At a time in our competitive industry when outside-the-box thinking is all but a requirement, the professionals featured by HOTELS can inspire you to think differently. This week, it’s Pippa Guy, senior bartender at the American Bar at The Savoy. Last week: Mitch Patel, CEO of Vision Hospitality Group. Guy, Patel and other trend-setters, thought leaders and change-makers are all featured our April People Issue.
Around The Savoy, 24-year-old Philippa Guy is a bit of a superstar. The first woman to be named senior bartender at the American Bar in more than a century, she’s also on the road to fame within the insular cocktail and spirits world.
Contributed by Jeanette Hurt
But Pippa, as she is known, describes herself in more modest terms. “My strength and my talents are that I am just calm and have a lot of patience, under pressure especially,” says Guy, before she returns — not rushes —to a bustling Tuesday night behind London’s longest-surviving cocktail bar. “When it gets super busy, I don’t tend to get stressed. I’m very much like the mother of the bar with all the guys, and I’m the calming figure.”
Guy’s promotion to senior bartender is steeped in history. “This is a particularly lovely story as it reminds us all of Ada Coleman, who is arguably the most admired and cited female bartender from history,” says Charlotte Voisey, director of brand advocacy at U.K.-based liquor company William Grant & Sons. Ada “Coley” Coleman, considered the world’s first celebrity bartender, was hired in 1899 at Claridge’s but was so popular and skilled that she became senior bartender at The Savoy in 1903, where she reigned until she retired in 1926.
Gender equity hasn’t inspired Guy. “To be honest, that sort of never really occurred to me,” she says. “I was in my first year, and I just started working part-time at a bar around the corner to earn a bit more money on the side. Then I ended up loving it more than I was enjoying university.”
By the time she graduated from Leeds University, she had been promoted to bar supervisor, and after 10 months traveling in Southeast Asia and Australia, Guy returned to Leeds. She was hired at Oporto, a bar with a reputation for churning out excellent mixologists. There, as bar manager, she met Declan McGurk, bar manager of the American Bar, in town to teach a whiskey seminar. “She impressed me from the moment I met her,” McGurk says. “She has a great presence behind the bar.”
McGurk suggested she come to the American Bar. “I remember thinking that I’d just apply for it on a bit of a whim, not actually expecting that I’d actually get a job,” Guy says. “I had to move everything in my life to London, so that was a bit of a shock.”
Server to senior
That was two years ago. Guy was hired as a server, something she’d never done. In 2016, she was promoted to junior bartender, and then in September, McGurk interviewed her for senior bartender. “He grilled me pretty hard in the interview on how I felt I was working and this and that and another, and then at the end, he told me that he’d actually signed off all the papers two days before and had given me the job,” Guy says. “I started crying, and I cried for about 10 minutes. He’s been incredibly supportive, he and Erik (Lorincz, head bartender). Erik’s been really good about giving me his time for training and development as well.”
Guy became the first woman to wear the specially tailored white jacket worn by the bar’s senior bartenders (the tradition started after Coleman retired).
“While numbers show that we are getting closer to gender equality in the bar and cocktail industry, men still tend to dominate, especially in the high-profile positions,” Voissey says. “As a benchmark establishment for the industry, the American Bar offers such a (renowned) stage.”
In mid-February, Guy and another senior bartender, Giannis Sitanos, turned the Gorilla Bar in Thessaloniki, Greece, into an American Bar outpost for the evening; in April, she and and Lorincz were to travel to Singapore to take over the Manhattan Bar.
Guy and her colleagues are finalizing the American Bar’s new menu, which also will debut in April. Inspiration comes from the bar’s collection of Terry O’Neill photographs. “One of my drinks on the next menu is a twist on white port and tonic,” says Guy. “I like using port in drinks a lot.”
Throughout its history, American Bar senior bartenders have created cocktails that became classics, including Coleman’s Hanky Panky. Guy’s yet-to-be-revealed port and tonic cocktail might be next.