Mark Sansom just got back from “a pretty special” World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards 2023 in Valencia. “The pandemic shackles have been well and truly shaken,” he’s proud to announce. And, already, we’re talking about this, the next project – the launch of submissions for the World’s 50 Best Bars Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award.
Đọc bài viết bằng Tiếng Việt
This year’s schedule of 8 global events for the 50 Best organization suggests Mark, who’s Director of Content for the World’s 50 Best Bars, The World’s 50 Best Hotels, and The 50 Best Discovery lists, is right.
It’s an intense cycle of events that inevitably involves lots of eating and drinking. “And the camera does add a few pounds,” Mark reminds us about hosting the events himself too, which are live streamed, with great anticipation, around the world.
He’ll tend to hibernate, as much as life allows, when he’s back in London like he is now in between events, and work off the accumulated calories – something he learned a lot about in his former life as senior features writer and then commissioning editor for Men’s Health.
In fact, Mark and the other senior editors once did a 10-week body-shred challenge that was so successful they were accused of using Photoshop. “The lads did all the hard work themselves!” Mark hit back at the critics.
Introducing The Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award
Between the Men’s Health years when the magazine had already dislodged FHM and GQ and the biggest British men’s magazine, Mark joined Food And Travel Magazine, “to indulge in a bit of cathartic gluttony” he laughs. It provided the perfect segue between his physique obsessed former publication and joining the 50 Best organization.
Despite still recovering from the jubilation of Valencia, Mark’s battling through a series of interviews. He’s here to promote the opening of the six-week admissions window for this year’s Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award.
Then, in quick succession, there’s Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2023 in Hong Kong on 18 July. The first ever World’s 50 Best Hotels in London. And then the World’s 50 Best Bars in Singapore, on October 17th, where they’ll announce the Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award.
“When we speak, people listen.”
In truth, he probably already needs a break. We wonder which bar we could send him to in the world right now, if we could send him anywhere for a time out. “Do you know what? A simple beach bar in the Caribbean would do perfectly right now! ” he sighs.
He has to be careful too. As the organization’s Director of Content any bias is scrutinized closely. It’s inevitable, considering how big and influential they’ve become.
“According to one media monitoring agency, the 50 Best, globally, has a 76% share of the market voice – so that’s against all other drinks-led publications,” Mark says wide-eyed. “Three-quarters of the market is ours. That means when we speak, people listen. And so the content we curate, and everything we put out including the lists, needs to be as accurate and as diverse as possible in everything we say, and in all facets of the industry.”
“Let’s just say I’ve always been more than willing to sit at a bar!”
Mark joined the organization around five years ago when they were looking to more clearly separate the World’s 50 Best Bar and the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards, both of which were helmed by William Drew.
The organization needed someone with a strong editorial background, and Mark fitted the bill perfectly. “Let’s just say I’ve always been more than willing to sit at a bar!” he shrugs. “And so I jumped at the chance.”
There’s something special about the bar awards, he says, and bars in general. “Look, chefs get the chance to shut themselves away behind kitchen doors. For bartenders it’s three-feet of mahogany between them and you.”
And he felt he just connected more to bartenders than chefs. “I really, really enjoyed learning about and from the bar community. At the same time they’ve been super kind to me,” he adds.
From Science And Inventions To Sponsored Beehives
Lots has changed. He’s taken the World’s 50 Best Bar Awards from five regional Academy Chairs to 28. And there’s more sub-awards than ever – like the Bartenders’ Bartender Award and this, the Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award that they first launched three years ago.
Previous winners represent the breadth of the organization’s and the award’s reach. The first one was won by Lab 22, a bar in Cardiff, Wales, with a menu called Theory + Frontiers, which took inspiration from science and inventions.
Juliana, in the gentrified neighborhood of Guayaquil in Ecuador, won the following year, in 2022, for its menu: “Diverso, or Diversity, a thoughtful and socially-driven menu that traverses the Andean nation.”
There are regional winners of the award too, like Allegory Bar in Washington DC. “In May, we announced Allegory as the winner of the World’s 50 Best Bars for North America Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu 2023. They have all these murals on the walls – by artist Erik Thor Sandberg – that portrays civil rights icon Ruby Bridges as Alice In Wonderland. And she narrates the menu that’s full of diverse flavors and ingredients from minority-owned distillers.”
And, closer to home, in 2022 Bar Trigona in Kuala Lumpur won the regional award with a menu, called Herb Garden in Your Glass, that they framed around indigenous herbs. It also offered guests the chance to sponsor their own beehive – Trigona, which gave the bar its name, is a kind of stingless bee, and a variety of the Trigona indigenous to Malaysia has become endangered.
“I’m always impressed when bars embrace their community.”
We assume, three years into the Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award, that Mark has seen a bewildering array of menus.
“Oh, I’ve seen all sorts,” he says. “At Little Red Door in Paris, for their most recent menu, Flourish, they went to 14 of the top French producers, and then brought their products to life in the drinks. I’m always impressed when bars embrace their community like that. Lab 22, the first ever winner, did something that’s being copied around the world. They offered guests a flowchart for ‘what do you want to do next’ where they’d offer guests options that would lead them to their next destination, everywhere from a pub, to a dive bar or a karaoke bar.”
What Even Is A Cocktail Menu?
With all that community mindedness, menus as wall murals, bars that change their menu weekly, and others not even having a menu at all, what, we ask Mark Sansom, even is a cocktail menu in 2023?
“Good question. All we know is that we’re likely to receive some diverse and really creative submissions – last year we received around 500,” Mark nods.
“I do think bartenders often get into the industry because they can’t find an outlet for their creativity in more normal jobs. But give them a blank piece of paper and ask them to communicate, for example, the ideology behind a drink and you get amazing results.”
However, there’s a danger, sometimes, of too much information.
It takes a bit of confidence to strip a menu back.
“There’s so much creativity and so many processes that go into those drinks and those menus. Real success often comes for the ones that take a more restrained approach. Juliana’s Diverso menu was pared back – no more than 20 words on the page,” Mark Sansom continues.
“To be honest, the consumer often doesn’t understand what the flavor profile of each individual liquid is unless it’s described to them. You can give a list of 20 ingredients with clarifications and dehydrations, but the most important thing for them is what it tastes like. But it takes a bit of confidence though to strip that back in a menu.”
And with that Mark’s off to continue preparations for Asia’s 50 Best Bars in Hong Kong on July 18th, proving that, even though less is more with menus, when it comes to community building on a global scale, you can never do enough. It’s just going to take some hard work.
Open to all bars across the globe, the Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award is now accepting submissions until 27th July 2023. You can apply through the link here.
