From Wyoming to Vegas, I Was Desperately Seeking Cocktail Culture

I grew up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Alex Day, my partner, grew up in Bend, Oregon. We both grew up on—or in, really—the mountains. We always thought it was kind of funny, because Bend and Jackson Hole have this kind of strange sibling-city relationship too.

Their cultures are similar on a lot of levels; both of the cities are isolated, kind of in the middle of nowhere, and super liberal. There are a lot of people that spend their time between the two cities, and there are a few shops that have one outlet in Jackson and one in Bend.

Well, Jackson Hole is a town—it's not a city. Bend is also a small town, but a little bigger. When you go to Jackson, you're like, "cute." There's a bar where the barstools are horse saddles. The Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. I love that bar. It's like 200 feet away from the bar we're partners in, The Rose. The bartenders there are all cowboys. and there's a serious Western swing dancing thing that happens there every weekend. There's live music almost every night. The fresh-pressed, very starched-shirted cowboys come out there with their dress shirts and their hats.

I loved growing up there. it was something that I didn't appreciate as much then as I do now. I miss it every day, and I love every moment that I can spend back there. I love the skiing, I love the summer. I grew up skiing almost every day of my life. Every day there was snow. My mom still lives there, so I get to go back a decent amount, but our schedule keeps us a little too busy these days. To be able to now go back and help shape the drinking culture of my hometown through our bar there, it's crazy. That's crazy.

Jackson is hyper liberal. In a sea of red, Jackson is a tiny blue dot, but it is aggressively blue. Once, there were parades of tearing down a statue of Dick Cheney, who had a house there, and dragging it through the square. It was an homage to the the Saddam Hussein tearing-down-statue incident [in 2003].

I think the culture is what brought both me and Alex to New York. I went to college upstate, so naturally most of my friends ended up out here. I went to school for fine art photography, which is really just sort of an open gallery art installations, experiential art installations, which I think certainly helped and relates to what we do now. After college, my teachers were really pushing me to go down that rabbit hole.

I've been in hospitality in some way or another since I was 13, and I knew that I didn't want to go into the gallery arts. I didn't like the idea of just a critic or someone else holding all the cards. I love hospitality, I love spirits, I've loved this since long before I even thought of it as a viable career. I used to have this drink guide that I would study like it was the Bible, even though it was so bad back then. There were cocktails in it made of like, flavored brandy—not like apple brandy which is made from apples, but schnapps, the American idea of schnapps. Just total shit.

So I asked around my family, said, hey , does anyone have any connections in the hospitality industry? My cousin Mike, who's like 15 years older than me, was like, well, I grew up with the Morton family, and Mike Morton Jr. has a couple of places out in Vegas. So I flew out there to Las Vegas, met with the managers, never met with Mike once, but they offered me a job as totally a friends-of-the-family gig—never in a million years should they have given it to me. i was the youngest person working at the place and it was the Palms in Las Vegas, and they had a steakhouse, Ghost Bar, and Rain, which most people know from The Real World. That nightclub was where I was working as a VIP host.

I still have my business card. I was clean shaven and I had to wear a suit every day with colorful ties. I had a walkie talkie on my belt with an earpiece and a microphone in my sleeve. It was a giant nightclub—I think the capacity was 3,500 people. Gigantic, huge, massive nightclub. There were 7 different VIP areas and I was one of six different VIP hosts, so I usually floated because they had enough hosts; they hired me just because the boss said to.

So for six months, I floated. I had almost no responsibilities. I would get a certain number of wristbands like you would get at a water park, and these wristbands were like gold for these idiot party goers. I've never been a club person or a Vegas person, so I was so uninterested in all of this, but it was hilarious. I minored in sociology, so I treated it like a giant sociological study of buffoonery. American buffoonery. But I also took it seriously in that I knew I wanted to go into the bar business, and it was a very calm, almost meditative, time for me. I was making great money and had 4 day weekends. so I read every single book that i could get my hands on: Opening Bars for Dummies, Business Plans for Idiots, basically everything geared towards people with no business education. Bar design books; I just started amassing a library and devouring everything I could, and that was when I discovered that there were some cocktail books out there where people actually knew that they were talking about. David Wondrich had his first book published at this time. I just became obsessed, and every night I would take notes about anything I could.

After my time in Vegas, I was desperately seeking culture—anything but freshly dried and painted stucco. Vegas is a hard thing for a 21 or 22 year-old kid to resist.You're making great money, you have access to everything, and the cost of living is so cheap. But I was like… nope.

So I went to New York, and about 9 months later I opened Death + Co. I was 23 when I moved here, turned 24 through the process. and opened up on New Year's, 2006-2007. In our careers, Alex and I have definitely had moments when we're on an airplane every week. It's a little daunting.

Soon, I'm getting two days to go back to my dad's ranch, which is in the middle of Wyoming, and I'll go hunt on the ranch in a place almost the size of the island of Manhattan, but with 10 people in it. But the opportunity that we have in this career path is amazing and frenetic and incredibly fast-paced, at times very indulgent and at times very celebratory. It's nice to get on top of a mountain every once in a while and just go for a walk.

David Kaplan is the co-owner of Death + Co. and Proprietors LLC, along with Alex Day. Click here to read Alex's accompanying piece, and to enter to win a signed copy of their book Death & Co., available now from Ten Speed Press.