Should Bars Credit Bartenders on their Cocktail Menus?

This is an excerpt from Pre Shift, our newsletter for bartenders, chefs and hospitality workers. Subscribe for more stories like this.

When Los Angeles’ Sqirl announced that it would be offering dinner service, the restaurant found itself in the national public eye once again. Some took the launch as an opportunity to rehash Sqirl’s scandalous past, including the controversy around unacknowledged staff contributions; at the time, former employees alleged that owner Jessica Koslow was taking credit for recipes they developed.

Recipe crediting is a thorny topic for restaurants. In an interview with Eater senior reporter Bettina Makalintal, Amanda Cohen, owner of Dirt Candy, shared why she chose to attribute dishes to their respective creators by name: “I certainly know there has been a movement to give more credit to staff over the last couple of years and I think it’s great—it takes an army to run a restaurant.”

But four years later, it’s still rare to see names listed on menus. Sqirl, for its part, has not printed credits alongside dishes, though it has been highlighting staff who worked on the food on the restaurant’s social media. At bars, however, crediting has become increasingly common practice. See, for example, menus from Cure in New Orleans, DrinkWell in Austin, or Better Luck Tomorrow in Houston. Should restaurants follow suit?

Cocktail recipes are often meant to be recreated and riffed on; Punch’s archive is a testament to the merits of sharing how signature drinks get made. But ownership is another thing. Who gets to claim a recipe, and who gets recognition for it? I chatted with two bars who’ve found that naming cocktail creators on menus helps the staff, operators, and guests alike to see why they do it and why it matters.

Cure is one of New Orleans’ top cocktail bars. | Cory Fontenot

Opened in 2009, Cure is an icon of New Orleans’ cocktail scene. The bar serves dialed-in takes on the classics (including the long-forgotten ones) and original drinks created by the team. The latter section of the menu, which rotates by the season, is also a snapshot of its current bartenders. You’ll notice that under each drink’s name is that of a staff member’s. I asked founder Neal Bodenheimer to explain the practice.

Pre Shift: Why do you include bartender credits on your menu?

Neal Bodenheimer: Bartender credits have been part of Cure’s philosophy from day one. While drink recipes generally can’t be trademarked, we believe ownership is shared, because the creative idea still comes from one person before it moves into our group workshop sessions. It’s important for us to recognize the individual who initiated the idea and helped carry it across the finish line.

Beyond recognition, crediting creates a deeper connection between our team and our guests. Regulars often come in looking for drinks by bartenders they know, and it opens the door for conversation, because it gives visibility to team members who may not naturally command attention on the floor but are doing exceptional creative work behind the scenes.

Does crediting impact how your team approaches R&D?

Our R&D process is highly collaborative, though each cocktail begins with an individual submission. Twice a year, bartenders submit drinks, and within about a week, we host a group tasting where the team evaluates each cocktail to decide what’s ready, what needs to be worked on, and what may not move forward. That depends on what feels seasonal, for example, or drink categories that may be missing from the menu. While leadership guides this process, the team is actively involved in the final outcome.

While one bartender is ultimately credited, that credit reflects both authorship of the recipe and the bartender’s ability to work with the team to develop it. A lot of company time and resources go into shaping each drink, so it’s never a solo effort. This process is also about education, especially for less experienced bartenders. It helps them understand how to think critically about the development of a recipe.

Do you think more bars and restaurants should have credits on their menu?

I think every bar and restaurant has to approach this in a way that aligns with their culture and operational style. For us, crediting makes sense because it encourages creativity and gives our team a sense of ownership and pride.

DrinkWell is a beloved neighborhood bar in Austin. | Jasmin Porter

In Austin, DrinkWell has been around for more than a decade, and the bar has been home to some of the country’s top bartenders. Part of the DrinkWell’s success can be attributed to the structures it has set up for education and mentorship, which includes recipe crediting. I chatted with owner and operator Jessica Sanders to learn more.

Pre Shift: Why do you include bartender credits on your menu?

Jessica Sanders: There are quite a few benefits to crediting bartenders on original cocktails, not the least of which is the visibility and platform that it gives the staff. I think our staff take a lot of pride in seeing their names in print, and it gets them excited to sell their specific cocktails to our guests. As bartenders build a following of regulars, it helps the guest gravitate to a bartender whose palate they may match up with. Some bartenders really excel at working with certain spirits or flavor profiles, and our guests will start to seek that out over time. It can really deepen the connection with guests who happen to really like a bartender’s personal style, within the guardrails or creative vision of the bar as a whole.

Does crediting impact how your team approaches R&D?

Menus are and have always been a highly collaborative experience for the DrinkWell team. There is no “one palate” that anchors the program from a recipe creation perspective—but either myself or a bar manager will give the ultimate sign off when a recipe is ready for prime time. These days, my role is not to stifle creativity but to make sure the drink works from an administrative perspective more than anything else: Is it properly costed? Do all the bottles fit within our well space? Is the bar prep needed to produce the drink practical? The creative work of recipe writing, however, lives among the entire team of bartenders.

In terms of our approach, specific drink styles are assigned to the bar staff and we ask them to build recipes from there. Sometimes we offer a creative prompt to help motivate or inspire them (for example: We need a tequila cocktail in the style of a Margarita that makes you think of hiking up Mount Bonnell on the first day of spring.) Draft recipes are then shared and tasted with the entire team, and everyone is given the opportunity to provide feedback or make subtle adjustments. The most successful cocktails, in my experience, have been the ones where everyone has had a little bit of a hand in perfecting it.

Ultimately, though, credit goes to the bartender who worked to bring the final recipe over the finish line. There have, on occasion, been instances where we have co-credited multiple bartenders who worked closely together. In cases of old recipes that we revive from past teams, we’ll credit it as a DrinkWell Legacy Cocktail.

Do you think more bars and restaurants should have credits on their menu?

Every bar is different, and I don’t think there is one way that works for all teams, all menus, and all guests. I think [a crediting system] works especially well for small, intimate teams that are built on mentorship, like ours is. Much like there are teaching hospitals, I have always viewed DrinkWell as a “teaching bar,” where bartenders can learn the fundamentals of recipe and menu writing and hopefully build a portfolio of cocktails that they will take with them as they grow in their careers.

As an operator, crediting bartenders is also unbelievably valuable for record keeping! It is rewarding to revisit the catalog of all the drinks and bartenders that the program has produced over the years, and study what worked and what didn’t. We now have this archive of our bar talent that has evolved as the bar has aged.

Responses have been lightly edited and condensed.

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