The Team Behind Cocktail Culture at Courtland Club
Laura Ganci and Kayla Campbell shake up the cocktail experience at the Providence bar.
Head bartender Kayla Campbell and beverage director Laura Ganci manage the bar program at Courtland Club. Photo courtesy of Courtland Club/Nadia Eisa.
Like a perfectly balanced cocktail, Laura Ganci and Kayla Campbell achieve the “golden ratio” on the bar menu at Courtland Club. The pair of bartenders lead the team at the intimate Providence cocktail bar, restaurant and part-time jazz club. Ganci, the beverage director, handles the day-to-day vision, recipe development and ordering, while head bartender Campbell manages the nightly drink service and guest experience.
The Eight Ball cocktail. Photography by Angel Tucker
Campbell was first drawn to her career at Courtland Club as a guest. She was already a regular when she overheard Ganci say they were looking for help, so she seized the opportunity. At the time, she was working in a cubicle and had weekends available. Ganci hired her as a host, but she quickly rose to server, and then trained to become a bartender. She soon was able to leave her day job, working her way up to head bartender. She was recently nominated for Punch’s Best New Bartenders 2026 list to acknowledge rising talent.
“I really adore the people aspect of it,” Campbell says. “I think that was what drew me to taking this on as a second job in the first place. I was missing the human interaction that I wasn’t finding sitting at a desk sending emails all day long.”
Ganci is a mentor to Campbell and many of the other team members who want to learn about spirits. The bar earned recognition as a 2024 James Beard Awards Semifinalist for Outstanding Bar. Ganci crafts her own Sicilian-style amaro recipe based on seasonal herb ingredients, and makes her own passionfruit cordial (used in the Radiant Gradient) and blackberry cordial (used in the Magic 8 Ball), passing along techniques to team members along the way, especially Campbell. “I jokingly call her my protege. It’s never an issue for me to start someone from green and teach them whatever it is that I know,” Ganci says. “And with Kayla, it was so fun to be reminded of what it was like in the beginning.”
They spent many late nights at the bar together after closing. “I remember when we would close together at the end of our shift, and she would pour me a teeny, tiny sip of four different gins, and she would describe each one of them to me in great detail. I would take notes furiously on my phone,” Campbell says. “And this is at like, 1:45 in the morning after we’ve cleaned the bar and everybody’s gone, but she would do this for me, week over week over week.”
“It’s very rare, I think, to find somebody who has that kind of thirst for growth and for learning and advancing,” Ganci adds.
Courtland Club was a former neighborhood social club. Photography by Angel Tucker
The pair continue to spend time together infusing syrups, sipping spirits, describing tasting notes and testing out drink recipes until they get the right flavors and ratios. Ganci still creates the majority of the seasonal, quarterly cocktail menu with Campbell contributing several drinks. Ganci even illustrates each drink on the menu.
“I have a fine art background, and any way that I can marry this with any of my other academic interests is always exciting to me,” Ganci says.
The Zodiac cocktail also rotates each month, something that started when Courtland Club opened nearly eight years ago.
The off-the-beaten-path location down a side street on the West End of Providence is deeply embedded in its neighborhood and the local music and art community. Courtland Club hosts weekly Sunday night jazz and a monthly Thursday night jazz program called Expansions spotlighting artists from outside of Rhode Island. “I think just because of the nature of our size and being nestled in a neighborhood, it gives us an opportunity to be really responsive to our community around us, and puts us in a position where we can respond,” Ganci says.
What makes their work even more fun is adapting the cocktail menu to complement the creations of the resident chef, Panagiota “Paula” Agganis, who runs Courtland Club’s Greek-themed restaurant concept, Paula’s. Her menu includes a dip platter of beet tzatziki sauce, pureed fava beans and whipped feta with pita, dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), lemon potatoes, a braised pork gyro and a lamb shank with saffron orzo.
The Zodiac cocktail. Photography by Angel Tucker
Ganci pairs the cuisine with several cocktails with Greek elements, including the Brine-Tini, a non-alcoholic martini sometimes made with Kalamata olive brine or pickled honeycrisp apple brine. Another winter cocktail, Home of the Gods, was a Greek mountain tea-infused cocktail with blanco tequila, fennel seed liqueur, blood orange cordial, allspice, lemon and Italian citrus soda.
“The mountain tea imparts floral notes, and it can push the flavor of the tequila, and then the blood orange is one of the things you think about from the Mediterranean,” Ganci says. “I was trying to pull in those layers, and the things that are coming out of the kitchen.”
The team at Courtland Club finds ways to mitigate food waste by incorporating citrus fruits in the food menu, and using the zest and juices for the bar program.
“When they make ice cream, they use a whole bunch of egg yolks, and then we use the egg whites for cocktails,” Campbell says. “We have egg white foam on top of the Magic Eight Ball. And after we finish peeling all the skins off oranges to garnish drinks, they take those oranges and use the flesh on the inside for salads.”
Instead of nose-to-tail cooking, it’s peel-to-pith bartending.
51 Courtland St., Providence, 227-9300, courtlandclub.com
