Sbe Group’s Yael Vengroff Gets Real About the Art of Bartending At S Bar Brentwood
story by Michelle Ball photos by Jeremy Ball
YAEL VENGROFF is not your typical mixologist. In fact, she told me, shaking her head, when I met her for an interview at S Bar Brentwood in Los Angeles, “I hate that term so much. As a bartender for so many years, we fought tooth and nail not to be called that.” Why? Because “at the end of the day, there are plenty of people who can be mixologists at home—but are they bartenders? The romance is the bar,” she said, tapping her hand insistently on the metal bar top. “It’s not the cocktail, it’s what happens over the bar. It’s what happens to the couple that sits at the bar. Yeah, good drinks are awesome, but there are so many people who can create a good drink. It’s not about that.”
Yael has built her career as an artist and a curator, so to speak, of bar programs. When she reflects on the start of her career as a 21-year-old craft bartender in New York, she regrets the snobbery she had then toward “basic” drinks, admitting, “I guess I associate mixology with looking down on somebody who orders a vodka soda”—implication being that mixology is a mindset that can inadvertently involve judgement, whereas bartending is a skill that requires genuine hospitality.
Yet in her new role as the head of bars and mixology programming for hospitality management company SBE’s Katsuya and S Bar concepts, Tales of the Cocktail’s 2018 Bartender of the Year no longer finds herself bartending either. Instead, she’s designing menus for each of their several locations, training staff, and spending a lot of time on Excel, codifying her work into training manuals, standards, protocols, and more.
Katsuya is a sophisticated Japanese restaurant with four branches in the L.A. area, plus one in Miami, one in the Bahamas, and another soon to open in New York City, where the hip lounge that is S Bar—which boasts outposts in Miami, Las Vegas, and Dubai—will also be launching. (The New York branch is designed by David Rockwell and Rockwell Group.) S Bar Brentwood, which opened in 2020 and was conceived by architect Philippe Starck, is located inside a Katsuya that opened over 16 years ago and enjoys an established local following. (For more information and to make reservations, visit sbe.com/restaurants/katsuya.) For that reason, Yael takes great care to avoid upsetting regulars by not revamping the beverage list too quickly, even as she introduces cocktails in the lounge that are exciting for more adventurous drinkers. “S Bar [Brentwood] essentially functions as the mothership for what [the bar] program will look like” at all the locations she oversees, she said, explaining that most recipes will be tested here before the results are added to the menu elsewhere.
As we talked, Yael artfully styled the first cocktail for our shoot: Shinigami Eyes, which blends passion fruit and green chile vodka, orgeat, fresh orange juice, and Galliano liqueur. The drink is finished with a banana leaf reminiscent of a pompadour as well as chile oil that represents the anime concept of red Shinigami eyes, which allow you to see your future, but there’s a price to pay for the privilege; the name is also the title of a recent release by imaginative Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes, who is among the influences from music, art, and dance that Yael leans on for inspiration when designing the experience of a given venue. “As a white girl, I’m never going to put out anything that is traditionally Japanese—ever; that’s not my role,” she said. Nevertheless, she added, “I wanted to pay homage to contemporary Japanese culture.” The drink was also designed to serve as a refreshing spin on one of Katsuya’s long-standing staples, the Burning Mandarin, which her new colleagues had insisted could not be replaced. The idea of launching the drink at S Bar was to familiarize locals with a similar but more interesting recipe.
To give another example, Yael’s Tiger Julius is a new spin on an old technique: clarified milk punch, which was first popularized by the English in the early 1700s. “I make it like I make a soup,” explained Yael, who blends mandarin vodka, Cognac, Campari, cinnamon, black tea, pineapple, hazelnut, and lemon together in a large stockpot for her recipe. She then adds milk and allows curds to form; as it’s strained through cheesecloth, prolonged contact with the curds changes its color from a deep red to a translucent almond. “It’s a pretty long process of figuring out what ratios work in general,” said Yael. “I always use black tea or some form of tea in a milk punch because it needs a lengthener. The resulting product is mellower.”
With aromatics reminiscent of pumpkin pie, the cocktail is silky, almost glycerol, with only a slight bite from the cinnamon that warms the back of the throat. Its mouthfeel makes an ideal match for the texture of sashimi. Meanwhile, if you were to taste it blind, you would insist it had color, which was exactly Yael’s point: “I love to play with people’s heads and hand them something that looks entirely different than how it tastes.”
Because she too understands what it’s like to go to your favorite bar or restaurant with the intent of ordering your usual, only to discover it’s been nixed from the menu, she explained, “A lot of it is about establishing trust. The last thing I want is to be the mysterious girl behind the cocktail program who took their favorite drink off.” Having had a similar experience at her job at Genghis Cohen, a popular Fairfax District restaurant, she knew exactly what to do when she joined SBE. To innovate Katsuya’s and S Bar’s programs strategically, she first replaced all packaged ingredients with fresh juices, housemade syrups, and so on. Next, she incorporated the three most popular drinks from the old list into her new one. From there, she and her staff made suggestions to regulars, gently nudging them to try this or that—and eventually, they accepted the changes.
Like any creative, Yael is learning to balance her pursuit of perfection with the reality of her job. Throughout the shoot, she constantly tinkered with each drink, admitting that letting go of the day-to-day minutiae behind the bar in order to focus on the bigger picture is still “a really hard pill to swallow.” That said, her favorite part about her new role is helping her staff in their professional development: Mentorship is critical for Yael, and she “find[s] any opportunity to transfer what I know [to my team] and guide them on their journey,” as she put it. After all, she knows creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum: It’s found through a sharing of ideas and inspirations. She hopes to motivate colleagues to conceive their own recipes and, by working together, to create flavors beyond expectations. She also hopes to work with other artists to produce content that fuses cocktails with music, cinematography, and dance.
Yael’s New Hit Single
Flipping open the top of a mint-green can, Yael unveils a project she worked on for the better part of 2020 in collaboration with LiveWire. The beverage company, built on the model of a record label, was established to give talented bar professionals a creative platform that might also net a sustainable income: Each bartender invents a cocktail that’s released like a single to earn them royalties.
LiveWire also gives its artists a stipend to create their own packaging. For her Crystal Shiso Mojito, Yael enlisted her tattoo artist, Tom Haubrick, to design the can, reflecting the inspiration she drew from an astrology reading she did at the beginning of the pandemic—a time when she was trying to make sense of what was going on. It taught her that the wolf is her symbol and the god who rules her is Typhon, which she says represents “change and evolution through hard processes and transformation.” Haubrick’s intricate pattern of overlapping geometric diamonds narrows in on the image of a wolf and a shiso leaf—which Yael notes makes her think of the wolf’s jagged teeth.
The combination of coconut rum, soju, shiso, and “fizzy lime” (citrus solution in carbonated water) is light, refreshing, void of any sticky sweetness, and perfect for drinking while walking down the beach in Santa Monica or at a concert. But while it’s meant to be consumed from a can, Yael serves a version of the cocktail at S Bar in a glass garnished with a shiso leaf; it pairs wonderfully with a dish of yellowtail accompanied by lime-chile kosho and onion ponzu.
For Yael, it’s a thrill to see her success actualized this way. Although she’s created hundreds of recipes over the years, “I don’t own them,” she points out. “They’re not memorialized anywhere.” She thinks of her parents in Texas: They may never get to taste her cocktails at S Bar, but now, they can experience her drinks exactly the way she intended them.
