Here are some of the words Will Lee uses when he talks about the hospitality industry in his hometown: “hard-working,” “camaraderie,” “supportive.” I think the one that comes up the most often in our conversation is this one: “pride.”
Lee’s parents, Shun and Li, ran two Chinese takeout restaurants in the metro Detroit area when he was growing up. He jokes they were ahead of their time: “They used to go to the market every Saturday to pick up their produce and talk to all the vendors.” Lee himself, who’s been working in kitchens and bars since he was old enough to vote, now works as beverage director at Grey Ghost and Second Best. Food and drink and hospitality and, most of all, Detroit have hummed along in the background of Lee’s entire life.
Nearly two decades ago, when Lee first stepped behind a bar, it was a little bit by accident, with a dash of supremely good timing: a barback no-showed on his shift at the neighborhood pub in Rochester, Michigan, where Lee worked in the back of house, mostly flipping burgers and frying fries. That night, Lee abdicated his position at the fryer, and volunteered to help out behind the bar. He never returned to the kitchen.
When Lee moved up a rung from scooping ice and drying glasses as a barback a year later, it was yet again thanks to a combination of ambition and timing. “I barbacked on Sunday nights, and no bartender ever wanted to work Sundays,” he says. “So that's how I got my first bartending job.” Lee spent the next nine years tending bar, and helping the bar’s owners open a few new locations throughout Metro Detroit.
During that time, Lee made a lot of Jack and Cokes. He cracked open countless bottles of cold beer for the regulars who comprised most of Lee’s blue-collar customer base. For Lee, learning people’s names was far more important than learning complex drink recipes. “People weren't so conscious of what they were drinking then,” he says. “They were just drinking what they thought was good, what they had been drinking, what their parents drank, what their parents had in their liquor cabinets at home.”
The alchemy of good service was, at that time, far more important than the particulars of what went inside someone’s glass. “Everyone who came in, you knew their names, you knew what they’d be drinking. They’d want a pint of Guinness, so you’d see 'em walk in, and you’d get their pint of Guinness right away,” says Lee. “I'd walk into a shift and would go down the whole bar and shake everyone's hands. I knew everyone's drinks.”
While warm, friendly service remained paramount for Lee and his fellow barkeeps, the end of the aughts brought forth a newfound sense of experimentation and curiosity in drink-making. In Detroit, the openings of early-adopter cocktail bars like Sugar House signaled, or perhaps ushered in, a quiet but mighty sea change in how and what the city drank. When one of his managers entered Lee into a Bacardi-sponsored cocktail contest, War of the Pour, in 2008, Lee says he was hesitant: he isn’t one for stages or spotlights. But at the competition, he witnessed the creativity of fellow bartenders making drinks like he’d never seen, and it sparked something inside him. “I saw this whole other side of bartending, and it captured my attention,” he says. “I've been in it ever since.”
“My philosophy behind making drinks is, I always create something that’s balanced, that has familiar flavors, and presents them in a different way.”
The drinks he concocts now for Grey Ghost and Second Best don’t look much like the pints of Guinness he poured in his pub days. One cocktail might call for soy sauce; another, housemade taco bitters. “My philosophy behind making drinks is, I always create something that's balanced, that has familiar flavors, and presents them in a different way,” says Lee. But Lee still tries to summon that spirit of service that he believes, more than any innovative recipe or impressive backbar, sets Detroit’s bar scene apart from so many other major markets. “We have to know everyone's names. We gotta meet people. That's what people come to the bar for,” he says. “The drinks are cool, but you can't lose that touch.”
Since first jumping behind the bar in 2001, Lee has been both a witness to and a participant in the rapid evolution of Detroit’s food and drink culture. I ask him if he feels like the city’s dining and drinking scene is still underrated or ignored by national media. He doesn’t hesitate: “Yes. 100%—dining, drinking, and hospitality.” He adds that he’s currently wrapping up a consulting job with another restaurant, whose chefs are explicitly gunning for Michelin recognition. “There's a chip on our shoulder that Michelin, realistically, will probably never come here,” says Lee. “But our restaurants here, our food and beverage scene ... we're ready for it when they do.”
Every Saturday, roughly 45,000 people descend on Detroit’s Eastern Market, one of the oldest and largest public farmers markets in the country. They come to buy flowers and vegetables from Michigan farmers; coffee, cheese, and artwork from Detroit purveyors. Tucked in the southeastern corner of the 43-acre space is Detroit City Distillery. Lee, who buys his produce for the bar at the Market, has made a habit of poking his head into the distillery and saying hi with each weekly trip.
Michael Forsyth and the seven other people at the helm of the distillery have shared lives and mischief since they were three years old, living in the tiny town of Bath, Michigan (population 2,083). “We basically started making beer when we were 16,” says Forsyth. “The one guy who used to buy it for us left town, so that inspired us to open a brewery one day … just a bunch of country kids bullshitting with each other.” The illicit beer operation didn’t last, but the friendships did, and so did the group’s bootstrapping sense of resourcefulness. Years later, in 2014, they established Detroit City Distillery, and found themselves at the head of an operation that would become the fastest-growing distillery in the state of Michigan.
Together, the group settled on two guiding principles from the outset, which they used as a North Star to guide what booze they made and how they wanted to make it. Rule Number One: make use of the best local ingredients that Michigan has to offer. Rule Number Two: make things they actually want to drink. The distillery also began exploring special one-offs made in conjunction with and for their favorite bars and bartenders—their inaugural collaboration was the gin they blended for Kate Williams at Lady of the House, which last year got a nod from Pete Wells in the New York Times.
Forsyth and his buddies started making beer because they had none and they wanted it. That same ethos is why, after establishing a flagship portfolio of vodka, rye whiskey, gin, and bourbon, they wanted to try their hand at rum. Only problem was, for a company that sources its rye, corn, barley, and pine from nearby counties, and even buys its gin botanicals from a 100-year-old spice trader in the Eastern Market, rum presented a conundrum. Michigan farms comprise endless rows of corn, sugar beets, wheat, even Christmas trees. Sugarcane doesn’t fit in that list; not even close.
“Everything we do is inherently local,” says Forsyth. “And so, we had to figure out how to make rum local. So we decided to bend the rules and to do this a little differently.” Their solution: in accordance with Rule Number One, spotlight the best of Michigan not with literal agricultural products, but with its talent—by letting its best bartenders take the wheel. The base spirit itself wouldn’t be local or regional, but the sum of its parts—a collaborative effort among a dozen industry friends—would be. As for Rule Number Two? That was in the bag. “We just really wanted to drink Daiquiris this summer,” says Forsyth.
Thus, the sourcing began. The first step was rallying a solid crew, which wasn’t hard. “We basically went out to our favorite bars, and asked our favorite bartenders if they wanted in on the project,” says Forsyth. “And of course, they did.” They wound up with a dozen bartenders repping some of the city’s best establishments, including Standby, the Skip, Takoi, Kiesling, the Detroit Foundation Hotel, and the Shinola Hotel. And representing Grey Ghost and Second Best, Will Lee, along with bar manager Rudy Leon.
“Everything we do is inherently local. And so, we had to figure out how to make rum local. So we decided to bend the rules and to do this a little differently.”
Then, the distillery worked to source a range of rums for the bartenders to play with, like high-quality base spirits from the Virgin Islands; a funky, high-ester rhum agricole from Jamaica; and a bright, grassy rum from the French West Indies. The bartenders convened inside the distillery’s production space and spent the day sniffing, sipping, blending, harmonizing, tweaking. “It was an incredibly democratic process,” says Forsyth.
Bartender Chas Williams, who works at the Shinola Hotel’s Evening Bar and San Morello, describes it as “a really big brainstorming session,” one in which the group spent hours categorizing rums, blind-tasting blends straight and in drinks, and bouncing ideas off of one another for the rum’s potential applications behind the bar. It was that sense of shared ownership that drew Williams to the project initially. “From the beginning, this wasn't a one-person collaboration, working with one bar,” says Williams. “This was taking people who'd run beverage programs from all across the city, and bringing them together, and creating something we all felt we wanted to use.”
At the outset, no one knew what the final product would be, though all were working with a shared goal of blending a rum that would shine just as brightly in a Daiquiri as it would in an Old Fashioned. “We all went into it with the philosophy that, if we design something that's more versatile, it leaves the door open for more creativity behind the bar,” says Lee. “And I don't think I've ever done that with that many different people. It was cool to see what everyone's palates leaned toward, what everyone's philosophy toward blending was, how everyone approached it.”
Summer Rum has ripe banana, pineapple, and clove on the nose; a robust body with notes of guava, mango, and coconut; and a finish with lime, toffee, and spice. Detroit City Distillery only released a few hundred cases, and all of them were exclusively allocated to the participating bartenders’ bars. At Grey Ghost, Lee serves the rum in the Bananarang, a kind of love letter to the industry: a banana Daiquiri riff, named after the drinks bartenders secretly send each other. It’s a wink and a nod to the treasured tradition and strong bonds forged in this line of work—and to the camaraderie that Lee feels is such a strong foundation of Detroit’s bartending family in particular. The drink will be on the menu until the Summer Rum reserves run dry, which could be next month, or next week, or maybe even today. Because the entire point of the exercise isn’t to sell rum, but to enjoy it, and enjoy making it, together with friends. “The best part of this,” adds Williams, “is knowing we can do something like this again.”
“The best part of this is knowing we can do something like this again.”
It is, at first glance, a little counterintuitive to think that a tropical rum, redolent of Caribbean fruit and spice, would be so representative of a decidedly untropical town like Detroit. But Forsyth believes the spirit embodies something deeper and more abstract about the city. “Detroit has, out of necessity, been forced to work together to get through all its challenges over the years,” he says. “It's a very interconnected place. It's a very small town. And that's something that I place a lot of value and pride in, our role in growing an ecosystem here in Detroit. It's kind of like the saying, ‘a rising tide raises all boats.’”
Summer Rum is a spirit that, like Detroit itself, is so much more than the sum of its parts. For a town that’s seen its share of hard knocks, that’s been overlooked (or worse, pandered to and pitied) by national media, and that’s managed to rise above despite—or in spite of—all of the above, it makes perfect sense. It conjures that spirit of community and camaraderie that Lee thinks defines the city’s hospitality industry right now, more than any award or national accolade (or future Michelin star) ever could. “We've all worked together at one point, we're all friends, and we're all here to support each other no matter what,” he says. “If I need ice, I have eight or nine different bars I can call to get ice.”
Then, after a pause, he adds: “I wouldn't want to do this anywhere else.”
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford
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