Photographer Jessica Blaine Smith and bar legend Josh Lindley started Bartender Atlas with relatively straightforward intentions: create an online field guide to bartenders — a cocktailer’s LinkedIn, as it were.
That quickly snowballed and now, a decade later, the duo oversees an ambitious range of community and educational initiatives, all aimed at bettering the bar community. There’s Independent Study Day, a monthly event that brings novices and industry leaders together for open dialogues and mentorship opportunities. A series of highly original podcasts and audio documentaries trace topics like the origins of the Blackbird, a bartender-beloved Canadian cocktail, and how to navigate career hurdles.
The heart of their work is the Toronto Cocktail Conference (TOCC), a three-day symposium that raised the bar for cocktail shows. Rather than touch on trending ingredients and techniques, they tackled meaty issues — the colonized term tiki cocktails; activism and justice in the hospitality sector; body inclusivity behind the bar; and road maps to entrepreneurship and bar ownership.
Bartender Atlas wasn’t launched to tell folks how to create a world-class bar scene. Its initiatives grew out of listening to bartenders speak about what’s missing in the community. With those insights in hand, Blaine Smith and Lindley mend gaps, start important conversations and, ultimately, unite and elevate Canada’s bar scene.
Ten years along, and any bartender would agree that the industry is very lucky to have them.
–Christine Sismondo
