It's Friday Vancouver! If you're thinking about going out for some drinks tonight, you could visit our Bartender of the Year, Jeff Savage, at botanistdining: Vancouverfriday friday vancouver vancouvernights bartender cocktails drinks bar
When we established this award in 2006, the goal was modest: try to figure out who is the top bartender in town. But what we didn’t appreciate at the time was that Vancouver was having a cocktail moment such that the winner of BOTY that year—and many years after—was not only the best bartender in town, but likely in the country… and, some might argue, the world.
Even more amazingly, as the mixology revolution grew, so did Vancouver’s standing—so when a young Albertan studying political theory and religious studies suddenly caught the barkeep bug, he was able to hop on a short flight and receive encouragement from luminaries like Jay Jones, Shaun Layton and Lauren Mote, all giants in the industry and also working bartenders in town, always willing to help out a visiting colleague.
Photo: Tanya Goehring. Bartender of the Year Jeff Savage and Sommelier of the Year Christina Hartigan pose in Savage’s Botanist home base. But once ensconced in the mad scientist lab in the Pac Rim, things really took off. In 2019 he won World Class Canada , then finished second in the world by an insanely close margin—and, in doing so, played his own key role in keeping Vancouver perched as one of the world’s cocktail capitals. And like those who came before him, he’s always happy to mentor a newbie or lead a patron through the genesis of a cocktail that might have as many literary references as it has ingredients.