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How Jacob Martin conquered Diageo World Class
Bartender Jacob Martin’s passion for drinks stood him in good stead when he won the first cocktail competition he entered – Diageo World Class.
*This feature was originally published in the July 2024 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.
If you tell Jacob Martin he can’t do something, you should know he is going to do it, and do it well. Spurred on by the oversight of a former manager, Martin set his heart on the Diageo World Class cocktail competition. His inaugural entry – not just into World Class, but into any cocktail competition – led to him beating hundreds of entrants from around the world to take the 2023 winner’s title.
Martin says: “I knew that to move up in the world of the bar, you need to do things for your name, and there are cocktail competitions. So, let’s start at the very top with World Class, an amazing benchmark because, essentially, it’s a global measuring stick of your skills.”
Martin’s entry into the on-trade industry was not, shall we say, ‘typical’. His story has many wonderfully weird twists and turns. “Singing, cheese, bartender,” he quips about his unique career path.
Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, as a child Martin had an “appetite for dramatics”. From around six to 12 years old he was part of a Broadway troupe that came to Toronto, providing an outlet for his passion for musical theatre. “At baseball games, they’d push the kid out (me) to sing. And then I was in choruses for really big productions like The Lion King and Lord of the Rings,” he explains.
“When I was about 12, there was this girl, her name was Diana. She was working on a cheese counter, and I thought she was so pretty, I really fancied her,” Martin continues. Armed with books about cheese, he would do his best to get her to notice him. While his romantic efforts went unnoticed by Diana, the Polish manager of the store, Nora, appreciated Martin’s cheese knowledge. “So they hired me there,” he says.
“One of the weird things about the cheese industry in general, is if you want to be a master sommelier of cheese, you have to go through a cheese organisation. And there are only two, one in France and one in the States, and in general, you have to work about 10,000 hours before you are admitted. And I hit that when I was 17.”
Martin graduated from the American Cheese Society when he was 22 as “the youngest maître fromage in the Americas at the time. And that was really my whole life.”
This status saw him running the cheese departments at Whole Foods Markets, “buying tens, and hundreds, and actually, literally millions of dollars of cheese”, he recalls. “My whole existence was doing this. Then Amazon bought my company; I lost all my cheese, which doesn’t sound that devastating but for me, that was my life’s work. And I ended up in fine dining because I didn’t know what to do afterwards. I was like: ‘I am the most cheese person! I have this skill, I am the youngest, but I don’t know where to put this.’”
He was snapped up by fine-dining restaurant Hexagon, in Oakville, Ontario. With an avenue to once again share his love of food and flavour, it was here he found himself captivated by the prospect of bars.
“It was three people deep at the bar,” he recounts. “And the bartender just danced this dance, and people were just hanging on his word. That was so impressive to me. His name was Jared, and he had just moved over from New York, and he was coming from a bar called Flatiron Lounge, run by Julie Reiner, one of the most famous bartenders ever. At the time, I had no idea about this world, but I thought ‘you’re doing something cool’. So he became my mentor.”
From then, Martin was hooked on the bar world. He found himself in a “perpetual accident” of being among some of the best in the business: “And thank God I did because I would have never found this path.”
From there, his journey veered towards the opening of the St Regis five-star hotel, Jen Agg’s Le Swan French diner, both in Toronto, and Rata, a restaurant in New Zealand’s southern alps. After the Covid-19 lockdowns, Jacob teamed up with French friends to open Bar Pompette in his home city. Today, he runs Bar Banane in Toronto, a speakeasy located in Ossington. The bar has a reputation for making its own infusions, and opting for a simple approach to drinks to allow the ingredients to shine.
“The cocktail menu changes seasonally,” Jacob explains. “We have a wonderful network of producers and suppliers, and a very produce-driven cocktail approach.”
However, 2023 was when Jacob’s career path took an exciting turn. Having never competed in a cocktail competition before, Martin found the ultimate success in his first contest, clinching the title of Diageo World Class Global Bartender of the Year 2023.
“As someone who’s never competed before, I’ve been exceedingly humbled by this process again and again,” Martin says. “It’s all rather surreal; if you’ve ever done something really technical, or something where you’ve had to really focus on all the little details you end up being so focused on the tasks that you don’t spend very much time considering what it’s going to feel like when you actually win.”
He recalls leaving his hotel after the competition: “I got into a cab and the cab driver said: ‘Oh, you’re Jacob Martin. You’re the best bartender in the world.’ And I burst into tears. Honestly, I was completely floored because he was a total stranger who recognised me for some reason. Now it’s settled in, it’s just an incredible privilege to be able to work with what is the largest collective of the best bartenders, best agencies and best brands in the world.”
Skills showcase
To add extra context, being crowned number one in the world entails beating competition from 10,000 hopeful entrants. The global final took place in São Paulo in Brazil in September 2023, when the top bartenders from 55 countries showcased their greatest mixology skills. Over four days, the finalists were required to elevate classic cocktails ‘to a 10’ using Tanqueray No. Ten, and creating a Ketel One ‘Garnished with Good’ cocktail.
Martin credits his “obsessive curiosity about things” along with his experience as a child actor for his success. “A competition such as World Class is not just measuring how good the drink is. It’s not just about what’s in the glass; how hospitable have you been? How knowledgeable are you about what you’re tasting – and how cohesive are the things you’re talking about?
“So with my childhood acting experience, World Class was like this wonderful coalescence of those two things.”
What’s next? “Oh my goodness, so many things,” he says. “But certainly the party piece is going to be World Class 2024 in Shanghai, which is possibly going to be one of the biggest yet, a production like no other. It is 15 years of World Class this year after all.”
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