If Vancouver is undergoing a restaurant renaissance, the drinks scene is more than keeping pace. Historic Gastown is heaving at night with revellers in old-time pubs and trendy bars, and some of the world’s top mixologists have gravitated to the city.
Anyone used to British bars and pubs might assume that the rebirth of cocktail culture just means you’ll take bloody ages to get served. You’d be wrong. At the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel, the handsome, smiling, bowtied bartender keeps up a stream of chatter, hardly breaking eye contact with his customers as his hands move with the bewildering speed of a magician’s: a drop or two from a pipette into a small metal chalice here, a sprinkle of something else there, a quick taste and slight refinement, and suddenly two drinks are ready. Like magic.
If only all bars had a Grant Sceney. But sadly that’s impossible, because Grant is a one-off. He’s officially Canada’s best bartender – he represented the country at the Diageo Reserve World Class 2014 competition, coming fourth. This year he coached Canada’s entrant, Lauren Mote (who also works in Vancouver, of course, as bar manager of Uva Wine & Cocktail Bar), to a creditable twelfth.
There’s a lot more to being a bartender than mixing drinks, as the competition shows. Sceney runs through some of the trials he faced over a testing five days: “There’s a theatrical challenge, in other words how well you present your mixing; a speed challenge, where you have to make and serve drinks, while still being friendly, to 10 guests; a market challenge, where they give you a bunch of in-season ingredients and see what you make from them; a flavour-pairing challenge, where you have to match cocktails with food; and a blind expert tasting, where they put drinks in a black glass. But my favourite, and the one I came top at, was the written word challenge, where you have to make two cocktails inspired by literature.”
Sceney, who moved to British Columbia from Australia six years ago, says he chose Ernest Hemingway for the challenge, making two cocktails inspired by the early and later stages of his life. “His mother dressed him as a girl until he was six, so I deconstructed champagne, using all the flavour elements of champagne, but with none of the actual drink: I used sherry, butter, French gin and then carbonated it – so it was a strong, complex drink dressed up in a feminine style. I call that one Six Years A Lady.
“By the end of his life Hemingway was a fiery personality who head-butted the window of a plane and knocked it out, and my second drink uses one of his favourite spirits – rum. I mixed spiced Ron Zacapa with Don Julio Blanco, tamarind, grapefruit, lime and Tajín. It’s called The Sun Also Rises.”
Both cocktails are on the menu at the Fairmont Pacific Rim, along with one made in conjunction with a male fragrance from Dior promoted by Johnny Depp. All I know is that Sceney adds tobacco liqueur and nutmeg to make the whisky and cognac more smoky, and that it tastes absolutely amazing.
The best thing is that he hasn’t let success go to his head. Unlike some bartenders, Sceney is less interested in showing off than in … well, this is what he said when I asked what was most important to him: “Some people come to chat, some to experience a great cocktail. The first task is to find out what they want. The most important thing to me is to make people happy.”
For more information on the Fairmont Pacific Rim, see www.fairmont.com
For more information, visit www.canada.travel
