GUEST SHIFT: Nate Gebhard, Night School
Aaron Wilson at Larkin Hi Fi on Lark Street, Albany
Talking with Nate Gebhard, official Dean of Cocktails at Night School in Athens, N.Y., about theater, growing up in Minnesota + crafting cocktails for a small-town pizza parlor.
Interview: Susie Davidson Powell
Photos: Konrad Odhiambo/The Dishing
From a career in acting and theater production to the theatrics of mixology, Nate Gebhard sees “guiding people through experiences” as the connecting through line.
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SDP: Hey, Nate. Thanks for talking with The Dishing. Can you start us off with how you landed at Night School in Athens as bar director?
NG: Yeah, I had been working at this amazing restaurant called Hearth in the East Village. I was there for just over six years - amazing staff, amazing team. Johnny had been an old roommate of mine. He had come upstate and started brewing for Crossroads when he had the opportunity to open up his brick-and-mortar and needed somebody to run the bar program. I was like, tell me more. The timing was right and in terms of seniority of staff and and all the amazing people there, I was probably halfway down the totem pole in terms of seniority for running a bar program so I knew if if I was going to like take the next step, it wasn't gonna happen at Hearth. But that's where I got the most of my experience creating drinks and working with amazing inventory. We had a lot of creative freedom to kind of play around and figure out how to put these things together. Plus when you're playing with the caliber of food they made with James Beard award-winning chefs, you have to be sure that you're putting very well thought out, presentable drink ideas next to that food.
Pho EQ: Wilson uses Asian flavors as inspiration at his Tokyo-style record bar in Albany. Photo credit: Konrad Odhiambo/The Dishing
I also come from a pretty extensive theater background and producing festivals, producing shows, acting, performing, tour managing. I went to college in the Twin Cities and was there for a couple of years after studying theater and sociology in college and I did a little music as well. I kept doing theater after that and I worked at this place called Bedlam Lowertown in St. Paul which has since tragically closed. They were this amazing restaurant, like a bar restaurant, but also a theater event venue kind of thing. Every day of the week there would be a totally different event happening there from contradance to hip hop shows to live dinner theater. So the through line for me is guiding people through experiences and that’s kind of how I connected into hospitality.
SDP: How did you come up with the cocktails menu you have at Night School?
NG: Well, getting up here and creating Night school with Johnny and his pizzaiolo Wes (when he was here helping to make the signature pizza)...and trying to figure out what style we wanted for cocktails because a lot of what I picked up at Hearth didn’t seem appropriate for a pizza parlor. I thought maybe it’s not what people would be looking for up here so we didn’t want to alienate folks. We have a very broad demographic in Athens and the greater area, although we're kind of pulling in some destination people, people who travel for beer, and they bring their friends who maybe aren’t such big beer heads. So they have options here with wine, cocktails. When we opened, before all our tap lines were up, our cocktail program became a little bit more of our voice since there was a lot less other stuff. We made it approachable because we didn’t want people to think they had to have a really refined palate to enjoy our cocktails.
SDP: What's your inspiration?
NG: A lot of it has to do with the products I buy across all of our spirits. I'm pretty intentional about, you know, the distributors that I'm working with and I'm not a super easy sell on a lot of products. Name brand doesn't quite do it because I'm looking for something that meets the quality but the more local, the better. And when things are made with intentional ingredients. My sort of rule for art and life is: Can I work with this? Does it know what it is and does it do it well because ultimately you need to meet people's expectations and we want to be affordable, you know? If it's not affordable, you want it to have a really good reason it’s not. A lot of our cocktails are $13, $14, $15 because I try to source good quality, but affordable base spirits? I don't have Rittenhouse rye or Hendricks gin…and I don't have any tequilas that have any additives. We make a lot of ingredients in house: Our fresh lemon juice and our fresh lime juice, and simple syrups and we do a local honey syrup. Anytime we're doing something special, whether it's a cinnamon syrup or a raspberry syrup or oleo, we're trying to be really intentional. That's not unusual in the cocktail scene by any means, but it is in this area.
We definitely get like people who come in and are looking at our list and they're like can I just get, you know, a tequila with sour mix. I’ll say I don't have sour mix, but if you want tequila soda and a splash of fresh lime juice, I can do that because really that’s what you're looking for. In the cocktail world, people are used to that, but in this area, there's definitely people who aren’t expecting it at Night School because we’re not a fine dining restaurant. We aren’t selling fillet mignon that would signal to people we might have fancy cocktails in here. We have to tell them that in other ways, a little bit with the back bar and talking to them about what's on the shelf.
SDP: Can you just tell me about a couple of drinks that are really specific to Night School?
NG: The P.S. 518 is a great one. That's you know, taking a classic Manhattan and kind of throwing it at a black Manhattan. Instead of going full amaro, I went half, like equal parts Pasubio Amaro and Cocchi di Torino sweet vermouth. I find a vermouth to be a touch more astringent and has, you know, a bigger body and a little bite too. I feel it plays really well. And I started with classic Old Forester 86 proof bourbon – I like to call that a Manhattan for the Catskills. We were here for a couple months before we opened and people were like, oh yeah, I love a black Manhattan, for that kind of more bitter bite: You're in the mountains, you're in the woods, but we're only a train ride away from the city. That bigger umph behind it, but with a nice balanced sweetness. So since it’s upstate and downstate, we call it the P.S. 518 because the P.S. is the Manhattan naming structure of public schools and our area code is 518.
What else? Oh yeah, the Study Buddy. We’ve gone through a couple different margarita variations. That one seems to be probably our most popular. We do an in-house infused spicy triple sec with the Calabrian chiles that we use on our pizzas, but I throw them in triple sec for a little bit. It gives a really nice soft spiciness that’s not gonna rip your face off. It kind of builds slowly and it doesn't stick around the spiciness, which for something that's on the menu, I feel is important. You want people to be able to drink your house cocktail and still experience all the flavors that they're gonna be eating. We have the gentian amaro. Lo-Fi is this really great brand out of California. They make a couple of vermouths and this gentian amaro that's really lovely. Amaros tend to be quite medicinal – they come from a medicinal history to stave off digestive problems – so taking gentian root and making it a more palatable amaro that you would actually want to consume is fun when you get to bring that in. I feel likeLo-Fi gentian amaro expresses the gentian flavor very well. It is almost like a cherry cola without being too sweet…
SDP: Are you more inspired by scent or visuals as you're building the cocktail?
NG: I would say visuals are definitely a component but I'm always gonna go flavor first, and scent is an important part of that experience. There are times when you're asking yourself “do these things go together” and you can just smell them, even though the taste often may be a bit more expanded or different than what you smell. But if the smells don't go together, it's rare the tastes are gonna go together.
I think like in terms of creating a menu, I'm trying to create something that's fairly well balanced on all parts of the board. So the simplest thing is stirred cocktails and shaken cocktails. You want to go with both of those, but you also want something that's gonna be really big and booze heavy or something that's gonna be a little bit sweeter, something that's gonna be served up, and something that's served on rocks, you know, so everybody gets a little variety. But I try not to have all of the cocktails with the same ingredients at the same time because then things do kind of start tasting similar, even if the bass spirits are different, where you're noticing well, all of these have the same sort of blended flavor…
SDP: Lastly, for context, where did you grow up and did it have any impact on how you work now?
NG: Yeah, so I grew up in northern Minnesota. and uh we were just maybe about 20, 25 miles from the headwaters of the Mississippi which is, you know, lake country up there. It’s beautiful and I was always very engaged in the natural world where you can just be chilling on the lake and look down and you can see 15 or 20 feet down in some of the freshest, clearest water I've ever seen. Amazing, beautiful, super tall pine trees. The land there just feels super. It's not mountainous, but it's the closest thing to living in the mountains where it feels raw and new, I think partly because it was probably underneath a glacier… Everything is all rocky and living around the lake you get to know a lot of the little animals coming out in spring, nesting… I don't know, the connection to the natural world is super impactful to me which might be why I focus on all the little details as I’m making drinks.
Read the story behind Nate’s nature-inspired Midnight Mirage cocktail here.
*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.