Photos by John Haynes
Bartender Marco Zappia at Martina
It’s impossible to find a seat at Marco Zappia’s bar. The hottest cocktail bar in the city lies in the middle of an Argentine restaurant in cozy Linden Hills. Only 16 seats surround Martina’s green marble bar: veiny, forest-green marble that would match the appointment of a library or an old bank. And the beautiful people have been stacked up two deep around this thing for months. If you want to sit down for a session with Marco and his cocktails, you either need to know somebody who works there, or somebody needs to know you.
Or you can show up at the glamour hour of 4:55 pm on a Sunday, and scramble for the last four-top out in the dining room. It’s an awkward post-brunchy time for food, maybe, but a perfect hour for cocktails. I order something called a Gancia Batido. The name basically means “vermouth smoothie,” but it snaps off your tongue with some wicked Argentine topspin. Marco says this is the first full cocktail menu he’s authored himself. And what a list! Most of the drinks come with titles that remind you of a Jorge Luis Borges short story (the Naked Ballerina #2, the Viceroy), usually a nod to either the history of Martina’s owner and head chef Daniel del Prado, or to Marco’s personal mythology. And when he delivers them, he’s prone to throw in a bit more magical cocktail realism.
Marco casts a charmed presence himself: He’s as tall and rangy as an Edward Gorey cartoon, with a droopy mustache and a man bun perched like a tiny robin’s nest on the top of his head. He’s wearing velveteen driving slippers without any socks.
“It’s a housemade vermouth,” he explains, dropping off the Gancia Batido at my table. “Eucalyptus, birch bark, wormwood, ginseng, turmeric, ginger root, and galangal are the dominant botanicals.”
The Gancia-type vermouth is basically the Argentine version of Campari. The one in front of me includes a little green chartreuse, and Haus Alpenz génépi: another housemade liqueur soaked in herbes de Provence, soda water, and lemon. Marco’s dramatic twist is to pour this herbal concoction over a small pile of chilled aquamarine-colored rocks.
“Amazonite,” Marco says. “They’ll both chill your drink and open up your throat chakra, stimulating your conversation.” Marco smiles then. He’s in on the joke that this whole procedure—the ingredients, the hippie crystals—sounds a little absurd, and yet the smile also seems to be probing for some recognition that you’re in on the fact that he’s completely serious. Like, write-a-49-page-bartending-manifesto-and-assign-it-to-the-bar-staff serious.
If he were giving this introduction in an 18th century salon, Marco would bow and flutter his handkerchief at me. In contemporary Minneapolis, he simply walks back to his bar.
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Marco Zappia prepares his Naked Ballerina #2, finishing it with a spritz of absinthe.
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The drinks exhilarate our table. Unless you’re trying to get blitzed with a frat boy’s efficiency, cocktails reach their fullest potential when they’re a little ridiculous. And we all agree that these might be the most ridiculous cocktails we’ve ever had. The Naked Ballerina #2 includes a peacock feather protruding from the top of its coupe glass, supposedly to mimic the peacock tattoo of Marco’s first love.
The gin and tonic comes in a wine glass. Picture a small bowl filled with everybody’s favorite ice—those soft white pellets that you got as a kid at Pizza Hut—garnished with lime wedges whose fresh peels have been decoratively carved into some kind of shamanic pattern.
On the subject of peacocking, Marco’s drinks have been attracting notice on a national stage. Robert Simonson, the drinks critic at The New York Times, waxed enthusiastic after a recent visit.
“I was most struck by Marco’s layering of spirits in nearly every drink,” Simonson says. “Using several brands of vodka, brandy, rum, or what have you to achieve a unique depth of flavor, as well as his use of housemade vermouth—not one but four different kinds.”
Marco brings an unusual level of obsession to developing the flavor profiles of his beverages—“eminently quaffable” is the ideal, Marco says. But it’s the thought—and the rhetoric—behind the drinks that make this bartender special. As much as Marco wants to serve you a perfect drink, he kinda wants to go Molotov with the bottle and explode the commercial tyranny of the branded craft cocktail. (You only live once!)
Where will that kind of subversive thinking and immoderate, even excessive, talent take Marco Zappia? Cable television? The New York Times bestseller list? How far can a star bartender go in our society?
After my first sip, I Instagram my vermouth and soda, pointing in the caption to its mystical crystal throat-chakra powers.
Some hater, unconcerned with the future of the American cocktail, immediately comments, “OMG, how cool and trendy.”
*****
Marco is only 26 years old, but he’s been a presence in the craft cocktail world for a few years now. City Pages named him bartender of the year in 2014, when he was a 22-year-old slinging drinks at local cocktail hipsterdrome Eat Street Social.
Back then, Marco served as Nick Kosevich’s protégé. Kosevich, a burly cartoon of a cocktail bartender, was *a partner at Eat Street, as well as one half of Bittercube, a bitters manufacturer and a bartending consulting company. When Kosevich made Marco a partner, he got a tattoo of Bittercube’s logo on his arm. Last winter, Marco abruptly burned out, and resigned through *an email.
Marco is worried that this mentorship burnout thing could be part of a cycle. Partly because he’s used to playing the prodigy. At the age of 14, he tested out of high school, passed his GED exam, and relocated with his hippie mother from Linden Hills to Berkeley, California. There, she rented a house and enrolled him in Stanford’s Advanced Learning Program, an education track for gifted youth. The next year, he transferred to Bard, a liberal-arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. As a 15-year-old, he studied critical theory and the deconstruction. “It was a bunch of intellectual masturbation,” he says. “I had to kind of fake it. Bravado came in handy.”
Marco felt some of that same self-doubt—but more acute—around the Bittercube guys, Kosevich and his partner, Ira Koplowitz. Nick and Ira *follow a lineage that starts with Sasha Petraske, the bartender who, in 2002, revived dapper craft-cocktail culture at his famed Milk and Honey speakeasy in Manhattan. When Marco attempted to shake his first daiquiri under Nick and Ira’s stern oversight at Eat Street, he realized he was the thing shaking—not the drink.
Throughout 2016–17, Marco spent weeks on end traveling the country as a drinks-program consultant for Bittercube. He opened more than *10 bars, as well as high-profile projects in the Twin Cities, like the whimsical menu of adult malts and slushies at the mini-golf palace Can Can Wonderland. After a while, the only thing keeping him at this exhausting job became the fear of disappointing his two older brothers.
“Nick and I, we are best friends,” he says. “I watched his kid. I was at his wedding. We traveled the world together.” The dream *as Marco recalls it, was to open a 12-seat bar together. “We would be open four days a week, three days off,” he says. “And then we would go to Scotland and collect water.”
Eventually, Marco realized that for the sake of his own creative integrity—and sanity—he would have to leave. He also knew it was going to hurt. Since quitting Bittercube more than a year ago, Marco hasn’t spoken to Kosevich. He still has that Bittercube logo tattooed on his arm.
But the gig at Bittercube—and that name certainly seems loaded now—helped Marco learn more than technique. It defined what he didn’t want to do: spend his working life trying to convince risk-averse restaurateurs to be just a quarter-jigger more creative.
“There’s this recurring theme in my life of looking for structure, looking for a mentor,” Marco says. Yet del Prado, at Martina, is the first boss to treat him as an equal. Marco says del Prado tells him, “Do whatever the fuck you want behind the bar as long as you hit these numbers.”
In July, Marco plans to open another project with del Prado—Colita, an Argentine barbecue restaurant with the cocktails to match. He’ll be able to hire another 10 bartenders, doubling his team. Some of them will move to Colita, some will stay at Martina.
He has a new dream now—perhaps a more realistic one than fen-dipping in the Scottish Highlands. Marco hopes in the not-too-distant future to open his own cooperatively owned place: an establishment where his team will share equally in the profit and creative invention.
Some of Martina’s bartenders—guys like Dustin Nguyen—have *worked alongside Marco since his Eat Street and Bittercube days. Dustin’s Murakami Tea, a pale pink, bourbon-based milk punch, recently won best punch at the Minneapolis leg of Cochon555, the prestigious pork-focused culinary competition.
“I want to get Dustin his own bar,” he says. “I want to get Adam Witherspoon”—another Martina guy—“a bar.”
Talented restaurant people like to open new restaurants. They can’t stop themselves. But what Marco really seems to be talking about here is how to prolong his working relationship with his protégés. It’s almost as if Marco is searching for a way to rewrite his Bittercube experience—this time, with a happier ending.
*****
Marco Zappia in the basement cocktail lab at Martina
Marco peels citrus, with bartender Adam Witherspoon, in his basement lab, where he also blends alcohols, stores botanicals, and reads. This is where the magic happens.
I finally score a reservation to sit at Marco’s bar on a Tuesday night. Before coming in, Marco sends me, as briefing material, The Martina Bartender Training Manual. This is what the bartending staff colloquially refers to as “Marco’s Manifesto.” It’s a wildly entertaining 49-page Microsoft Word document, wherein the Doogie Howser of Twin Cities mixology breaks down everything, including the slave trade and its relationship to sugarcane, with a long exposition on the practical and ethical status of French and Spanish rums.
The overarching point—which you realize somewhere around page 5—is that the entire human history of fermentation has created just five archetypal cocktails. Marco calls this “The Pentagram of Cocktails.” Once you’ve mastered these five, every other recipe is just a question of ratios.
All this theorizing will leave you needing a drink. The plan had been to sit at the bar with my fiancée and engage in a Socratic breakdown of Marco’s philosophy, while sipping our way through the five points of his pentagram: the Sour, the Daisy, the Long Drink, the Old Fashioned, and the Manhattan/Martini. But the section of the manifesto that most intrigues me is the most manifesto-y part. It comes near the very end—page 48—under the label “The Idea of Brands.” And this idea may be the thing that separates what Marco is doing at Martina from what almost every other American bar is doing.
If you look at the 11 drinks on Martina’s cocktail menu, you may notice one weird thing: Hardly any of them mention what bars refer to as “call booze.” That is, brand names, like Hennessy or Maker’s Mark (or slip-sliding downmarket, Captain Morgan). No top shelf, no rail. No hierarchy.
That’s because Marco blends all his liquors. His London Dry Gin, for instance, contains a mixture of five different types, ranging from big brands to small batch: Tanqueray, Beefeater, Broker’s, City of London, and Citadelle. His vodka blend ranges from international to local: Modest, Boru, Green Mark, and Norseman. He does all of his mixing on site, in his basement laboratory, next to his botanical library and the thermoelectric wine cooler where he ages his concoctions.
Marco explains that this bit of workaday alchemy depends on buying booze in bulk. The result? He can keep his internal liquor costs at a more egalitarian level: The cheap vodka drinker isn’t subsidizing the expensive whiskey drinker. And his menu prices can be competitive with the mainstream bars that receive price breaks in exchange for letting the beverage companies determine what to stock. Specifically, most of the Martina cocktails cost between $9 and $11—at the same time the local boutique cocktail creeps inexorably toward the $20-a-glass you’ll pay in New York.
In the consulting world, brands rule. Marco says he’s seen brand sales reps offering $40,000 for Instagram product placement. He’s seen bars accept cases of comped booze and equipment, including slushy machines and cocktail glasses. Whenever you see copper mugs behind a bar, he says, big liquor brands have provided them. In exchange, the booze merchants demand placement on drink menus—and sometimes require the bar to carry a distributor’s entire line of products.
“I’m blending because I don’t want my bar to be branded,” Marco says. “I don’t want to owe anybody or have somebody own my soul.”
Simonson, of The New York Times, suggests that Marco’s blending technique isn’t novel unto itself. But the concept of mixing as a way to eradicate brands from a menu? “That is new,” he says, “as far as I can tell.”
I would have loved to discuss all this with Marco over a drink. But despite the intentionally watered-down glasses full of crypto-booze, I somehow get drunk. And he gets dizzyingly busy. The bar at 10 pm is a scene. There’s Leslie Hammons, doyenne of the Hammons Weinstein Gallery . . . and at the other end of the bar—separated by 12 beautiful people (all seemingly carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag, regardless of gender)—is Billy Jurewicz, the gonzo founder and CEO of marketing agency space150.
Linden Hills on a Tuesday. Who knew?
Cocktail at Martina
Back at Martina the next afternoon, nursing a paper cup of cod chowder from Clancey’s Meats and Fish across the street, I’m surprised to find that my head doesn’t hurt much at all.
Whatever liquid resides in those drinks, it doesn’t seem to be lock de-icer and nail-polish remover.
Marco laughs: “That would be fucked up if I bought super-cheap spirits and then blended a little bit of Tanqueray into it and said, ‘I have Tanqueray in my blend.’”
Marco is much quieter during the day. He’s a reader. His basement lab at Martina spills over with books: everything from David Wondrich’s history of cocktails to a new stack of cultural criticism from Camille Paglia.
That is to say, the dashing Marco we see at the bar is a performance of sorts. “I get really nervous before every service,” he says. “Every single one.”
Dustin Nguyen brings us both a cocktail, the Dharma Bum, that he’s preparing for an event coming up over the weekend.
“Is it clarified?” Marco asks. (This is a procedure that uses pectin to prepare clear cocktails, while softening the citrus flavors.) Dustin nods. Marco tastes the concoction and then issues a quick but mild order. “Do it continuously, for about 35 minutes.”
I ask Marco if he’s worried about burning out again.
He cogitates for just a moment. “If you’re always being fed, always having stimulation, and always evolving and growing? I could work 100 hours a week doing that. But when you’re doing that many hours a week for something you don’t love, that you don’t believe in, then everything starts hitting.”
Dustin pads back into the room and updates Marco, like a resident briefing the senior surgeon outside the operating theater. He’s been infusing grain alcohol with 280 grams of beets, peeled and sliced, for about half an hour. “I like the color,” Dustin says of the exsanguinated shade of pink, “but I don’t think we get that much beet flavor.”
“Let it sit for another bit longer,” Marco says. “Another half hour?”
Dustin nods and walks away.
Marco is an artist but also a bartender, and he already seems to realize that the only time you need to rush a cocktail is when there’s a guest at your bar.
See the 4-page (!), 44-ingredient (!!) recipe that Marco made for us, inspired by this interview. It takes a classic cocktail—basically, a negroni made with mixed gin (infused with beets), homemade bitters, and his version of Americano vermouth—and turns it into a performance.
* Corrections and clarifications: The text has been changed here.
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