that we use. Our main restaurant is three dining rooms with an additional area for members only. That's kind of like a golf pub attached to locker room.

And how many employees are you personally overseeing? That's got to be a ton depends on like what's going on like whenever players, the big author is happening exponentially more, right? Because we bring hospitality college students from all over the country. Whenever it's just, you know, like a Monday during the season, I have seven bartenders that work for me.

Oh, that's it. Really? That's it. Really?

And so when you're the beverage director for the whole course, you're obviously selecting the beer, the wine for the program as well. So I'm doing all the beer and I'm doing all the liquor and the cup dough. Very fortunate to have an awesome counterpart who does the wine program. We have right now, it's just under like 20,000 bottles in our wine cellar.

We just got our second drink. And so we're going to have a couple of different things. We're going to have a couple of different things. We're going to have a couple of different things.

We have, we're now, it's just under like 20,000 bottles in our wine cellar. We just got our second glass with wine spectator, which is really great. So we have a fantastic wine program with red and white wine sellers. That sounds awesome.

I fucking hate golfing, but I feel like I want to come and visit your course. Just because the dining screen sounds awesome. I really love it. Do you golf at all?

Poorly. Absolutely. But you get to play the course like whenever you want or yeah. Not so much whenever I want.

I can book pretty far in advance. So if I have family members and friends coming to play, we can do that. Usually you can play very early in the morning before you would work a shift or you wait until like the last time. Or you wait until like the last round of tea times for the day after the majority of the golfers have gone through and you play speed.

Right now, they're like almost eight 30. Okay. So yeah, and how many members does the course have? We have tons because we have the various memberships from, you know, people that are just dining social members that come in and get discounts, you know, through being members.

All the way up to charter members who are top tier, you know, player experience level, you get the same treatment as the players on the course, but you're talking hundreds. So how does your, I guess I'm just the only other real question I have for you is like, how do you separate the two dollars? Like you work for the golf course, but you also work for the PDA. Yeah, absolutely.

So how does that work? So my full time job is like my bread and butter every day is working at the golf course, making sure the operations run smoothly. And then every once in a while I get phone call and it's the national director and he's like, hey, this is happening. Can we get you out there?

Or can we have you design this or can you help with, you know, architecture designs in another place and I get that phone call and I say, absolutely, let's go. So I'm really just kind of on calling the bullpen until they're ready to take me out there. That's great. I'm a cool job.

So like you, you got the job at the golf course first and foremost. And then once you had the job of the course, that's when you get connected with the PDA. Yeah, yeah, because the TPC courses are owned by the PGA door. There's 32 properties around the world owned by the PGA door or pay to fly the PC banner as well.

Gotcha. All right. That's the part that I wasn't connecting. I'm not sure.

We got there. Well, it's a crazy awesome job. You got John. That's awesome.

And yeah, and I'm much success with the podcast. I tell her, listen to the podcast. It's called one more time. Yeah.

So our podcast is called Bard Tenders. You can find us on social media at Bard Tenders. We're pretty much everywhere you can listen to a podcast. We love reviews.

We love our live star ratings and we love to hear your comments. So we continue to grow together. You can check out our website at www.bardtender.com. We have amazing sources for bar education, cocktail education, mental physical health.

Connect you with those resources to take care of inside the bar and outside the bar. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for doing this show. I think your job is super fascinating.

And I think it's awesome that you have like a, this I get doing the podcast because that obviously is close to our hearts as well. So yeah, thanks for doing it. And that's a block and everything. Thanks.

Well, I'm sure we'll have you on our show soon. Yeah. That sounds good. Thanks very much.

Cheers.