Nomad bartender and co-owner Matt van Dinther voted as Vancouver's best bartender

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      Matt van Dinther has no difficulty remembering when he decided he wanted to make drinks for a living. In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, he recalled his days as a young kitchen worker and seeing bartenders walking out with women’s phone numbers and money in their pocket.

      “I was scrubbing lemon underneath my fingernails wondering what I was doing with my life,” van Dinther said with a laugh. “So I decided to get into it. One thing led to another and I started doing cocktails.”

      It’s been a remarkable odyssey for the 28-year-old bartender and part owner of Nomad, a bright and hip Main Street restaurant that has attracted as much attention for its sustainable, local cuisine as for its craft cocktails.

      This year, Georgia Straight readers voted van Dinther the city’s best bartender in the annual Golden Plates awards. (H at Notturno took silver and Tacofino’s Julia Diakow captured bronze.)

      “I just want to pass along my thanks to all the readership,” he said. “It was an absolutely humbling experience.”

      It’s not his first bartending honour. Van Dinther took first place in Havana Club Canada’s Los Maestros del Daiquiri competition. Last year, his team won an international competition sponsored by Hennessy involving 45 participants from 18 countries.

      According to van Dinther, one of the biggest misconceptions about bartending is that people do this work while pursuing another career. He emphasized that it’s becoming more of a profession with the rise of cocktail culture and the growing popularity of craft drinks.

      “A plethora of restaurants are investing in that,” van Dinther stated. “You can no longer just offer really good food or really good drinks. You need to offer both.”

      He added that while wine pairs extremely well with food, not everybody wants to drink it with dinner. Some prefer a mixed drink or craft beer.

      Van Dinther also pointed out that some customers are becoming very sophisticated because the Internet makes it easy to gain access to information.

      “People are starting to learn more about their drinks just as they’re starting to learn more about their food,” he said. “They know where their spirits are coming from. They know which brands they like.”

      In the past, he worked behind the bar in Gastown at the Diamond and Wildebeest. Van Dinther said that he has noticed a difference in the clientele between that part of town and Nomad, which is near the intersection of Main Street and King Edward Avenue. In Gastown, more customers were interested in what van Dinther calls “eccentric cocktails”.

      “Here, the cocktail crowd isn’t as diverse,” he acknowledged. “So you definitely want to tailor your menus and your offerings toward that.”

      As much as van Dinther enjoys the craft of creating drinks, he doesn’t prefer making any one over the others. As for drinking alcohol, his personal tastes lean toward the classics, like a brandy crusta, Manhattan, or Tom Collins, or just sitting down and having a beer or a whisky.

      Born in St. John, New Brunswick, van Dinther grew up in the Millstream area outside of Victoria. He trained in the famed Bengal Lounge in the Empress Hotel, which is kitty-corner to the B.C. legislature.

      From there, he moved to London to work in the Beaufort Bar in the Savoy Hotel. He explained that was because he was eager to get his career started and there isn’t as strong a tradition in the United Kingdom of working as a bar back before getting a chance to tend the bar.

      “It was an opportunity to get my foot in the door without having to go through all the precursor steps that I wanted to skip,” van Dinther revealed.

      The Beaufort Bar is no small fry in the world of cocktails. Last year, it was named the best international hotel bar at Tales of the Cocktail.

      Canada is no slouch in this area either, according to van Dinther. He pointed out that bartenders in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal are getting noticed in international competitions, noting there has been a proliferation of great drinking establishments in these three cities. “They’re rivalling some of the best bars in the world,” he said.

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