A Few Last Words with Paul Clarke

What’s shakin’, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 281 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Eric Kozlik.

Thanks for joining me for this interview episode, where I track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that I can share their secrets with you.

This time around, I’m joined by Paul Clarke (@cocktailchron). He’s the Editor in Chief at Imbibe Magazine, Author of The Cocktail Chronicles, and host of the Radio Imbibe Podcast, which is one of my favorite shows to listen to when I’m not working on this one. Paul and I pulled up a seat during our recent spirits judging stint at the American Distilling Institute’s annual International Spirits Competition to explore the legacy of one of the cocktail renaissance’s most beloved bartenders: Murray Stenson.

Upon his passing in September of 2023, Murray was memorialized for the major part he played in bringing The Last Word cocktail back onto the world stage after decades of obscurity, but he also played a massively important role in stewarding the overall cocktail culture of Seattle for many years.

In this Seattle cocktail retrospective with Paul Clarke, Editor in Chief of Imbibe Magazine, some of the topics we discuss include:

• How Paul began his drinks journey in the early days of the cocktail renaissance and became a regular at the ZigZag Cafe, a Seattle cocktail den that rose to prominence thanks, in large part, to a bartender named Murray Stenson.
• The fascinating gravitational pull that Murray exerted, both within professional hospitality circles and on the community of cocktail enthusiasts who congregated at his bar. 
• How Murray resurrected The Last Word cocktail from the pages of a forgotten 1950s cocktail book and why his quest for the weird, wonderful, and esoteric extended far beyond cocktails.
• We also examine hospitality through the lens of an old-school bartender, someone who understood that the people are more important than the drinks – and we try to collect some takeaways for young bartenders who are just starting out on their hospitality journey.
• Along the way, we consider the merits of large vinyl collections and a lifelong fascination with music, the simple pleasure of spilling “your unique weirdness” to the bartender after a couple drinks, why Murray was “too cool” for awards ceremonies, and much, much more.

As I prepared for this interview, and now, as I’m preparing it for you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the purpose of elegy–why we derive meaning from commemorating someone who’s passed away. In the case of a service industry veteran who cared for tens of thousands of thirsty patrons and likely poured hundreds of thousands of drinks over the course of a decades-long career, I think for me it boils down to a sense of awe at the sheer amount of hospitality that was channeled through someone like Murray.

It makes you wonder: how can one person remember so many regulars and their drink orders? How can you show up day after day and manage not to get swept up in the ephemeral glitz and glam of cocktail culture? How can you take a profession with so much repetition and tedious labor and somehow imbue it with a sense of soul?

I guess maybe that’s the purpose of elegy: a reminder that these questions are still important and that they’re now for us to try and figure out.