The Philip Duff Show

It's been a minute since we went over the news, and I've been rocketing around the world doing interesting things, so here's a DNN episode!

We cover bar shows like BCBrooklyn, the Gulf Bar Show, the upcoming BCB London, the risers and fallers in the annual Millionaires List of million-case-selling liquor brands, Pernod's restructuring, the tiny cocktail trend, how I found the best cocktail bar at Disney Paris, an...

I've known Lorenzo since his days bartending at The Savoy in London, and have also had the pleasure of his drinks during his stint at Argo Bar (HK).

Now he's opened Bar Leone, which is the fastest-ever to get to #1 in Asia's 50 Best Bars and #2 in World's 50 Best, after opening in June 2023. 

He's also about to open Montana bar in HK together with his fellow Italian, Simone Caporale. 

We got together to catch ...

Woody, a New Zealander, has been a fixture in Australian bartending for as long as I've been in the business, and he built his flair bartending and cocktail catering firm into a massive business there, wrote ten best-selling cocktail books, toured with Guy Fieri, burned out, came back, and has now founded a new solution to revolutionise the import-distribution of liquor in Australia, Drinks Network. 

Clearly, we were overdue - ...

Me, Josh and a bunch of other people (including Julio Bermejo and Mauro Mahjoub) were together in Yerevan for Yerevan Cocktail Week (YCW), so I took the chance to tape an episode with Josh, who I always run into at Tales of the Cocktail, but never get to sit down and chat with. 

Josh is best known for Trick Dog cocktail bar in SF, a perennial award winner and two-time World's Best Cocktail Menu winner at Tales; in fact, Josh ta...

Taped live in an annoyingly child-ridden park on a lovely day in NYC, myself and the rock 'n' roll Irish-Italian Rome-based cocktail bar owner Patrick Pistolesi cracked some all-American tariff-free beers, washed 'em down with mezcal and 'Murican single malt whiskey, and talked about Japan, billionaires, awards, his adventurous Irish mum, bars, cocktails, and the profusion of guest bartending, plus looots more s...

Ektoras Binikos opened Sugar Monk cocktail bar in Harlem just 9 months before the COVID lockdowns kicked off, after a career in both art and mixology, having emigrated to Manhattan from his native Greece. While weathering the storm of the lockdown, he and his team started making and selling amaros and liqueurs, and this venture has blossomed into a company, Atheras Spirits, which has a distillery and a cocktail bar/tasting room, Bi...

Regular listeners will know New York drinks writer Tony Sachs, who occupies a place in The Philip Duff Show universe somewhere between "henchman" and "drinking buddy". 

It's been a while since we convened to drink our way through the literal lakes of booze Tony is sent on a daily basis, and because he was off to drink Direct Martinis from the hand of Alessandro Palazzi that evening, we started out with a nic...

Warren has written six cocktail books - including on cannabis cocktails, as well as more conventional cocktail tomes - and he was way ahead of what is now a trend of quitting alcohol, back in 2018, during Tales of the Cocktail, which is like quitting skydiving mid-jump. 

He's recently created a range of delicious cocktail-inspired THC beverages named KLAUS, so it was high* time we sat down, guzzled a little Klaus, and caught up...

Me and Rob have known each other since the early early days, back when I was still a competitive flair bartender in the 1990s, and together with fellow OGs Dean Serneels and Deborah Richards, he's just created and premiered the world's first documentary about flair, "Shaken & Stirred", so it was high time we had a chat. 

We talked about the wild network that was flair, before this Second Golden Age of mixolog...

Hayden's been a mate for ages, and his bar, a gorgeous, tiny, stripped-back speakeasy-type Mecca in Melbourne, is almost ten years old and has been winning awards and getting on lists quite a lot, so it was time we got together and shot the shit. This tiny little bar in Australia's second city got #100 on the overall World's 50 Best Bars list - not bad, eh?

I had no idea about Hayden's Euro ski-resort Flugel-drin...

Without Jonathan and the London-based international Match Bar Group he built, spanning 40+ venues at one time or another, cocktails in the UK would look very different today. 

Jonathan, a cheerful Mancunian former lawyer, invested heavily in bartending expertise when building his group: his first head bartender for Match bar was the legendary, late Dick Bradsell, he hired Dale de Groff to be a training consultant and partnered with ...

I've known Nico since his time at Experimental Cocktail Club Paris around 2008, and he's very much the mixologist's mixologist; most people would say - I agree - that he's one of the two or three best mixologists working today. 

He just launched Kota Pandan liqueur with a banging party in Mace NY, so the next day we sat down to talk bars, pandan, awards, the state of the business, how he almost opened a place in ...

Few people in the cocktail world are as well known as Salvatore; you don't even have to say his surname before people begin talking about his many achievements in bartending, dating back forty years to his youth on the sun-kissed shores of the Amalfi Coast. He really is the  Maestro, and it's been a privilege to call him a friend for several decades now. 

From inventing the Direct Martini (while at Dukes Hotel, for guest S...

Maxwell is an old friend who came to prominence with the drinks program he curated at Brooklyn's amazing Maison Premiere, winning James Beard awards, World's 50 Best Bars listing, and Tales of the Cocktail awards, to name but a few. (It is also, and to this day, a magnificent place for dinner or a cocktail).  He's also co-authored a cocktail book and created one of the first modern-era cocktail recipe apps. 

Maxwell r...

It's nomination season!

If you enjoy The Philip Duff Show, take a minute to throw our hat in the ring for an award that is guaranteed to annoy everyone - link to nominate us for "Best Broadcast, Podcast Or Online Video" here: https://spiritedawards.secure-platform.com/a 

(Nominations deadline is February 13th, at 1159pm New Orleans time!)

Dolph's been a legend in Hollywood for almost forty years, from his first rol...

Nominate The Philip Duff Show for the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards - “Best Broadcast, Podcast, or Online Video Series” category: https://spiritedawards.secure-platform.com/a

David’s a legend in the liquor business, ever since he and his business partner came up with the idea for Baileys Irish Cream, easily the most succesful liquor brand created in the last half-century or so. 

He followed up with brands like Tanqueray TEN, ...

Adam, a native Scot, spent a decade working for the Hawksmoor group, including a five-year stint opening and running the bar at their first-ever US branch here in New York, and he's just moved back to London, so I thought we'd have a chat.
It was a lot of fun and we got into a ton of different stuff, including US tipping culture, the "Sopranos"-esque nature of doing deals with American liquor brands, what it...

Caitlin makes some of America’s best eaux-des-vie, as well as America’s first-ever single malt whiskey, McCarthy’s.
(American Single Malt was only recognized by the US government’s TTB as a legal category about a month ago, but McCarthy’s started distilling in 1985. )

This is a nerdy one.
It was a great chat, though, discussing Caitlin’s unconventional path to being a master distiller, who’s drinking eau-de-vie, ...

I'm not sure exactly where me and Oisin met, but we definitely had a drink to hand!

Born in New Jersey, he moved to Ireland when he was just 10, so he's lived there for far longer than I have - in fact he moved there more or less precisely as I left - and has done far more cool stuff there than I ever did, from running great Dublin bars and music venues, to writing an award-winning cocktail book, to promoting Iri...