Domenico Costa, aka Dom Costa. Unmistakable and very famous bartender, one of those who make Italy great abroad. I ask you right away, what is your first memory that ties you to this profession, was there a moment in your life as a boy, as a teenager in which you realized that this would be your profession?
I was 13 years old, and after seeing a photo album of a cousin of mine who worked as a bartender for Società Italia aboard the Michelangelo, I realized that I too would do the same thing.
On the website of your famous venue "Liquid Cocktail Bar in Alassio," your biography is certainly very fictionalized and instead of explaining your more than 30-year international career, the many awards and recognitions you have had and all the prestige you have won, you tell an unlikely journey that takes you on the run among professional players, sailors, adventurers from the Panama Canal to Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia... a story that strikes me as somewhere between Corto Maltese and 1930s half-American, half-Chinese detective Charlie Chan, entangled in mysterious adventures of oriental fascination. Is this pure entertainment or is there also something authentic in your storytelling?
No, beyond the novel there is also a lot of truth, during my 7 years of sailing I sailed around the world three times, visited 65 countries, prepared drinks from Alaska to the equator and from the North Cape to the Strait of Magellan. Adventures? It inevitably happens to everyone who goes to sea to find themselves in very unusual situations, even without looking for them, especially in the East.
In your way of telling the story, it seems to me that there is a playful, disenchanted aspect and another, which is instead a bit nostalgic for a world and a way of doing the bartending trade that is now disappearing, am I wrong?
I have always maintained that one should never take oneself too seriously, and that is my way of putting myself forward anyway, never too zealously. The bartending profession is constantly evolving, it's normal, but I don't like to say "how good it used to be," it's just different, times change as well as drinking fashions and ways of working.
I believe that great bartenders, bartenders like you, a bit like those sly and wonderful concierges of the great international hotels, are the best psychoanalysts in the world and sometimes the best confidants of famous and reclusive people. You only need to glance at your customers to understand their age, nationality, social status, mood and probably even their drinking tastes. This makes you in my opinion genuine artists, special people of special sensibility.
From the height of your experience, how is drinking today ? Is there one nation that has preserved the pleasure of good, high-quality drinking more than others? What are the most interesting age groups ?
In our country there is not much of a drinking culture, changes happen slowly, often new trends come from abroad, Great Britain and the United States in the lead. We are not big trend setters. , we adapt to what happens outside our national borders, we may be a country of saints , navigators and poets, but in the world of mixed drinks we are a bit traditionalist.
The style with which you present yourself and also the style you use when explaining a technique, a product, an ingredient or the history of a venue to an audience is very engaging, funny, interesting and never banal.
You are an excellent storyteller who also transfers to the listener the atmosphere that revolves around what you are telling. How important to you is the aesthetic of a presentation, the suggestions that revolve around a creation?
I try to detach myself from the classic speaker/presenter figure, there is nothing worse than a boring speaker, especially when you have to talk about mixed drinks and not about projections or graphs on market trends or sales, this bartenders don't care about.
You are considered a great rum expert, an authority on the subject. Where do you derive this passion from? Does it date back to the time of your very long professional career on the luxury cruise ships that took you around the world?
No , when for a period of my life I was a professional pirate in the Panama Canal Zone, or rather I was a bar attendant on a ship that flew a black flag with a skull. The drink that was all the rage was rum with flame powder...a real bomb!
Can you give us some golden rules to distinguish a truly classy rum, from a mediocre product?
Often just reading the label carefully is enough to understand many of the secrets of distilled spirits, including rum, however, a rum does not necessarily have to cost a lot to be good.
Another of your passions, I understand is the Tiki style, can you tell us a little more about the history of Tiki cocktails and why they interest and amuse you?
I am a fan of the Polynesian lifestyle in general, Tiki is drinking in color, never black and white. Donn Beach , the father of the Tiki style ,invented it during a difficult time in the U.S. economy, at a time where you had to make Americans fantasize, simply by having them go to dinner at a place where they could for a moment dream that they were really in the South Seas.
How did the idea for DrinkZionary come about? What exactly is it about?
The idea came about to help colleagues who were unfamiliar with English bartending terms-not all of them have been fortunate enough to have experience abroad.
At the 2010 Rimini Barfestival, Alassio's Liquid Cocktail Bar won the Diamond Award for the best cocktail list. The motivation of the prestigious jury was "an excellent list that is unique and pays special attention to international trends."
What, in your opinion, makes your cocktail offerings so special?
I hope to give an offering that is always in step with the times.
What are the new suggestions that you are moving toward ?
It's a time where there is a great rediscovery of classic cocktails, maybe revisited, but still drinks from the past that have made the history of mixed drinks , and that makes me enormously happy.
For information and insights:
www.liquidalassio.com
Interview by Monica Palla
Interview with the great bartender Dom Costa of the famous Liquid Cocktail Bar in Alassio.
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