Ben Yabrow leaves Sip & Guzzle to open own bar
Sip & Guzzle’s head bartender Ben Yabrow has left the bar, with plans to open his own venue in the coming months.
Yabrow was part of the opening team at Sip & Guzzle, which launched in early 2024.
The bar topped the 50 Best Bars in North America 2026 list in April, shortly after Yabrow’s departure.
“My last shift was the Friday before 50 Best,” he told The Spirits Business. “I went to the awards, and then it was done. I got to end on a bit of a high.”
The timing is an echo of a previous moment in his career, when Yabrow left his post at Double Chicken Please in 2023 less than a week before it too was named the Best Bar in North America. “I’ve been joking that I’ve twice helped get a bar to number one, but I’ve never worked at the number one bar on North America’s 50 Best,” he laughs.
His departure had been months in the making, with Yabrow having told Sip & Guzzle co-founders Shingo Gokan and Steve Schneider about his plans to open his own venue the best part of a year ago. “Now was just the right time,” he explains. “It’s not fair to a bar of that calibre to have their head bartender not 100% focused on the bar. To get my own thing open, things would start falling through the cracks.”
The new bar
Yabrow is not yet ready to fully share details of his plans, but he is happy to confirm that the new bar will be in New York City. “I don’t want to speak prematurely because I thought we had a space twice and then it got leased out from under us,” he says.
Like both Sip & Guzzle and Double Chicken Please, the bar will also have a dual concept, something he “swore I would never do again”. “I’ve done three in a row with SG Club, Double Chicken Please and Sip & Guzzle,” Yabrow explains. “But the space we found just lends itself to that.”
The bar will be “similar” to everything Yabrow has done in the past, with one concept being more casual and straightforward and the other “more elevated, but you can still come in a T-shirt”. In this bar, drinks are likely to be very technical and “hyper focused”.
He adds: “The two bars will play off each other a little bit more than in the past, where they’ve been two different concepts in the same space.”
Sustainability will be a focus, with the smaller bar using as much waste from the larger bar as possible.
Building a bar in the shadow of Sip & Guzzle – not to mention Double Chicken Please and SG Club – could be intimidating, but Yabrow isn’t focusing on the accolades.
“The lists are great, the awards are great,” he says. “They’re not everything. It’s not why we do it. It’s certainly not a goal we’ve set out for the new spot. I think any bar that’s opening to win awards is doing it for the wrong reasons.”
Equally, he is mindful of other people’s opinions and feedback. “It does add a little bit of pressure, because you do want recognition from your peers, of course. Whenever anyone says: ‘I don’t care what other people think’, I assume that’s not 100% true. It’s hospitality. The whole goal is to make other people feel better. By nature, you have to care what they think.”
Rather than getting to number one on the list, his first concern is profitability. “Times are tough for a lot of businesses,” he explains, adding that he’s selected his new business partners because “their bars pull very good profit margins”.
His second mission is making the bar a great place to work. “My main goal is that the team are happy and comfortable and that they are getting as much out of it as we’re getting out of them, if not more,” he says. “I really want them to accomplish their goals.”
For now, the focus is less on what the new bar might become on any list, and more on what it might become for the people working in it. “I will do everything in my power to help them,” he says – the same grace that Gokan and Schneider once extended to him.
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