By Dina Novarr—
There’s a reason people talk about a great bar program the way they talk about great sex: you don’t fully know what to expect until you feel the rhythm and the vibes.
What Nora does is create those experiences (the bar programs, not the sex). It’s the difference between a transaction and an adventure that writes your sense of what a place can be. She has built programs that make a room feel like it knows you. Once a restaurant has that quality, guests don’t just return … they bond. They sit at the bar alone; they bring dates; they bring friends. It becomes woven into their life.
Nora is a beverage consultant and an award-winning bartender and Operating Partner at Buddy (a San Francisco bar named to Imbibe’s 75 in 2022 and Forbes’ Best Bars in America in 2023). She approaches each project through the lens of provenance, terroir, and process. These aren’t buzzwords for her; they’re the scaffolding. A cocktail program, in her hands, is less a list of drinks and more of an aura for the atmosphere to get appetites wet. With partners Christopher Longoria and Stephanie Gonnet, she heads up the consulting firm West Bev (https://www.westbevconsulting.com/). Their combined experience spans across all types of bar establishments, from nightclubs to Michelin-starred restaurants.
She occupies this incredible intersection of hedonism and expertise that few other professions can claim. She understands chemistry, agriculture, business operations, cultural trends, and human psychology. Then she distills them onto a menu that works for a specific room, a specific crowd, a specific movement. She is essentially a professional enthusiast, someone whose job is to care deeply about quality, seek out interesting stories, and connect restaurant experiences to cultural movements. She gets paid to have opinions about things that bring people joy.
Great sex also brings joy in the same way. It goes beyond physical competence; it is attunement and building frequency that works. That frequency creates intimacy that, in turn, creates loyalty. And loyalty is everything in hospitality. Nora engineers provenance-driven solutions through the ritual of a well-made drink that makes the room complete. She builds attachment with good frequency and outcomes, as a way to keep customers returning.
To understand what that looks like in practice, she shared two cocktails created roughly a decade apart, for two very different concepts in two very different parts of the world. They tell a story about evolution without losing a throughline.
The first is the Herbert West (named after the Re-Animator) created in 2014 for Belga, a Belgian mussels and fries restaurant on Union Street in San Francisco. The bar had a serious back bar: genevers, brandies, a fridge full of sours and witbiers. “Most of the cocktails featured spirits our average guests weren’t familiar with, much less able to pronounce,” Nora recalls. But she knew her room. She’d logged enough hours in the Marina and Cow Hollow to understand that sometimes you have to reach across the aisle. Which is to say: she put vodka on the menu … and St. Germain. “It was 2014, after all.” Because a woman who engineers intimacy for a living knows that you sometimes win hearts with the familiar before you seduce them into the strange.
The Herbert West is a riff on the Corpse Reviver, “a category of cocktail meant to bring the drinker back to life,” according to Nora. In her version, the vodka and St. Germain carry the friendliness, while Cynar and grapefruit ride alongside to “amp up the bitterness” and give it some actual teeth. There is no house-made anything, but there’s an honest ounce of juice. It evidences the ratio of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and isn’t trying to prove it. “I really think it’s one of the better cocktails I’ve come up with in my day,” she says. “It’s probably better with gin, but its true form was vodka, and ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
Herbert West
1½ oz vodka
¾ oz grapefruit juice
¼ oz lime juice
½ oz Cynar
½ oz St. Germain
tiny pinch salt
grapefruit peel for garnish
Shake with ice; strain into a coupe. Garnish with grapefruit peel.
The second is the Zam Zam, created for The Mission Bay, a restaurant in Delhi, India, built around Bay Area recipes, ethos, and vibes. The menu paid homage to beloved San Francisco haunts: The Buena Vista, The Lolo, The Mauna Loa, The Make Out Room. The Zam Zam honors its namesake, the legendary Upper Haight dive bar famous for its strong-as-god martinis, while, as Nora puts it, “pulling its flavor profile from the retro build for a Surfer on Acid,” the pineapple-Jägermeister-coconut rum shot “that was commonly called for in my early years of bartending.” It is pure late-nineties nostalgia, reconstructed for a room halfway around the world with a fraction of the imported spirits availability. And, yes, I am highlighting this because any person who can make love touch my Indian lips is a winner in my books. Thank you, Zam Zam.
Here is where provenance becomes something more than a philosophy; it becomes a constraint that forces creativity. Import laws and excise taxes in Delhi mean that many bottles that would be given on a San Francisco back bar are either unavailable or prohibitively priced for cocktail use. So, Nora and her team made their own. They created a house herbal liqueur they called Chart-Ruse, which isn’t merely a stand-in for Chartreuse so much as it is what Chartreuse could be when terroir wins entirely.
When you’re forced to source and blend local botanicals with intention rather than reach for an import, you make something that actually belongs to the place. They also produced “a licorice root gum syrup for that Jäger flavor, plus a bit of body,” and “a coconut tincture so we could control the coconut flavor intensity.” And then there were the pineapples: “fresh juiced pineapples that we acidified using a blend of acids. Fresh fruit in India is unreal,” she says, “so why mess around with something from a can?”
The garnish is a tie-dye stencil executed with colored powders and sprays. “We probably should be burning some nag champa every time we serve this to really nail the Haight Street head shop energy,” she admits, “but the drink was already complicated enough.” I agree completely.
Great bartenders, like great lovers, know how to make something extraordinary out of exactly what they’re given. The Zam Zam is a monument to that instinct. It is born of limitation, soaked in nostalgia, and elevated by the sheer refusal to settle for less than the best.
Zam Zam
1 oz vodka
½ oz coconut rum
¾ oz pineapple juice
½ oz lime juice
½ oz Green Chartreuse
¼ oz simple syrup
white of one egg (optional)
Dry shake without ice to whip and emulsify. Shake with ice; double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with colored powders over a stencil, or simply express a lime peel over the top.
As the month of love comes to an end, let’s pay tribute to all the ways we as humans find love and intimacy. For me, it is in the programs Nora has built and in finding myself lost in ecstasy with every sip. The next time you visit your favorite place or person, maybe spare a thought for what makes them a draw and unique—the reason you keep coming back for more.
San Francisco-based Dina Novarr enjoys sharing her passion for fine wines, spirits, non-alcoholic craft beverages, and more with others.
Cocktails with Dina
Published on February 26, 2026
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