Q-and-A: A Trip Down Craft Cocktail Memory Lane with Vito Lantz
The former Dorrance bartender helped shape Providence's craft cocktail scene, and now co-owns two bars of his own, Lucky Enough and High Motor Bar & Grille.
Vito Lantz.
Jamie: You were so integral in the beginning stages of developing Providence’s craft cocktail scene, so I want to make sure I have your voice in here. When you came to Rhode Island, did you start at The Dorrance?
Vito: When I first moved here, I got my job at the Dorrance on the second day that I lived in Providence. They hired me, and they were supposed to open it in two weeks, but it ended up being two months. I was part of that opening crew over there. Jesse Hedberg was running it. Everybody else had other jobs, like Jay Carr and Jenn Ferreira [now Davis]. And Jon Dille was over at the Grange.
J. Before that, did many places have cocktail menus around here?
V. The only places that did were places that these guys had all worked at, so Fluke in Newport. That’s where Jesse cut his teeth, and then Cook and Brown, which Jen was running. Garden Grille had a really underrated menu when Jay Carr was running the bar.
J. They are like the godfathers and the godmother of the Providence cocktail scene.
V. They joked about being the Mount Rushmore of Rhode Island’s cocktail scene. So those guys were all big old cocktail nerds, and that was such a big part of their lives. So they would get off work and go work on drinks. Where I come from, I’m more old school, like you get done working at your fancy bar, you go to a dive bar. You drink your shot of tequila and your Miller High Life and play pool. And these guys would get out of their fancy bar, and they would go to one of their apartments, and they’d be like I’m working on this new riff on the Negroni. I was like, who the hell are you guys?
J. It’s like a cocktail laboratory.
V. They really, really loved it. And that kind of energy is contagious. So it wasn’t just a work thing, they were constantly trying to gain knowledge. They would visit different cities, see what everybody else was doing in different markets, and not replicate it, but build on it.
J. So you were part of the opening team at The Dorrance. What did that place mean to you, when you were coming up in the cocktail scene here?
V. It’s like talking about your family before you moved out on your own. There will always be a special place in my heart. It’s like the way you hear soldiers talk about missing the guys, or football guys when they retire. A lot of times you’re like, I don’t miss the work. I miss the guys and the good old days. And I don’t mean just the guys. I obviously mean Jen [Davis] Ferreira and the Lester family. You just miss the people you were in battle with, because it was such a swing. At the time, cocktail bars were usually like ten seats at the bar, and maybe another fifteen on the floor, and there were two bartenders crafting stuff. And they were like, let’s do the same thing, except 300 people at a time at The Dorrance.
J. Seriously, the place was huge.
V. It was bananas. That’s the kind of the team that worked there. I’ve never seen anything like being able to put out that level of drinks at that level of quality. It was a real badge of honor for everybody who was able to bartend at that place for more than four months.
J. I remember all the amazing marketing spoof comedy videos that you guys would put together at The Dorrance, like the Up and Cumber Spa Treatment and Super Server Coleman. And you were the brain child of those, right, like before reels and TikToks were a thing?
V. Everyone else had a hand in something else. Jesse left after a year or so. It was like the music stopped and I was the last one on a chair. I stayed there the longest. I took over the bar. I was really lucky to have very supportive owners who were like let’s promote this idea of being light-hearted, doing creative stuff, not taking ourselves seriously, because that space lended itself to seriousness. The biggest hurdle was trying to get people to just come and hang out.
J. It was such a fancy place.
V. They recognized that some of my ideas, and just being funny were helpful for the place. I don’t feel like the cocktails fell off at all. There was still so much effort. And all the teams that followed after that OG crew were also absolute killers. And you can follow some of their careers around the country, like Harrison Ginsburg, who runs probably the greatest bar in New York City called Overstory. And Tyler Schweppe came up at The Dorrance and is now in Portland, Maine.
J. Overstory is one place I’ve been in New York, but yeah, they told me that you helped mentor a lot of people like that. It’s like our cocktail scene is the epicenter of so many things to come.
V. It’s a tiny town, but it’s super impressive to see what people have gone on to do, not just in this town, but around the country.
J. And when you were going down the memory lane with The Dorrance, my mind flashed back to…was there, like, a pie fight fundraiser for ALS or something there?
V. That was a Lester idea that I cursed for years afterwards. Oh my god, like, we’re gonna get a cleanup crew, and we’re gonna do this, you know? And it was every bit as crazy as a Marx Brothers movie. Pies flying around.
J. There’s a YouTube video out there. I’m gonna go track it down.
V. I was not there that night. I think I was out of town. But for the next six months, we kept finding pie pieces behind bottles and in the middle of places where they definitely didn’t belong.
J. But anyway, so now you own two bars of your own, and obviously you do still have more complex cocktail creations, but it’s also a very welcoming atmosphere for the beer and shot crowd.
V. I learned so much from those days at The Dorrance and with those people that I’ll take with me to every place I work at, or own. They taught me so much more about the actual business of cocktails and stuff. I’ve always been a little bit more of a casual guy and a little bit more of a rock and roll mentality to running a bar. The cocktail team was out of my comfort zone, but the hospitality aspect of it was always number one. I was able to combine both those things into our two spots now. Lucky Enough is where you don’t have to dress up to get a quality drink at your neighborhood pub. And at High Motor, you can get a quality cocktail at a sports bar. I think that’s where the movement has taken all of us, because now you can’t walk into a place without a cocktail menu, and that includes my little neighborhood pub and my rock and roll sports bar. I’d put our cocktail menus up against most of the fancy cocktail bars. Now it’s kind of expected. People want nice things.
J. Yeah, we demand a cocktail menu. Now, I can’t come up with a drink on my own. I always like to try things that are really, really different.
V. That’s the way the culture has shifted. When I first started in this business, some thirty years ago, there used to be such product loyalty to whatever brand it was, and if you didn’t have that brand, people would get up and walk out.
And now, if we go full circle, people are like, what do you have that I haven’t tried? What do you have for whiskey? Do you have any gins that I haven’t heard of? What craft beers are local that I haven’t heard of? People want to try new things. So it’s a cool time to be a part of the business.
J. Yeah, I think everyone’s palate is developing, and people are getting exposed to more, and they are up for trying new things.
V. Now you can’t even go to an airport bar without somebody trying to give you a barrel aged Negroni.
J. I gotta figure out what is my signature drink. I need to find one that just defines my personality. So I’m on the search for it.
V. You know what? Jamie, it’s a beautiful idea to be on that search, but never find that drink. Never.
J. Yeah, I’m just gonna try them all.
V. Yea just keep going on a journey that never ends.
