Danil Nevsky creates cocktail menu database
Indie Bartender, Danil Nevsky’s global online mixology platform, has launched a resource featuring more than 100 cocktail menus from bars around the world.
Menus can be browsed by country, bar name, year and keywords, providing inspiration for concepts and cocktail recipes as well as layout, design and terminology.
Its goal is both functional and community-centric, offering insights into drinking cultures in almost 30 countries.
Speaking to The Spirits Business, Nevsky explained: “The project has an educational goal first and foremost. As bartenders, we check every detail of a bar menu with a critical eye. We often take the menus we love away as a memory of our visit, but also as an inspirational tool.
“I find it really surprising that nobody has thought about gathering menus from bars on one platform for other professionals to discover and consult.
“It’s a matter of access to information, especially for bartenders who haven’t travelled and visited certain bars. It’s also a way of creating a footprint of bartenders’ work and crediting all the people that contributed to a menu creation – so, in this sense, there’s a community goal too.”
Bartenders are credited for their menus, with each either personally collected from bars visited by Nevsky or submitted by the bars themselves.
Bars interested in supplying their menus can fill out a submission form, which will be checked and uploaded by the Indie Bartender team if they “feel the menu has something to offer from an educational or inspirational perspective”.
Nevsky hopes to include new menus from bars already featured to demonstrate how their work evolves over the years.
How can bartenders best use the collection? “By being curious and open,” said Nevsky. “The database is free to access and easy to browse around. I’d recommend seeing what countries and bars are featured at the moment. Check those that you might have not heard about before and get to know their work.
“Compare the ingredients from one region to another, look at how a menu name or concept comes to life in the graphic design and the recipes, in the names used for the cocktails and so on.”
The Cocktail Menu Collection is available on the Indie Bartender website and is powered by Sip, Pernod Ricard’s global trade advocacy programme. The project is free to use owing to the support of Indie Bartender’s work with brand partners.
Looking at the menus currently collected, Nevsky has observed a rise in minimalism: “Notably, a rise in minimalism in design and language. The wording has often gone from very eccentric and imaginative cocktail names and a full list of ingredients to names that nod to core ingredients with an explanation that mainly highlights the flavour profile of the drink.”
He hopes that by collecting more menus and increasing the sample size, he’ll be able to analyse more specific trends.
“Please do share your thoughts and feedback if you think we could do anything better, or if there are things you want to discover on the database,” he concluded. “We would love to improve the Cocktail Menu Collection according to the community’s needs.”
Nevsky recently contributed to a roundtable held as part of the Sip programme, which addressed the growing need for ‘offline’ bars and insular thinking in the industry.
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