Not to get too sentimental, but the best part of life is the people. As we head into the holiday season, we hold true to this adage, spotlighting the bartenders shaking up — and leaving their indelible mark on — the Baltimore cocktail scene. Bartenders are like therapists… if therapists were licensed to throw parties. They know your name, your drink preferences, and the story behind the concoction you didn’t know you needed.
In the early 2000s, the term “mixologist” re-emerged from history, taking over the craft cocktail movement. Today, the term has mostly faded in exchange for the truest expression of the work: bartending. Across Baltimore, a handful of bartenders have truly honed their craft, redefining the latest in cocktail culture and laying the foundation for a new era of hospitality. It feels more personal now: drinks built like dishes, menus that include everyone at the table, and cocktails that contain bits of their makers’ stories.
From Jake Eyer’s chef-minded precision at Mama Koko’s to Gabe Valladares and Brenton Pegues’s creative partnership at Cookhouse to Dre Levon’s nationally recognized leadership at Clavel, they’re ushering in a cocktail era distinctly its own.
Jake Eyer, bar director at Mama Koko’s
The walls within the James E. Hooper house, constructed in the 1800s, contain multitudes. From housing Hooper — the Baltimore industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing cotton duck fabric, used to make items like sailcloth — to its recent rebirth as Mama Koko’s, owned by local restauranteurs Ayo Hogans and Angola Selassie, they’ve seen everything. This rich heritage is what drew Jake Eyer from his former role as bar manager at the Parley Room in Annapolis to the artist-fueled cafe by day and cocktail lounge by night.
While Eyer came up from the world of bourbon after cutting his teeth in Knoxville, Tennessee, his bartending is a confluence of his global travels and scientific background. After all, he got his masters degree in neuroscience at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He also speaks French fluently.
Now, after almost a decade spent pouring drinks, mostly in leadership roles, Eyer talks about bartending the way a chef might describe mise en place, a French term meaning “everything in its place.”
“We work heavy on prep in the kitchen first,” he says. “Techniques like oleo-saccharum, sous vide — things that have existed there for a long time — have slowly crept into the bar scene. We’ve just really latched onto that.”
It’s what Eyer calls “bar chefing,” a deliberate move away from what he sees as the pretension of “mixology” and into an approachable way of curating cocktails. His cocktail program is guided by artistry, sustainability, and inclusivity — the last element, he says, being the most important.
“Inclusivity, to me, is about accessibility. Everyone should be able to engage with the bar at their own pace,” Eyer says.
While his schooling era hasn’t fully left him (he still loves to get really “science-y,” and a food scale is not far from sight), that inclusivity extends to Eyer’s menu, which is tailored to his patrons. “The whole idea was to make it approachable but still educational,” he says.
Eyer’s leather booklet of libations is indeed unique, each page outlining cocktails along spectrums like “refreshing to spirited” and “adventurous to comforting.” It clearly states the Alcohol By Volume content of each item, integrating spirit-free drinks seamlessly and intricately detailing ingredients (think: tamarind, pistachios, black sesame, and chai). The menu even features illustrations of the glassware each drink comes in.
“I think of it less like a cocktail list and more like a conversation,” Eyer says. “The drinks move from refreshing to comforting to adventurous, and that’s on purpose — it lets people find their place in the story.”
Among standouts is “Coastin’,” a nori-infused reposado tequila cocktail with sake and a honey mango shrub. Mama Koko’s is a place where every detail — from the garnishes on cocktails to glassware each one comes in — adds a layer to the experience. This is evident in this savory, onigiri-inspired drink that evokes a depth of rice, fruit, and umami.
“It’s oceanic but not salty. It has that coastal feeling that makes you stop and think,” Eyer says of the concoction.
Gabe Valladares, bar director, and Brenton Pegues, bartender, at CookHouse
At CookHouse, a swanky and high-ceilinged Bolton Hill restaurant, the small bar seats seven. The intimacy of the rowhome space — which takes no reservations and features a seasonal, rotating menu and a fierce duo mixing drinks — makes its bar one of the best in the city.
The name is an homage to the 19th and earlier 20th centuries when kitchens, then called “cookhouses,” had buildings of their own, separate from sit-down dining areas. At the helm of the kitchen at CookHouse is co-owner/chef George Daily, who opened the restaurant to honor his mother’s cooking, along with his English and Venezuelan upbringing.
On any given weeknight, a line will have formed well before the doors open at 6 p.m. But it’s not until you see regulars sitting at the bar, the onslaught of tickets printing for cocktail orders, that you realize what a draw the drinks are.
The bar, which is, undoubtedly, the anchor of the space, is adorned by a high wooden ladder, showcasing a selection of liquors from mezcals and chartreuse to the largest collection of High West Whiskey known to Baltimore City. Bar Director Gabe Valladares and bartender Brenton Pegues, his right hand, are conducting the entire show while serving a full dining room. Together, they’ve created a natural rhythm.
You might say it was destiny. Valladares grew up surrounded by hospitality (his father has worked at The Prime Rib in Washington, D.C. for nearly forty years) and his extended family runs restaurants across Maryland and the capital region.
“I’ve always been around kitchens. The way people move, the rhythm of service — it’s home to me,” Valladares says.
After taking the helm at CookHouse in October 2021, Valladares reimagined its bar program alongside Dailey. Inspired by Valladares’ love of craftsmanship, they launched an all-natural wine list, a quarterly rotating cocktail selection, and began hosting The Tasting, a cocktail-exclusive event that sells out in mere seconds, blurring the line between bar and kitchen.
Valladares’ creations speak to his creative training. He studied photography and printmaking at Maryland Institute College of Art, and brings a visual artist’s sensibility to his recipes. “Your eyes eat first, then your nose, then your palate. I treat every cocktail like a dish,” he says.
Before CookHouse, Pegues earned his Level 1 Bourbon Certification, building a foundation on structure and balance. “Whiskey was where I started,” he explains. “It taught me balance — how sweetness, smoke, and heat play together.” Much like Valladares’ creative knack, music is at the center of Pegues’ mixology process.
“A drink has rhythm,” Pegues says. “You build tension, then you release it.” His two debut cocktails, which premiered at CookHouse over the summer, both pay homage to the sounds that inspired them. Much like a conductor flowing through the beginning, middle, and end of a composition, Pegues thinks about the elements hitting the tongue in the right order.
The inspiration for his signature drink “Venom” comes from Little Simz, a UK-based artist Pegues listened to a lot while working.
“The way her tracks build slowly, dark and heavy, and then open up, that’s the energy I wanted for Venom,” Pegues says.
Topped with a shot of underberg, an aromatic, herbal German bitter, Pegues’ “Venom” boasts white and dark rum, basil, pineapple, allspice dram, passionfruit liquor, and chartreuse. It’s a layered drink, nuanced like Little Simz’s music, and blooms when it finds its groove.
The boozy drink is meant to be savored, its taste evolving much like the progression of a musical act, with the melting of the ice somehow diluting and accentuating multiple flavors. The underberg, which comes in a small bottle wrapped in paper (and which Pegues has tattooed on his arm), adds nuance to this recipe, incorporating bitterness to balance out the onset of rum and chartreuse.
Dre Levon, bar director at Clavel
As bar director at Clavel, the now decade-long establishment that introduced Charm City to mezcal and the unique flavors of Sinaloa, Mexico, there’s a reason Dre Levon has garnered national acclaim. He looks at bartending as not only a service job, but something of a cultural practice. He’s been with the Clavel team from day one, becoming bar director in 2017. This year, Levon was also named a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service, honoring not just his artistry, but his leadership and mentorship.
Still, he shrugs off the spotlight. “You don’t make art because you hope you’ll get an award,” he says. “You make it because the process means something.”
Now 38, Levon has tended bar for half his life, though, he would say that he’s lived several. Throughout the years, his ethos in bartending hasn’t wavered, always rooted in connection. Levon is unequivocally himself, part of the reason he’s stayed so long at Clavel, in an industry where six months spent in one role is considered long-term. He can wear his dreads, flaunt his nose ring, and show off his intricate neck and chest tattoos without being judged.
But what’s kept him behind the bar isn’t just the drinks he serves. “I might be a little bit of a people pleaser,” he admits. “If you even share a little snippet of what I love with me, then, man, we’re cool. That’s the element of service for me. It goes above and beyond everything.”
During his two years of sobriety from 2021-2023, Levon began to reconsider what true hospitality meant. Stepping away from drinking reshaped how he thought about service and inspired him to build Clavel’s spirit-free program long before non-alcoholic cocktails became trendy.
“Making spirit-free drinks is actually way harder,” he says. “You’re trying not to make just syrup or soda. Pregnant women, people in recovery, folks who just don’t want to drink that night, they deserve something crafted with the same attention as a mezcalita.”
For Levon, that care for the spirit-free drinker became its own version of artistry. His favorite guests — the pregnant women who’d come out with friends, hesitant at first to order — often received something extraordinary: a drink crowned with a flaming garnish or built from an unusual house-made ingredient. It’s all about making the patron feel special “so that group of friends who were all having a glass of wine or whatever would look at that and be like, ‘damn, that’s cool.’”
Backed by Levon’s institutional knowledge, spanning over a decade, his current cocktail menu is an amalgamation of the greatest hits of Clavel, including a creation introduced in 2019. Named after the leaf of the agave, “Penca” is a drink born from a trip through Jalisco, when he got into a spirited debate with producer Esteban Morales. The cocktail is an homage to raicilla, a regional type of agave and the plant that gives us mezcal, nuanced with notes of pineapple along with banana liqueur, one that Levon swears is insanely good.
“A lot of banana liqueur is garbage — scary bad,” Levon says, laughing. “But Tempus Fugit makes a great one. It’s intense, higher ABV, super good. That banana element is actually a really heavy backbone in the cocktail.”
Since its inception, Clavel’s heartbeat has been experimentation, a legacy of co-owner and founder Lane Harlan’s early fermentation projects. What started years ago in Clavel’s basement has relocated upstairs to the apartment where co-owner/chef Carlos Raba once lived with his family. The bar lab space, which Levon helped design, functions as both kitchen and classroom, where his team ferments, clarifies, and experiments, logging every recipe like scientists. “We use a lab report format — ingredients, tools, process, discussion,” Levon explains. “It’s still art, but it’s also biology.”
Levon is partaking in alcohol again, and mezcal remains his top focus. He’s traveled through several of Mexico’s mezcal-producing states, learning directly from people whose families have been distilling it for generations.
“Mezcal is a cultural product. It’s about plants, people, and places,” Levon says. His reverence for the spirit shows in Clavel’s tasting flights and educational nights, now offered twice a week. Every pour of mezcal is $12 at the bar, regardless of vintage and production.
“You can’t separate the spirit from the people who make it. If you don’t understand where it comes from, you don’t understand what you’re serving,” he says.