A drink with… Michele Mariotti, Gleneagles
When it comes to running the drinks programmes at one of Scotland’s most iconic luxury hotels, Gleneagles’ Michele Mariotti is a man of structure. We grabbed a drink with him in the hotel’s American Bar to learn about his role, his approach to menu curation, and how he ensures customer satisfaction in every outlet.
In spring, the American Bar at Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland debuted its latest cocktail menu, the Rose Compendium – the result of 18 months of research, experimentation and ingredient sourcing. Mariotti tells us about his role at the historic luxury hotel and shares the complexities of managing a multifaceted beverage offering across its diverse venues, all while launching a new menu.
What does your role at Gleneagles entail?
In a nutshell, I look after the beverage programme across the resort. I curate the cocktail lists for all our outlets, manage the spirit list selections across the board, and assist the wine team in day-to-day operations. I’ve got direct control of a number of outlets, predominantly the bars – The Century Bar and The American Bar being our crown jewels – and then the whisky shop, the steering room, and the cigar lounge. This means my day-to-day can be quite wild – from outdoor pursuits to whisky tasting on a mountain to hosting pop-up seasonal activations.
With so many outlets under your ward, how do you ensure each one gets the attention required?
I lean on my team quite heavily. I don’t think I’d be able to do any of what I’m doing if it weren’t for them. In the first couple of years in my position, the main thing was getting the right people in the right places – once you do that, things take care of themselves, really. If someone is really passionate about the product and really believes in it, they sort of become your ambassador for that specific project. And then that requires way less micromanagement. In an ideal scenario, as is the case in The American Bar, it’s the team that brings ideas to you, rather than the other way around. And that’s probably the best feeling to have, and it’s the best way to run the whole thing.
How do you make sure each venue within the hotel gets its moment to shine each year?
I think structure is key. We try to be quite strict with the schedule, but I do believe this is something relevant to the industry as a whole. I think the point of difference is the way you collaborate with third parties in this day and age, because everyone has done everything possible to do within four walls in a bar, right? The natural progression for the bar industry is to start managing relationships with other partners that are local to you, so you start to infuse a little bit of terroir and identity into your own bar.
But working with external partners can jeopardise schedules at times, because you rely a lot on third parties. We have a quite tight schedule on how we manage menu creation, but a lot of times we end up having delays, so that tends to postpone every single project. We work on it, just because we have a finite amount of time, but I think the most important thing for me is to create structures wherever I go, and then put the right people in there.
Does each bar at Gleneagles attract a different type of guest?
We like to put things in boxes, really. This is for two reasons. Reason number one is that our average stay has gone from just a couple of days to nearly a week, especially in the summer. A lot of our guests would have to interact with outlets multiple times, and they have a number of options to choose from. It’s important for us to have specific identities within our bar ecosystem, but we do believe in accessibility. I think it’s quite important that everyone is able to enjoy a bar to a certain degree – so, we never say no to beer, for instance, in The American Bar, but we are conscious that this is not the place for the best beer selection.
So it depends. It’s probably a 60/40 split of people who are happy to interact with any outlet and guests who would interact only with certain parts of the hotel. I believe about 60% of our consumer base is quite flexible, and they like to try different things. They will find something in all our outlets. For the ones who are really into something specific – perhaps they’re into straight whiskies or really into wine or beer – we have that level of depth in each of the outlets to allow them to interact with them differently.
For instance, restaurant-wise, the Strathearn is one that some guests really like, and some other guests find it a little bit too formal, and so they would never interact with it. The Birnam is a bit of a jack of all trades. The Century Bar, for instance, is really, really accessible. Great beers, great wines, great whiskies, great cocktails – a little bit of an all-rounder, so everyone would go for that. The American Bar and Auchterarder 70, it depends if that’s [the kind of venue] you’re looking for.
When curating and debuting new menus at Gleneagles, such as The American Bar’s Rose Compendium, how much analysis do you do into past menus to determine the potential success of a new serve?
As a matter of fact, once a month we sit down and analyse our sales. We see what sells and what doesn’t across the resort, but specifically in The American Bar.
By looking at the Book of Berries [the previous menu], we had a clear indication of what we were going to do for [the Rose Compendium] – but it was more about structuring the offering, more than trying to revolutionise it.
We look at the drinks on the menu that we think are going to perform – the ones that historically have given us an indication they’re going to do well. Anything with Champagne, for instance, always does very, very well in here. Every rich and spirit-forward drink that’s good for pre-dinner and post-dinner, like a Martini, does very well. I know it sounds weird to put Martini and Rob Roy [this menu’s signature serve] in the same box, but they feel like the same niche of a spirit-forward drink.
The Rose Compendium offers four of the cocktails as non-alcoholic options. How do you create these without losing the essence of that serve?
With the menu, there are drinks where the spirit is quite a crucial part of the experience. If you were to look at it as a graph, you’d have spirit in the middle, and then all the other components contributing towards it. When we selected which drinks were going to become non-alcoholic, we picked the ones where the centre stage was taken by an ingredient that wasn’t alcoholic – like a fantastic jam that we found, or this incredible secondary ingredient we’ve discovered that we had in our hotel. When that was the case, it allowed us to rethink the drink.
Instead of trying to supplement the spirit with something else, we’d look at what other flavours would complement it. Sometimes it’s a spirit, sometimes it’s not. I think it is quite mechanical to just delete the spirit and add the non-alcoholic version of it, and it doesn’t always work. Especially if it’s the first case I mentioned, where the spirit is the centrepiece of the drink. By picking drinks where that is not the case, where we can easily play around.
Spirits are quite important for what we do, but they’re not always the centre stage of the drink that you work with. It’s the same with cooking – sometimes it’s not always the protein that’s the centre stage.
Related news
Does terroir matter to vodka drinkers?
