Reuben Virasami: Bartender Extraordinaire

Reuben Virasami is an amazing bartender.

COVID-19 has had a negative impact on the hospitality sector. Hotels, casinos, cruises, sporting venues, and restaurants were empty for months and they navigated the guidelines to stop the spread of the virus. As a result, many people have left the industry forever.

As the hospitality sector opens its doors to welcome customers, the consumer has changed. However, good food, good drink,s and great service are the key to any restaurant being successful.

I talk to Reuben who is an amazing bartender about the business and his passion.

Reuben, welcome to my blog. Let’s start by you telling my audience a little about you?

My name is Reuben Virasami. I’ve studied health administration, fashion business, and bartending. I feel fortunate to have grown up with parents that always supported what I did, but it also meant, I had numerous options in terms of what I wanted to do with my life. Thankfully, I finally found my true calling. I’m a huge sci-fi geek, I enjoy trying new food and drink, and love to travel. All but the first of these interests have led to me spending a couple of years abroad.

Tell me about your passion for bartending? How did you get into it?

I’ve spent most of my life working in the service industry, but I transitioned fully into bartending less than three years ago. Due to a family history of addiction and my parents’ strict religious beliefs, there was no alcohol kept in my home growing up. However, we have always had a strong connection to our extended family, many of whom did enjoy a drink, so it wasn’t completely taboo. Having to wrestle with these two viewpoints from a young age meant that I learned early on about both the positive and negative sides of alcohol.

A strong influence was my grandfather, a real spark of light in my family.  He spent a little time working in F&B at a golf club here in Toronto which really fueled his passion for people and hospitality. When I was a little boy, he built a bar in his basement that he used to serve drinks to his friends and family. The joy I saw in his service and in the people who received it across the bar left a distinct impression on me.

As I got older, I began to learn more about alcohol and my natural curiosity pushed me to try whatever new spirits and liqueurs I could get my hands on. Many of my friends can attest to me showing up at parties or get-togethers with a duffel bag full of bottles that I would use to mix people’s drinks. As I reached a point where these experiences accumulated, it made perfect sense for me to do this as a job and I’ve never looked back.

What do you as a bartender bring to the table? Do you feel there is anything that helps you stand out?

Passion, honesty, knowledge, attention to detail, and most importantly, a drive to do and be better than I was yesterday.

As I mentioned before, I have in my family those who are quite religious, those who drank heavily, and those who fell in between. I’ve spent much of my life reconciling what I saw as two extremes and it has helped me to understand the importance of moderation, which is still a growing concept in this industry.

How has the cocktail culture changed over the last decade?

In the last decade, people have come to expect fresh ingredients and well-made cocktails, but as the market becomes saturated with quality bars, owners need to find new ways to differentiate. As our culture becomes more environmentally conscious, many businesses, including bars, have been focusing on decreasing their carbon footprint by using more biodegradable products and choosing local ingredients.

We also have been looking at what’s going on in the food industry and borrowing ingredients and techniques from them. For example, never before in my life had I learned how to blanch vegetables or cook via sous vide until I started needing these methods for cocktail ingredients.

Bars in Toronto on the cutting edge, such as Pretty Ugly and Bar Raval have also created menus with delicious low and no alcohol cocktails as well as working on ways to reduce potential allergens in cocktails.

Bars and bartenders who stand as strong pillars in their community have been creative in finding ways to give back, such as the collaboration this past December between local bartenders and Miracle; they created a special Christmas cocktail bar pop-up that donated $1 from every drink sold to a local women’s shelter. Another example is the recent Speed Rack event here in Toronto, an all-women cocktail competition, where 100% of the proceeds went to breast cancer education and research.

I’m excited to see where cocktail culture goes in the next few years as general quality goes up and consumers demand more as they become even more educated about their purchases.

Do you consider bartending to be a glamorous job?

A bartender is often needed to be the life of the party, so the job can certainly be perceived to be glamorous. However, I would consider ‘showmanship’ a better way to explain what we do. A form of bartending we call ‘flair-tending’ was created for this; an example would be a bartender that throws shakers in the air, juggles bottles, etc. However, every style of bartending creates showmanship, just in different kinds of ways. For example, Japanese-style bartending is full of practiced and deliberate movement as such to create a beautiful sensory experience.

Transitioning into other related fields, such as working as spirit brand ambassador, writing bar books, or simply becoming famous enough to warrant bars paying to fly you in for seminars is definitely higher to me on the ‘glamour-scale’.

To be quite honest, there isn’t that much glamour in this work. A bartender is often responsible for cleaning up messes, taking out trash, and plenty of other menial tasks that people don’t notice. Anyone getting into this job with glamour in mind is likely not going to get far.

Does a good bartender also have to be a good psychologist?

One doesn’t need to be, but as I’m sure you know from your experience in the service industry, the best hotels, bars, and restaurants in the world are filled with people who are able to anticipate customers’ needs. This is sometimes slightly more difficult for a bartender, who also needs to gauge a guests’ sobriety and their actual needs more than their perceived needs, such as cutting someone off or calling someone a taxi. Depending on where you work, belligerent and aggressive customers are also part of the mix and we need to be able to anticipate how people will act and react in different mental states.

Tell me about some of your favorite ingredients to work with?

Just like with food, I’m always excited to look at different regions and countries to see what they use locally. Especially here in Toronto, I enjoy going to markets and looking at exotic fruits, vegetables, and herbs and seeing what I can do with it. For example, when I lived in Vietnam, I had a chance to try betel nut, which grows in symbiosis with a leafy plant; they both have stimulative properties and are often wrapped in each other with limestone and chewed on for a similar effect as chewing tobacco. I was able to make a cocktail that uses just a portion of the leaf, with interesting effects on both flavor and how it affects the customer.

So, to answer your question, I don’t have a specific favorite, I’m simply excited to taste and learn from those who have already been working with ingredients I’ve only just discovered.

What about spirits? Do you have a favorite you like to work with?

As I mentioned before, I’ve always been curious about trying new things, so I enjoy discovering new spirit expressions and experimenting with them. However, my favorite spirit is rum, for a few reasons.

My family is Guyanese, of Indian descent. Due to political issues, most of my family emigrated from Guyana in the mid 70’s. It’s a complicated history and growing up, even in such a multicultural city, I never felt Canadian enough, and I certainly didn’t feel Guyanese enough.

As I started to become more educated about rum’s complex history, I saw a connection to my own heritage and have since begun to appreciate both in a way I’d never been able to before. This is a spirit with incredibly humble beginnings, originally drunk by slaves and the poor, so it hurts to see the truth and quality that can be found in some modern rum overshadowed by the marketing of multinational corporations and their poor-quality products. I now see rum as a medium through which I can share my own distinct understanding of my peoples’ heritage with my family, friends, and customers. My study of rum has been instrumental in bringing me to a place where I see in myself the full value of being both Canadian and Guyanese.

What is a simple cocktail I can make at home?

Like any decent chef, I will tell you this: the beginning of understanding the plate of food or drink in front of you is to try their components individually.

Now I’m not saying you must go drink spirits on their own, but some simple cocktails will definitely help you discern what your palate prefers and create a stronger understanding of these different products.

Do you like aged rum or whiskey? Try making an Old Fashioned:

2oz of spirit
0.5oz of simple syrup (more or less based on your palate and the spirit)
2-3 dashes of angostura bitters
1 orange peel

For the syrup, simply add a 1:1 ratio of water and cane sugar or demerara sugar to a pot, boil, and stir till mixed. Once refrigerated, it should last months.

To make the drink, simply add the liquid ingredients on top of one or a few big ice cubes and stir. Take the orange peel and squeeze the skin towards the top of the drink to express some oils, which will add to its complexity.

If you’re interested in tequila, mezcal, or unaged rums, I’d recommend using the recipe skeleton of a Daiquiri:

2oz of spirit
1oz fresh lime juice
0.5oz simple syrup (more or less based on your palate and the spirit)

If you use tequila or mezcal, it might be nice to add a dash of salt to the mix, as it helps accentuate flavors already there. Add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice (or a mason jar or water bottle if you’ve got nothing else), shake and strain into a glass without ice

These cocktails are great ways to learn some classics; after you’ve done this, try sipping 10-15ml of the spirit by itself, with or without a few drops of water if you need it. Are there any flavors you taste that didn’t make it into the cocktail? Perhaps you enjoy one brand over another in a cocktail, but vice versa when tried on their own.

This is a rabbit hole, but if you make at least two drinks and prefer one over the other, I’ve done my job.

What are your future plans?

This year I hope to make at least one trip out to the Caribbean and two to the US to visit some distilleries and make more industry connections. I’m also working on being part of the upcoming Toronto Rum Festival and Tiki by the Sea, a three-day educational session in the US focused on rum and tiki. Beyond this year, I plan to continue along the path I’ve chosen and further seek opportunities to work abroad, with Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK, and Spain all being strong possibilities. My focus has also shifted from purely cocktail-focused, to looking at educating consumers and bartenders, especially concerning rum. Planning your life is like trying to hold water in your hands, so I’m not sure that everything will go as planned, but I’m here for the journey, not the destination.