Audrey Saunders

The Climb

Culinary training gave the cocktail work a compositional base. Audrey Saunders trained at Peter Kump’s cooking school before building a career behind the bar and beyond it. That grounding shows in an approach to drinks as balanced builds rather than simple pours: acidity, texture, aroma, and finish treated as working variables. A durable bar career is usually assembled across different kinds of rooms. Saunders was co-founder at Contract Services of America, bartender at Waterfront Alehouse in Brooklyn, New York, lead bartender at Beacon Restaurant in New York City (from 1999), and manager at Tonic in Chelsea, New York City (until 2001). Those posts map the practical curriculum: service tempo, consistency, guest reading, and the small corrections that keep a drink repeatable. Hotel-bar work added another register. In 2001, Saunders became bar manager at Bemelmans Bar, Carlyle Hotel in New York City. From there, the operating partner and creative lead role at Pegu Club in New York City (2005–2020) put the system, the menu, and the room under one standard. The later work kept the emphasis on method and transmission. Saunders continued as a partner developing cocktails at Tar Pit in Los Angeles and as area editor contributor at The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (2021). Today, Audrey is developer of Ravenwood Beverage Institute, extending the educational side of the craft: practice, critique, and shared standards passed from one working hand to another.

Today

"We need to get back to a point where things are fun again." In bar terms, fun is not the opposite of discipline. The line points to a service value: generosity, pace, and pleasure in the glass. After years spent helping define standards, Saunders frames the work back toward the guest’s first reason for sitting down at a bar.

Signature

The signature set attached to Audrey Saunders includes Old Cuban, Gin-Gin Mule, French Pearl, Aqua Pearl, and Little Italy. Taken together, the names mark a recognizable bar language: structured, exact, and built for liveliness rather than austerity. The craft claim is balance with movement—drinks that carry discipline without becoming stiff.

In Their Words “There was no “movement” back then—there were only a handful of us preaching the gospel of craft in the hopes that it would eventually stick.” “But I knew from the very first time I stepped behind the bar I was home.”

Recognition

The central recognition attached to Audrey Saunders is her James Beard Award finalist status for Pegu Club in New York. The venues around that recognition—Waterfront Ale House, Beacon, Pegu Club, and Tar Pit in Los Angeles—show the working pattern behind it: station work, program development, ownership-level responsibility, and continued cocktail development across markets.