This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.
There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.
There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth; it’s something people remember.
The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”
That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.
