Kapri Robinson Is Our 2023 Bartender of the Yr

Kapri Robinson has loads happening, and she or he’s dealing with it just like the seasoned bartender she is.

“I’ve by no means seen Kapri within the weeds,” says Deke Dunne, the bar director of Washington D.C.’s Allegory, which Robinson helped reopen in 2021. 

On prime of her position at Allegory, named our Finest Resort Bar of 2023, Robinson is the founder and president of Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest, the nation’s first-ever cocktail competitors for Black and Brown bartenders. She showcases her vibrant character on Soul Palate, the weekly podcast she hosts with Denaya “Dee” Jones-Reid, and she or he was a contestant on the primary season of the Netflix actuality collection Drink Masters. 

Robinson started bartending in D.C. when she was 21 and has since labored at quite a few spots within the metropolis, together with Addendum and Dependable Tavern. However the now-30-year previous Robinson says her profession actually took off in 2017, after she gained D.C.’s Cocktail Queen title.

“Due to that competitors, I went to my first-ever distillery,” she says. “I used to be featured on TV. Then I began to listen to about all these alternatives to be concerned within the business past my metropolis.” 

Robinson needed different Black and Brown bartenders to have the identical alternatives, so in 2018, she launched Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest together with her good friend Michael Vacation. What began as a one-day competitors in D.C. has developed right into a nationwide weeklong occasion that features distillery excursions, brand-sponsored dinners, mentor pairings, and different alternatives. 

“Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest’s foremost focus is certainly schooling and empowerment,” says Robinson. “We’re not solely difficult [contestants] on a cocktail however we’re giving them a glance into what else occurs within the bartending world.” 

“Our competitors creates loads of bonding amongst opponents,” she provides. “It creates eye-opening moments. Lots of people stated it was their first time being at a model dinner or doing spirit tastings.” 

It’s additionally changed into a community that features a 300-plus-person WhatsApp group of bartenders from world wide. 

“Kapri is a neighborhood builder,” says Jones-Reid, who gained the primary Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest competitors in 2018 and joined the staff as a content material curator in 2019. “Individuals naturally gravitate towards her, and she or he likes bringing folks collectively who’re like-minded.”  

Robinson’s strengths have discovered a pure house at Allegory, which opened in 2018 however closed through the pandemic (her first shift was purported to be on the day town shut down in 2020). When Dunne reopened the bar in 2021, he needed to create an area that might converse to the art work on the partitions by muralist Erik Thor Sandberg, which depicts civil rights activist Ruby Bridges in an Alice in Wonderland-inspired universe. Robinson was the primary particular person he referred to as. 

“She will not be solely one of the crucial gifted bartenders from a palate standpoint, she’s additionally an activist and an advocate and she or he understands what it means to construct a Black area,” he says.

Robinson helped to assemble the brand new staff, which incorporates proficient bartenders of colour like Princess “PJ” Johnson and Greg Lengthy, and has emerged as a frontrunner. “She by no means needs to relaxation on her laurels,” says Dunne. “She at all times needs to be higher, she at all times needs to push, and she or he actually does take a management position among the many staff to push everybody to be higher, to be their finest model of themselves.”

Robinson could also be a “tradition shifter,” as Jones-Reid places it, however her bartending model is firmly rooted within the classics.

“I like quite simple cocktails that blow your thoughts, so 5 substances or much less if attainable,” she says. 

“She is an encyclopedia of cocktails,” says Jones-Reid. “I don’t know anybody who is aware of as many random pre-Prohibition, post-Prohibition, trendy classics… You can provide her the bottom of one thing and she will flip it into something.” That may embody the Unicorn, an “Afro-Caribbean Rum Outdated Customary,” or the Backyard of Dwell Flowers, a drink described on the menu as what would occur “if a Mai Tai was grown in a backyard.”

“She simply is aware of find out how to steadiness drinks, and I feel it’s as a result of she has a deep understanding of basic cocktails,” says Dunne. “She understands the steadiness between citrus and sugar and spirit and fats.” 

When she’s not working at Allegory, Robinson is planning for Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest, which was on hiatus in 2023 however will return subsequent 12 months with a bigger industrial area for contestants to create their cocktails. “One in all my greatest issues is to create a legacy on this business the place once I’m gone, folks nonetheless talk about me,” says Robinson. “I’m proud to have the ability to put collectively a neighborhood with Chocolate Metropolis’s Finest and be a voice that may assist others thrive and study and develop.”  

She provides that although the competitors will at all times have roots in D.C., it’s open to bartenders from everywhere in the nation, and in the future, she hopes, the world. 

“Chocolate is available in so many types and shades and colours, as do Black and Brown folks,” says Robinson, with fun. “We’re all in Chocolate Metropolis.”