This week’s SLTN Awards will be a big night for Glasgow bartender Mairi McDowall.
In addition to being a finalist in the Bartender of the Year category, Mairi will be serving her Away from Home cocktail to hundreds of guests after winning this year’s SLTN Spirit of the Sixties: Revolution! cocktail competition.
Having been in the trade for seven years, Mairi’s career has seen her working in a range of venues including Slug & Lettuce, Blue Dog, Tabac, Bothwell House, Mikaku and now Sebb’s.
She’s been at the latter for the past year, and it was a deliberate move to get her back to the coalface of customer service.
She told SLTN: “The way things went at Mikaku I was doing mainly back of house stuff by the end of it. I was doing a lot of ordering, a lot of rotas. I was glued to a laptop a lot of the time, which was a good way to learn, a good experience, but I just felt I was really disconnected from service.
“So I wanted to get back to that, which is why I came here, to step up my service game again.”
And it’s been a good move, said Mairi. The venue, downstairs from sister venue Margo, is a part of the expanding Scoop Restaurants group, which is also behind venues including Ox & Finch and Ka Pao.
“Scoop Restaurants are filled with some of the most experienced people in the industry,” said Mairi. “It’s been really class to learn from everyone. It’s also the smoothest venue I’ve worked in. Everything works, and looking behind the curtain to figure out how that happens has been really cool – being able to adjust how I approach these problems to stop them happening before they do.”
This year’s SLTN cocktail competition took inspiration from the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s – the decade SLTN was launched – and asked bartenders to create an original drink in keeping with that theme.
Those bartenders invited to compete in the final were also asked to create a second drink containing Buffalo Trace and which could be prepared in large volumes.
Mairi’s first cocktail, Lil’ Pink Pill, was inspired by the sexual revolution, and hormonal birth control pill becoming available on the NHS – a seismic development in the early 1960s.
She explained: “It did lead to this insane increase in life expectancy, financial differences, better health outcomes, higher educational levels, and it separated reproduction from the act of having sex itself. It made it two separate things. And made it something women could take control of themselves for the first time. That was where the idea came from.”
The follow-up drink – Away from Home – was designed as a tribute to the bartenders that have made Mairi feel welcome in their venues through the years. This second drink, a whiskey highball, will be the one served to guests at the 2025 SLTN Awards.
Mairi explained that she will often ask a bartender to create their own spin on a highball whenever she visits her favourite venues around Glasgow.
“I think especially at the end of a long night or after a shift it’s really nice to have a moment to just make something fun or make something for someone,” she said.
“I’ve never had a drink I’ve not liked. I’ve never been disappointed. Every one has been incredible. It mixes whatever flavours they’ve used with a connection. And that’s what hospitality is about: having that connection with your bartender and making a drink that you’re truly going to enjoy.
“What I wanted to do was recreate that connection on a larger scale, as a tribute to every bartender that’s made me laugh after a long shift, made me a drink, made me feel at home in their bar. It’s something I’ve relied on heavily over the years, is sitting in bars feeling at home and feeling relaxed after a shift.”
There’s a clear passion for hospitality when Mairi speaks about the industry, and it’s something she’s keen to encourage in the next group of young bartenders as they enter the scene.
“It’s been quite a difficult few years for hospitality. But there’s a new generation of kids coming in and it’s really making sure that they’re getting the best from the industry and it’s not a horrible, toxic place to work,” she said.
“Because it does have the reputation of being that sometimes. It’s something that still happens, but I’m trying my best to improve it for the next group coming forward.”
