“There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently,” Lindgren said.<\/p>\n
Lindgren said that companies aren’t pulling back from bars at corporate events \u2014\u00a0but they want more mocktails.<\/p>\n
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.<\/p>\n
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan<\/a>. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia<\/a> that survived the first crash and created the second wave.<\/p>\n When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.<\/p>\n We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky<\/a>.<\/p>\n We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.<\/p>\n The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating<\/a>, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.<\/p>\n It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.<\/p>\n There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.<\/p>\n There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.<\/p>\n Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.<\/p>\n The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.<\/p>\n Mocktails are all the rage at tech events<\/p>\n More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.<\/p>\n We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought<\/a> is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.<\/p>\n Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.<\/p>\n The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth<\/a>; it’s something people remember.<\/p>\n The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.<\/p>\n So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”<\/p>\n That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.<\/p>\n