Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an unassuming backyard in South Jersey that powers some of the area\u2019s most interesting cocktails. The third-of-an-acre Pennsauken plot looks like that of any suburban home, with a weathered swing set and plenty of lawn, but it generates over 100 species of fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers each year, a mix of the familiar \u2014 lavender, dill, celery, tomatoes, peppers, etc. \u2014 and the far more intriguing: dandelion chicory, huacatay, prickly pear cactus, pawpaws, yuzu, jujubes, wormwood, and Jenny Lind melon.<\/p>\n
Ingredients from this garden have been showcased in drinks at some of Philly\u2019s best cocktail bars<\/a>, as well as bars in Chicago; Cleveland; Berlin; Mexico City; Turin, Italy; and Bacolod, Philippines. That\u2019s because the garden\u2019s keeper, James Beard Award-winning beverage writer and bartender Danny Childs, knows how to transform the bounty into a liquid treasure trove. <\/p>\n This backyard and the wilds of South Jersey inspired Childs to develop a range of farm- and field-to-bar beverages, alcoholic and non, collected and detailed in his 2023 book, Slow Drinks<\/a>. <\/p>\n The principles and practices in the book combine to form a drink-making theory that\u2019s familiar to anyone who\u2019s dined in a farm-to-table restaurant. The best illustration may be homemade amaro, which can capture a time and a place in a bottle by way of its botanicals. Slow Drinks has a recipe for every season \u2014 in spring, it\u2019s a strawberry-tinged rabarbaro with roasted dandelion root; in fall, it\u2019s a wormwood-heavy g\u00e9n\u00e9py spiked with apples, cranberries, and figs. <\/p>\n The theory behind Slow Drinks, which Childs views as larger than the book itself, emphasizes seasonality, local sourcing, preservation, and storytelling, and it can be applied anywhere. <\/p>\n The farm- and field-to-bar approach has caught the attention of prestigious bar programs here and abroad: Slow Drinks has sold 14,000 copies in English and some 4,000 copies in Italian. It was recently translated to Mandarin. <\/p>\n Though Childs has consulted on several beverage programs in Philly, this year marks the opening of his first bar, Field Day, in Northern Liberties<\/a>, which he owns with his wife, Katie. Flagged as a \u201cregional cocktail bar,\u201d Field Day will filter its menu through a Slow Drinks lens, showcasing the breadth of ingredients and culinary traditions that swirl around our pocket of the Mid-Atlantic, from the Jersey Shore<\/a> to Pennsylvania Dutch country. Think sherry and cherry wishniak<\/a> highballs, boozy gelati, and a daiquiri-colada hybrid flavored with pawpaws and strawberries, along with regional foods like tomato pie, Lebanon bologna, and steamed clams.<\/p>\n The bar\u2019s debut marks the culmination of years of work. But Childs\u2019 ultimate goal is much bigger. He wants Slow Drinks to take root at bars everywhere. He\u2019s made some headway, but just as it takes time to turn black walnuts into booze<\/a>, sowing the seeds of a cocktail revolution is no fast or easy feat.<\/p>\n Pitching a movement<\/p>\n It was steamy outside but freezing inside the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, where Childs was presenting at 2025\u2019s Tales of the Cocktail, the national drinks-industry conference that is nerdy and bacchanalian in almost equal measure. <\/p>\n The annual convention brings together a wide range of beverage professionals \u2014 bartenders, bar owners, distillers, marketers \u2014 who converge on seminars that would likely bore a layperson to tears. Slideshows on backbar configuration, viscosity, extraction, and \u201csensory analysis of spirits\u201d were standing-room only, even as cocktail samples were being passed outside conference-room doors. The most-anticipated presentations saw people queue up outside the meeting rooms up to 45 minutes beforehand. <\/p>\n Childs had organized a panel with himself, bartending legend Jim Meehan<\/a> (best known for cofounding the East Village cocktail bar Please Don\u2019t Tell, or PDT), and Matchbook Distilling\u2019s Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski<\/a>. It was slated for a Thursday morning, the penultimate day of the five-day-long conference and when many bartenders fly back home to work lucrative weekend shifts. That may have accounted for the relatively modest crowd in the double-wide meeting room that had been jam-packed for a boisterous lecture on dilution two days before.<\/p>\n Another factor that may have contributed to crowd size? Compared to some more granular items on the Tales of the Cocktail agenda, the panel \u2014 entitled \u201cthe Slow Beverage Movement\u201d \u2014 promised to be a little lofty. <\/p>\n Over an hour, fielding questions from then-executive director of Slow Food USA Bilal Sarwari, the panelists made the case for cocktails concocted the locally inflected way. The discussion at times veered into very dry territory: Childs waxed on ethnobotany, Meehan meditated on our world\u2019s disappearing biodiversity, and Merinoff Kwasnieski, at one point, gushed about fungal networks\u2019 impact on soil quality.<\/p>\n The talk was well-received by the audience (a small contingent of which were Slow Food Negroni Week scholarship recipients<\/a>, whose rides to the conference had been subsidized by fundraising efforts that Childs had a hand in), and a couple queries ate up the 10 minutes left for questions. Reliably upbeat, Childs said he couldn\u2019t have been happier with how it went. <\/p>\n Having sat in on several other seminars with higher-energy audiences, I myself wasn\u2019t so sure how well the pitch had landed. A bartender with a gardening habit might be an easy sell. But could Slow Drinks\u2019 time- and labor-intensive cocktail theory gain a foothold in the mainstream? How many bartenders are willing to ferment their own ginger beer<\/a>, forage ingredients for housemade amari<\/a>, or harvest actual roots for root beer<\/a>?<\/p>\n Deeply unpopular, very important<\/p>\n I asked Meehan later about the challenges facing this prospective movement. In 2024, Meehan released a book, The Bartender\u2019s Pantry<\/a>, written, as he framed it in our interview last year, \u201cin the wake of the reindustrialization of the craft cocktail.\u201d He considers it in league with Slow Drinks \u2014 a call to think harder about cocktail ingredients and their sourcing in a time when \u201cour world and our climate is under great duress.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Childs, Meehan feels strongly about this cause, but he\u2019s skeptical about industry uptake. \u201cAre people doing this? Absolutely not. And will they do this? I don\u2019t know. I doubt it,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n But Meehan had reason for optimism, too. \u201cAs I think back to the early days of the craft cocktail movement<\/a> that I participated in [in the aughts] \u2026 it is very hard to describe to today\u2019s young bartenders how deeply unpopular what we were doing was \u2014 how unpopular, unprofitable, and how vain and silly most people viewed us.\u201d <\/p>\n He remembered working 12-hour shifts at Pegu Club, the storied New York cocktail bar<\/a> that opened in SoHo in 2005, and earning just $80, a fraction of what he would make at Gramercy Tavern. He would repeatedly deny requests to sub vodka in for other spirits on the cocktail menu. \u201cIt was tough,\u201d Meehan said.<\/p>\n Time and \u201ca never-ending parade of great press\u201d eventually moved the needle, he said, as a curious clientele of mostly young professional women came in, dragging their vodka-drinking boyfriends with them. He was surprised to see customers casually embracing whiskey and gin drinks within just a couple of years. By the 2010s, craft cocktail bars were opening in cities all over the country. <\/p>\n To some extent, Meehan \u2014 no longer bartending \u2014 finds himself on the outs again, having taken up a new mantle in advocating for a more thoughtful, sustainability-minded approach to beverages<\/a>. He considers himself in the same camp as Childs in that sense, but he thinks Childs has an edge he and his cocktail-pioneer comrades didn\u2019t: \u201cWe were weirdos, and Danny is, frankly \u2026 very normal and very reasonable and very articulate, and I think mostly he\u2019s very positive,\u201d Meehan said. \u201cFor these reasons, I think this guy has a very good chance of being successful.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think that there\u2019s something revolutionary about what Danny\u2019s putting out there,\u201d Meehan said. \u201cI\u2019m sure people think that we look like some bartender form of Alice Waters, but I think that it is very important work.\u201d <\/p>\n Changing perceptions<\/p>\n Childs is well aware that the very idea of locally inflected cocktails can come across as pretentious and twee \u2014 they\u2019re the kind of thing you might have seen skewered on Portlandia<\/a>. <\/p>\n But it\u2019s also hard to imagine a better ambassador for what seems like a very fancy thing: Childs first developed Slow Drinks as a concept while working as bar manager at Farm & Fisherman, a family-friendly tavern in a Cherry Hill<\/a> strip mall. Over a decade, he hooked suburbanites on sophisticated cocktails<\/a> that were also approachable and highly drinkable, only going on a spiel about sourcing when prompted. <\/p>\n Childs\u2019 upbringing no doubt plays a part in his innate ability to soft-sell. Before he moved to Marlton<\/a> at age 11, he grew up in Delco: first in his grandparents\u2019 house and then a Clifton Heights apartment complex. His dad bartended at the Clifton Inn (now Murray\u2019s Bar & Grille) for years. \u201cI grew up in that bar in a lot of ways,\u201d Childs said. He remembers learning to play pool and shuffleboard there, and having his first underage drink one Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n His blue-collar roots are balanced by a deeply nerdy side. Childs\u2019 fascination with plants, fostered by his naturalist-oriented uncle and grandfather, kicked into high gear when he studied anthropology and ethnobotany at the University of Delaware. He spent four years traveling through South America to study the use of medicinal plants among Indigenous people. (If not for a bartending gig in Chile, Childs might be an M.D.\/Ph.D. teaching and practicing ethnomedicine today.) <\/p>\n He swerved out of academia postcollege, when a would-be gap year sent him down an agricultural rabbit hole: first on a Marlton Christmas tree farm \u2014 where he and Katie homesteaded in a military tent equipped with a wood-burning stove for nine months \u2014 and then over stints at Urban Roots Farm in Newtown Square<\/a> and at Plowshare Farms in Bucks County<\/a>. <\/p>\n Those various walks of life all braided together when Childs took a job at Farm & Fisherman in 2013. It was there that he started dreaming up \u201ccocktails through an anthropological lens\u201d \u2014 a phrase, as he writes in Slow Drinks, that he scrawled on a bar napkin, then spent years teasing out. He started applying age-old practices of fermentation and infusion to the local ingredients surrounding him, then mixing them up behind the bar. <\/p>\n Childs codified these methods in Slow Drinks, which is intended as a springboard for other bartenders and home enthusiasts, offering building-block master recipes for shrubs, liqueurs, aromatized wines, and more preserved, distilled, and infused liquids. Cocktail recipes (pickled ramp martini, stone-fruit amaretto sour, clarified persimmon punch, etc.) round out the book, showing region-specific applications season by season. <\/p>\n Just as he knows the larger theory runs the risk of feeling esoteric to guests, he recognizes the work required may intimidate industry pros. \u201cBartenders are taught how to make syrups and mix cocktails with ingredients that are on their backbar. It\u2019s changing a little bit, but the bars pushing that envelope are still like the top 1%,\u201d he said. \u201cI know it might seem difficult or out of reach.\u201d <\/p>\n Childs\u2019 ultimate counterargument is a humble one: He\u2019s not actually doing anything new here. \u201cPeople have been doing this for hundreds and in a lot of cases thousands of years.\u201d <\/p>\n Local gaze, global ambition <\/p>\n Childs has been dedicated full-time to Slow Drinks as a business and a concept since 2023, when he left his role at Farm & Fisherman. The departure gave him time to promote the book but also more flexibility and autonomy over where the larger idea might go. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was kind of like jumping out of the plane without a parachute and hoping for the best,\u201d Childs said of the decision to leave. <\/p>\n In the years since, he\u2019s consulted on several bar projects in the Philly area (most notably Almanac<\/a> and La Jefa<\/a>, both James Beard Award nominees<\/a>). With Katie as copilot, he\u2019s grown the Slow Drinks brand via pop-ups and collaborations, some of which have left lasting impressions. (If you find yourself at Mexico City\u2019s Baldi\u00f3<\/a>, ask to try the chinampas Chartreuse and agave amazake.) He\u2019s also established a close relationship with the international organization Slow Food<\/a> that\u2019s taken him to various cities and countries to present on the budding movement, often with an entourage of scholarship-backed bartenders who are practicing this style of drink making already. <\/p>\n Childs also spent much of the last two years laying the groundwork for Field Day, whose staff claims a number of Philly\u2019s most promising restaurant-industry talent, including chef Melissa McGrath<\/a> and fermentation whiz Jamaar Julal<\/a>. <\/p>\n Even as he becomes a bar owner, Childs is going full tilt on Slow Drinks. The business\u2019 headquarters live above the bar, in an office\/lab that shares space with Cescaphe Ballroom\u2019s wedding complex. This summer he and Katie hired Canyon Shayer, a Philly Distilling and Heaven Hill alum, to be the S corporation\u2019s COO and \u201cdirector of culture,\u201d working with clients on developing and implementing Slow Drinks-style beverage programs.<\/p>\n In a way, Field Day is a test case, \u201ca blueprint for, this is what [Slow Drinks] looks like in practice day in and day out,\u201d Childs said. \u201cI think we\u2019ve just really scratched the surface of getting people fully bought into it, and that it is something that can leave the industry better than we found it.\u201d <\/p>\n If Childs gets his way, bartenders all over will see potential ingredients every time they step foot outside \u2014 even if it\u2019s just into their own backyards. <\/p>\n