INTERVIEWED BY MJ PADILLA
Tell me about your iconic name.
My parents were hippies back in the 70s and so they were originally going to name me something like Ram after the Hindu god Ram. And then my mom says she had a vision during labor with me of a river. And so, she decided on the name River. And then my middle name, Running Free, I think she just picked that to piss off my grandparents.
That’s your middle name? Running free?
River Running Free.
That’s a pretty rockstar name.
Thanks. It’s pretty unique. My little sister’s name is Shakti Summer Moon.
Oh, okay. Do you have any other siblings?
I do. I have my older sister is Mija and my older brother is Jacob.
He got the normal name?
Yeah. She mellowed out. Well, what happened was she was married before my father and so they got normal names—like Catholic names—and then she married my father and that’s when they went all super hippie. We used to live in a commune when we were kids.
Oh, the whole hippie thing.
Oh, super hippie. But not like drug crazy hippie, but Hindi.
Was it more religion-based?
Yeah, kind of, but it was more of like Hindi religion, like we went to Satsang. Satsang is like a Hindi church. You go there and you meditate, the women sit on one side, the men sit on the other, you meditate, then you talk to the saint, his name was Baba Hari Das. Brilliant, beautiful man. My earliest memories are of him, and what he used to do for the children is, he had a little bowl of candy out front and when he wanted to give his blessings to the children, you came up and he gave you a little piece of candy. And he was just one of these guys that was a truly just genuinely happy for you, kind of person, you could see in his eye, he always had this glimmer of like enlightenment where he was just always wanted your happiness over anything. He was one of the greatest. And my mom stayed in touch with him for the longest time up until his death recently, So those are like my earliest memories…
Did you bring religion into your adulthood, or are you religious now?
I am a man of great faith, but I wouldn’t say I’m a religious man. To me religion is like a corruption of faith. Anytime you organize you get one guy who’s got one good idea about what God’s like and then you get two or three guys together and they all decide “We’re gonna define God in this way.” That’s what causes it all to go askew. Faith is something you keep for yourself and it’s what keeps you strong. But if you need to go to a group and talk to these people, and then you start defining what God wants, and then it just goes down a dark rabbit hole where you screw it all up.
So for me, I love religion. I’m a big fan of religion. I study religion just for fun. And when I was a kid—probably because of my parents influence in the Hindi church—I studied things like Buddhism, Taoism…I studied all kinds of different religions when I was a kid. I was probably the only kid in my high school checking out the teachings of Buddha.
Once you start looking at other religions you realize that a lot of those principles are the same.
Yeah, they’re all the same. The golden rule is pretty much synonymous in all religions. Like I said, the mythologies—which I find fascinating, I love the mythologies of all religions—people take their mythologies way too seriously, and that’s the biggest problem.
So where did you grow up in your commune?
I grew up in California. So I grew up in a little town called Salinas, a little armpit town, and the commune was in Watsonville, so about an hour away or so. My dad worked in produce, so that was there—it’s an agricultural town. It’s really kind of a gang-ridden town. It was not a great place to grow up, but I wouldn’t say it was that bad. A lot of gang violence and stuff. And that really shaped my life, just because of the things I had to see every day in the news, there was always some collateral damage of some poor kid getting shot.
And so by the time I was 18, I was burned out. I didn’t want to be in California anymore. So I moved away, I moved to Oregon. And it was fascinating because growing up in Salinas, I just thought gunfire happens all the time. I just thought you just hear that. And going to sleep in Salinas, you hear gunfire all the time. And I just thought that was life in America. That’s just what I assumed. And then when I moved to Oregon and I was listening at night and there’s no gunfire going on, I was like, what is this? And I talked to my friends, asking them, “Your high school wasn’t shut down regularly?” They literally had to put a fence up around my high school—a big slat fence you couldn’t see through—because of so many drive-by shootings. When I talk to people from Oregon, they’re like, “No, that’s not normal, that’s not how things are supposed to be. We didn’t experience that.” So I realized that, okay, I grew up in kind of a—I wouldn’t say a hard neighborhood—but definitely a town that had its problems.
So how did you get start getting into the industry?
I moved to Oregon, I worked in the woods for a long time, doing trails—jobs where you’d hike in 11 miles, then you’d sort of build a trail for another few miles, and then you’d hike back out. It was really labor-intensive stuff. And then when I turned 21, I realized I didn’t want to do that hard labor anymore. I didn’t necessarily want to be camping out for six months at a time.
So I went to this bar, and I decided I wanted to be a bartender. I don’t know why—it was a calling, I think. I really didn’t fully understand why I wanted to be a bartender, but I knew I wanted to be a bartender.
The only place that was hiring at the time was this gay bar called Perry’s on Pearl. And Perry’s, it had been a cornerstone of the community for a really long time, 30 years, and it was really popular. It changed names a few times, but it was a staple of the community. And people loved Perry’s.
So I got a job actually as a cocktail server for one of their busy nights, which was like a Thursday night, it was a dollar drink night. So, they hired me to cocktail. And then I told the manager, Jerry, that I really wanted to learn to tend bar. And he said, “All right you come in. We won’t pay you, but you can keep your tips and I’ll train you to tend bar on these nights.” And man, it was such an experience. The characters I met there were incredible—some of the coolest people I ever met, some of the weirdest people I ever met. We had crazy events and it was just, it was like the world was upside down.
That’s a crazy first bar experience.
It was the most bizarre experience, but I loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was one of the best places. And I worked there until it closed down a year later and the owners decided to pack up. They were tired and old.
That reminds me of the Wolf of Wall Street where he gets his first job and it’s so crazy and then he’s like, oh man, I’m really hooked.
It was great. I feel honored to have been able to be a part of Perry’s for its last year. My boss really liked me. He loved that I had such an initiative. I showed up every day to work shifts, and worked any shifts I could just to learn. And then he gave me shifts upstairs in the lounge for most of the time.
That first year, I learned a lot about bartending. I learned a lot about the psychology of bartending, how just treating everybody equally is a really easy way to be, as opposed to changing your opinion on how they look when they come in and all that. I realized if you just show everybody respect, they will shower upon you that same respect tenfold, and so I developed a loyal following of regulars at the bar. People loved me and that first year I learned so much.
It’s an important lesson to learn early on.
It really was. It was like the first bar that I really learned what people really want when they get served by a bartender.
At what point did you know this was the career you wanted?
I think I knew it immediately. I knew it because it was never boring and there were new people every day. And I got the chance to converse with people and hear their stories, especially as a bartender. A bartender, people all load their lives on you. And it’s such a beautiful thing when somebody comes in and all they want is an ear. And all you have to do is go, “How are you doing today? You wanna talk about your life, how’s your life going?” And then they will just pour themselves out to you. And only as a bartender—or like a shrink or a priest—will somebody do that with genuine sincerity, where they would just tell you everything about their lives. I got to hear some of the most amazing stories, most incredible life stories, just from everybody that would come in. And I made so many really good friends. I knew then that I really wanted to tend bar for a while and maybe own my own bar someday.
And that’s what really hooked me, it’s a job that changes every day. I can’t work in factories, I can’t work in offices, I can’t work with the same eight people every day. I have to interact with new people every single day. I hate doing the same thing over and over again. Bartending gives you the opportunity to be really creative. And you decide your money. If you want to be a good bartender, you’ll make money. If you decide you want to be selfish and stupid, then you’re not going to make money and you’re going to hate bartending. But a bartender decides their own money.
And that’s important. That’s one of the lessons I learned early on from you, when you were training me to be a bartender at the old Bebedero, you said something along the lines of, this is the only job where we are able to give ourselves a raise with our knowledge, experience, how we treat others. It really is all about elevating yourself if you have that kind of work drive.
Yeah, definitely.
I know you’ve been all over the crazy world, been in Thailand and Mexico.
Yeah, I’ve been all over. East Coast, West Coast. And I still want to see more. That’s one of the great things about bartending is that you can take it anywhere. Every country, every town, every city has a bar in it, and especially as an American bartender you can take your skills to countries where they cater to English-speaking tourists.
And that’s super important. When I moved to Thailand, I couldn’t speak Thai. And luckily, I found the one good job on Craigslist. Craigslist is a good thing to look up if you’re trying to tend bar in other countries because Craigslist is mainly only used by Americans.
People advertising for American bartenders will use Craigslist to do it. And then you’ll find like one ad that says you don’t have to speak the language fluently. And whenever I find that ad, I’m like, that’s the place. It’s usually because they’re catering to English-speaking tourists, either Americans or Europeans.
I know that you’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico as well.
I had kind of sown my oats in Thailand I had overcome a lot of fears like of travel and all that and so when I came back I was like ready to start a real relationship with Melissa and so that’s what happened.
I left for Thailand in 2010 got back in 2012 and moved here. Then we spent a year here. I got the job at the Whiskey Jar…
Is that where you met Wilson [Richey]?
I became close friends with Wilson too, and I think the same kind of thing happened. He saw what a professional I was. He saw the other bartenders standing around doing nothing. When he came in, saw me, I was like pulling shelves apart to sweep and clean. And so we hit it off, became friends. Then Melissa had to do her year of research for her dissertation for her PhD and that’s when we moved to Mexico for a year. She grew up in Puerto Vallarta with her mom. She was a native of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, essentially. I mean, she’s white, born in Montana, and then when she was four, went down to Mexico, lived in Mexico until she was in her teens. That’s where she learned to speak fluently. That’s where she fell in love with Mexican culture.
So it was through your wife that you were kind of introduced to the Mexican culture.
Yeah, really, because I’m Mexican, but I’m a Chicano. We’re raised in California, half Mexican, you know? And where I’m from, it wasn’t good to be Mexican. Like I said, a lot of gang violence. Mexicans were blamed for all the gang violence. Everything was agricultural, most people’s family were picking lettuce in the fields, and then their kids were getting in trouble at school. So being a Mexican wasn’t something that you could be necessarily proud of back then and so I didn’t speak Spanish. My mom didn’t teach us Spanish growing up even though my family spoke it in the house. Same thing with all my Mexican friends—it’s like most of them didn’t speak Spanish.
I spent a year in Mexico working at one of the best jobs I ever had. It was a place called the Verana, a beautiful boutique resort in the hills of a little beach town called Yelapa, and Yelapa is this gorgeous little beach town. They didn’t have anybody that could bring American cocktails to the place and so that’s what I brought—things like shrubs and all kinds of techniques that nobody was using, plus I was creative in decoration. I would take flowers off of trees and decorate the cocktails of flowers and leaves and bamboo sticks.
And that’s where I learned about mezcal and tequila because it was my job as a bar manager to teach mezcal, tequila classes to the clientele—which were mostly people from California because it’s a quick hour and a half flight.
Is that where your love of Tequila and Mezcal began?
Absolutely. What happened was I was required to learn about Mezcal to teach the class. And I took that very seriously. I didn’t want to look like an idiot, talking about something I didn’t know anything about. So I started studying. And the more I studied, the more I fell in love with Mezcal. The history, the mythology, the agave plant itself, everything was just so fascinating to me that I fell in love with it. And it really changed my whole palette on drinking. I used to drink nothing but Scotch and Irish whiskey, like bartenders do.
And then the more I learned about Mezcal, the more I fell in love with it, and I could really appreciate the flavors of Mezcal like I couldn’t before. I didn’t even like tequila at the time because I had bad tequila experiences. But I learned to love it because of the education, because of learning about it and realizing what a special spirit it is amongst all other spirits. A truly artisanal spirit that has a rich history and is so creative. It was all the things I love, which is like creativity and mythology and religion, things like that. And so that’s what happened to me is I just fell in love with it. And the more I studied, the more I loved it. And I would take every opportunity when I had a day off to tour agave fields, visit distilleries, talk to mezcaleros, and there’s plenty of local mezcaleros I could talk to that were making moonshine out of their backyard.
In Puerto Vallarta there’s lots of mezcalerias. There’s all kinds of mezcal bottles that I could choose from, and I got to curate the bar. I would go into town on my days off, drink and taste hundreds of different kinds of tequilas and mezcal, and then I would bring it back up to the Verana, and I would use them as part of my classes. I taught probably 100 classes while I was there and learned more and more.
So you come back. It’s what, 2016 now? You’ve got a new-found love of Mezcal…
Yeah, that’s when Wilson brought up the idea of opening a Mexican restaurant. And he had said, “You came back from Mexico with all this knowledge of tequila, I think you’re the guy to run the bar.” And I told him, you can get a lot out of me as a manager, but you’ll get more out of me as an owner. You give me partnership in this and I’ll work my ass off for this place. And Wilson was like, all right, man, here, you run the bar program… and the rest is history.
What would you say is the most important thing when it comes to being a bartender?
I mean, there’s a lot of stuff, but I think what a young bartender especially needs to understand is the nobility of the role. A lot of people don’t think about that. They think of bartenders as just the guy that slings beers, the guy that slings drinks. They don’t realize how important the bartender is, but if you think about people in our society, When you get married, you go straight to the bartender after you say your vows. When you’ve had a hard day at work, you go hit up the bartender for a shot. When you think about the person you fell in love with, chances are you met them in a bar. A lot of times you met them in a bar. Bars are where everybody goes to celebrate, but they’re also where everybody goes to mourn. When people are sad after a funeral, they go to a bar to drink. People go to a bartender to pour out their life story.
People go to a bartender to celebrate and suffer. That’s why, for me, being a bartender is one of the most noble professions in the world. Because we truly engage the world and the public in ways that very few other jobs get to do. We get to see people at their best and at their worst. And we are caretakers of those people. We are shepherds of those people. We are both the shrink and the bouncer. And so, I think young bartenders especially should know and understand the great value of a bartender.
It is an honorable job. It is one of the most honorable jobs. And so that is the most important thing I try to teach young bartenders is that man, this is not just a job. This is a calling. This is a career. This is where you can have a lot of fun, but you can decide your own money and be a good shepherd to your people. You can influence the world very positively by simply being of good service to people, being happy to lower yourself before others. And that alone will teach you so much about you personally, psychologically, what you’re capable of, what you can endure from say a crazy drunk or a how about a narcissistic crazy boss. A bar will teach you so much about the human experience that you should go into it with respect and awe and you should be really grateful to be a part of it. Because bartending will teach you everything you ever need to know about life, people, happiness, all that shit.
Bebedero has a super eclectic, really unique cocktail menu. What’s your inspiration?
Yeah, I’m an artist too, right? And I think a lot of problems with modern bartenders is they only take inspiration from other bartenders. They don’t look for inspiration in other fields. Like for me, I might see a beautiful piece of artwork and go, that would be a very cool garnish on a cocktail. I look at chefs and I look at what chefs are doing, the techniques they’re doing, and I go, wow, that would be a very cool way to turn alcohol into a solid somehow. I take inspiration from every different kind of art or every different kind of field and other bartenders, they only look at what other bartenders are doing.
So they look at all the most popular bartenders and they steal their techniques. I look at chefs and artists and workers. One of my favorite garnishes for a cocktail is a masonry nail. And I made a cocktail at the Milkman’s called the Rusty Nail or the Rusty Clavo because it was a Mexican version of that and you just stirred it with a masonry nail and that to me is one of the coolest garnishes I’ve ever seen on a cocktail because who does that? Who puts something weird like a tool inside a cocktail?
I think that’s what’s so great about bartending is you have the opportunity to be really creative. Literally, there are no limits. How you design a cocktail, how you can create a cocktail. The glassware has no limits, the garnish has no limits, the ingredients have no limits. You can do whatever you want and there are very few professions out there where you can literally take every part of what you do and make it creative and so that’s another one of the great opportunities that only bartending gives you. And if you’re smart, you’ll appreciate that creativity and it will teach you a lot of other things. I’ve learned a lot of techniques just from watching chefs and how they do things, how they cook things, how they make syrups.
As far as bizarre, I hope I haven’t reached what’s most bizarre yet. Living in Thailand, I got to taste things I had never tasted before, flavors I had never experienced before, insects and animals that I had never eaten before. So that really opened up my mind to the flavors that we can actually enjoy and appreciate is well beyond what we are being told by the average bar. The average bar has like five flavors. It’s bitter, sweet, tart, savory, salty. Those are the only flavors you get from 99% of the cocktails out there. So, whenever I can come across an ingredient or a combination of ingredients that creates a flavor I’ve never had before, that’s when I think it’s a good cocktail. We can reinvent the mojito and the margarita over and over again a million different ways and it’ll always be enjoyable. But, if you can get somebody to appreciate a cocktail that they don’t understand the flavor of, you know, that they never had that flavor in their mouth before, that’s when you can accomplish something.
But it’s the same for mezcal too, right? And why you love mezcal is because of the complexity it has and it doesn’t taste like your regular rum.
Exactly. The flavor spectrum of mezcal is so vast from sweets to vegetal, to smoky, to earthy, to woody. And then to flavors that you don’t even want to taste, like band -aids and burning tire fires. That’s the kind of flavors that I get from mezcal.
Mezcal creates flavors that I’ve never experienced before in any spirit ever. I didn’t even know that I would like something like that. Especially from working at the Verana, I often tasted things that weren’t flavors you would describe, like you would describe wine, fruity and floral and things like that, but I could taste experiences. Like I used to lead tours through the jungle to go to like waterfalls and things like that. That was part of my job, and flavors I taste in mezcal are like the smell of a moist jungle. Being close to a certain kind of tree that has a certain pollen in it. Dry desert grasses as you walk through an agave field, those smells and those aromas and those flavor spectrums are in mezcal. And so, when I describe mezcal, I don’t describe them like you would describe wine.
And that’s what you want to bring to the cocktails is that experience.
Yeah, exactly. I want to bring experiences that people don’t ever have with cocktails. I want them to taste things that they would never think they would like in a cocktail.
A lot of people want an experience. The reason the scorpions sell so well here is because it’s an experience that people can’t get anywhere. They can’t even get it in like Mexico. These are rare experiences. And that’s what I think every cocktail should be. It should be a rare experience. And every spirit should be a rare experience. It takes you out of your comfort zone a little bit. You never regret something you did to overcome fear. You only regret not doing something because you were afraid. You don’t regret skydiving after you’ve gone skydiving because you were terrified before, but when you come through it, you’re like, I am so proud of myself for doing that. And it’s the same thing with when we garnish a cocktail with a scorpion or a chapuline (Fried Grasshopper). This is something that people are like, “I’ve never had a fried grasshopper as a garnish before. I’m going to try this,” you know? And they try it, and then they’re like… “Wow, I didn’t even know that could be good, and I didn’t ever think that I would be willing to overcome that or do that.” They never forget the bar that they did that in. They never forget the place that they went to where they had that experience that cannot be duplicated.
