Interview: bartender Danielle Tatarin (The Keefer Bar)

Bartender Vancouver

Some of best bars don’t just offer great cocktails and have an inviting vibe, they also have a sense of place. Edmonton native Danielle Tatarin helped to accentuate the terroir in The Keefer Bar, an apothecary-inspired bar in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The distinguished drinksmith and manager also owns a cocktail consultancy called Designer Cocktail Company. We recently met at The Keefer Bar before the evening rush to discuss her background and approach.

How did The Keefer Bar opportunity come about for you?

The owner of the building, Cam Watt, approached me when they were kind of towards of near the end of the project, and they were just getting ready to open. He heard about me through the grapevine, I guess, and he came to visit me. I was running the bar at DB Bistro in Lumiere. He came to visit me there. I have a consulting company as well…I was looking to get out of the position I was at DB and just do fully consulting. I took the opportunity to open The Keefer on a consultancy basis, and then it just ended up that I stayed on and continued to help run the place, and it turned more into a partnership between myself and Cam. That was November of 2009.

What’s the cocktail you’re holding?

This is one of our signature drinks, the Dragonfly. It’s dragon fruit infused gin, pearl sake, fresh lemon juice, ginger, fresh ginger syrup and magnolia bark tincture. We do house-made tinctures, bitters and syrups and we try and incorporate Chinese medicinal ingredients. When I first came on to the project, I did a lot of research. I was already making my own bitters and stuff like that, but not utilizing the Chinese ingredients. I’ve been to Chinatown and had an office nearby here and had experimented with the ingredients, but not to the extent that we do here now. This one was one of the first drinks where I went to the market and was looking at all these crazy Chinese herbs and figured out how to use them, and how their flavor profiles would impact the drinks. The magnolia bark helps to move your digestive chi, and the ginger is very helpful with your digestion. It’s kind of like a light digestif or aperitif Asian cocktail.

So being in Chinatown informs what you’re doing here at the bar?

For sure. When Cam approached me, he had a concept of apothecary. He had been to or heard about a place in New York called Apotheke. They do similar apothecary style, but they don’t incorporate Chinese medicine. He wanted to build on that. That was what he had in mind for this space when he looked at the design of it. He needed someone to execute that. My passion for cocktails and learning about the history of drinks and alcohol and bitters and stuff like that, it is a really cool experience to build on that medicinal aspect of drinks because that’s kind of where it started from. People were making alcohols and bitters and stuff like that to cure ailments. We’re trying to take it back to that level of trying to cure some sort of ailment in our drinks. It’s still fun though. We’re not going to take away the fun from the drinks, because we want them to taste good at the end of the day.

And you’ve incorporated the ingredients into the décor?

Yeah. We have all of the herbs displayed like an apothecary, like you walk into Chinatown and they have all their jars with the herbs. So we try to emulate that in the space, but it’s also, when you look at the space, we want you to feel like you’re not in Vancouver. It’s more like you walk into a back alley somewhere and don’t know where you are.


Bar Vancouver
These kinds of medical diagrams and images of anatomy, how does that fit in?

It just fits in with the whole theme of the healing cocktails, the Chinese medicine, and stuff like that.

What was your very first bartending job?

That was a long, long time ago. I’ve been bartending since I was 18. I’m from Edmonton actually. But I actually grew up being my family bartender, when I was 11 or 12. My step dad taught me how to make a couple drinks because I was too old for the little kids and too young for the big kids, I guess, so I would always hang out by the bar and make people drinks.

What would you make?

The first drink I learned how to make was a Harvey Wallbanger and China White shots, so you’d layer crème de cacao and Bailey’s. I thought that it was really cool – it’s like a science experiment – how you could get two liquids, like one liquid on top of the other, so that was really neat for me when I was 11. I didn’t drink the drinks, so it’s pretty funny to look at myself now and see – I knew people were getting drunk – but I didn’t really have an idea that I wasn’t serving it right.

So it wasn’t like one for you, one for me?

No, no.

What was the first cocktail you ever drank?

The first drink I ever drank would have had to have been an Alabama Slammer with Southern Comfort, orange juice and Sprite, one of those ’80s drinks.

What brought you to Vancouver?

I went traveling to Australia and throughout Southeast Asia when I was 20 and 21 and when I got back home to Edmonton, I’d met a bunch of people from Vancouver and I got back home and it was minus 40 and two feet of snow in December and I just spent a year traveling in tropical Australia and Southeast Asia, and I just couldn’t get used to the cold anymore. I spent the winter there, just kind of doing the same bar gig and working for the gas company and I wanted to do something different and I was tired of the winter in Edmonton. I grew up in a small town, or Edmonton’s like a big city, small town feel, so I just wanted to get to somewhere warm. My step dad moved here and I had some family here, so I just drove my car here, found a place, found and job and started my own company.

When did you know when you’d bartend for a living?

INTERVIEW CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

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