Hamish Smith can’t seem to escape guest shifts. We must de-escalate this trend, he says.

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In recent years, guest shifts have industrialised, with some award-winning venues even appointing bartender-ambassadors, such is the global demand for them to regularly parachute into far-flung bars to perform their signature show. If you’ve been to a cocktail week or bar show of late, you’ve seen how they are now beset by a migrating flock of star-tenders, who alight at every bar station in sight.

And why wouldn’t you enjoy the joyful jamboree of the global bar industry in all its colours, a sort of World Cup of cocktail culture? Well, you can, but for one, rather inescapable detail. This is the host city’s chance to shine. Just when the world is at its door, its bars hand over the keys to other bartenders.

If you, like me, travel to visit the bars as much as the shows, navigating your way through the matrix of guest shifts has become a form of nocturnal orienteering. At one cocktail week that saw 200-300 guest shifts, came the emergence of a counter-schedule of the nights and times the big bars weren’t doing guest shifts. It became my itinerary for the week.

It’s hard to imagine the scale of this phenomenon in other industries – including restaurants – as it takes a particular set of circumstances to make something so paradoxical seem so rational. So why does it happen? Well, economically, this triangular accord between host bar, brand and guest bartender works – to degrees – for all parties.

Brands are in town for a show, a conference, a cocktail week. They want to get bang for time and buck, so they decide to put on satellite events. The brand-sponsored guest shift is a neat way to strengthen bonds with key international bartenders (or bar accounts), while building new relationships with the market’s own bartenders and audience. Media is in town too – it’s a world of marketing wins at a little extra cost.

The guest bartender, meanwhile, makes their reputation from being at big international events. They’re marketing themselves and their bar to a throng of opinion makers and if the brand picks up the bill, it’s not a case of why would you, but why wouldn’t you. And if you’re lucky enough to be in town to pick up an award, a sponsored guest shift or two can be very facilitatory.

For the host venue, there are pros too. There’s the PR, through positive association, exposure and the chance to impress opinion makers – often the visiting bartenders – in the industry. There’s the financial reward of a busy night of service, and there might even be an attractive contra guest-shift agreement too.

So, between the guest bar, the brand and the host venue, the economics of the guest shift are triangular, yet not exactly equilateral. The host bar loses that most precious thing – the opportunity to shine just as the spotlight is on them. 

Invention and reinvention

So, where did guest shifts start? Well, I asked the global bar community exactly that question and, of course, there followed an ever-scrolling page of differing opinions. The answer depends on two things – how you define a guest shift and how far you want to descend into history. We’ll skip past the Harry, Ada and Jerry generation and indeed the Cantineros because bartending is one of the oldest professions, so they probably weren’t first either. Indeed, Jesus Christ’s water-into-wine trick might be one the earliest forms of recorded mixology (credit: Tristan Stephenson). 

But to fast-forward to the 1990s, perhaps the most credible and certainly the most high-profile claim is Salvatore Calabrese’s appearance at Dale DeGroff’s Rainbow Rooms. There were other inflexion points on the guest-shift graft too, one of which was Sean Muldoon’s Connoisseurs Club at The Merchant in Northern Ireland, which saw talks and guest shifts in the mid-to-late 2000s. It was perhaps the first series of events to answer the question of how you become an award-winning and globally recognised bar when you’re based in a lesser-known city such as Belfast.

But really, the guest shift’s industrial revolution came with the advent of social media, which gave bars a platform to easily and freely publicise their events. The ubiquitous takeover flyer today is now commonplace – and less impactful by the day.

In some quarters, there is a movement to evolve the format. Let’s not call it a craft takeover, but you know what I mean. At Sub Astor in São Paulo, visiting bars join their twice-yearly Mission to forage for new ingredients in Brazil’s many biomes. At Alquímico guests visit for a week and experience the bar’s Colombian farm, and in London at Viajante87, guest shifts see a leading chef and bartender from a specific country put on a showcase event together and even bring rare ingredients that then make their way on to the bar’s own drinks list. Satan’s Whiskers, meanwhile, is one that is bringing education back to the guest shift, with bar talks on best practice. Through the likes of Campari Academy, brands are also helping the guest shift evolve.

But these more meaningful guest shifts are less of an innovation and more of a return to how things used to be. Guest shifts started out as exchanges of skills and knowledge, bringing greater understanding to the community. If we are to slow their industrialisation, it will be in this direction, away from transaction and marketing.

Part of this de-escalation will be more bars saying no to guest shifts when the time isn’t right. As Nico de Soto proved, sometimes the best person to give your bar up to, is you.