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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Martini Maker Juices Up Bars

As a bartender, you’re juggling a dozen orders, chatting with customers over background music and keeping track of cash and cards sliding back and forth across the counter. But in the end, you’re only as good as your drinks. That’s what led Eric Tecosky, bartender-turned-entrepreneur, to create Dirty Sue – a premium olive juice used to make dirty martinis and Bloody Marys that has designs on expanding into an international brand. “Bartenders make a ton of martinis, and one night I was by myself when a big party came in and it got a little crazy,” Tecosky said. “Someone ordered a dirty martini, but when I went to grab the olive jar, it was full of olives but there was no more juice.” He was forced to head to the storage room for another jar, leaving his customers to wait. This was not the first time it had happened. “I would have two, sometimes three open jars of olives with no juice,” he said. “So I’m trying to get this jar open and I think, Why has nobody bottled olive juice yet?” That’s when inspiration hit. Tecosky worked with a team of investors to create Dirty Sue, a blend of olive juice specifically for cocktails. The product contains no olives – just juice, which is twice filtered from Spanish olives and complements many cocktails, including gin and vodka dirty martinis. Even though Tecosky set out to prioritize the juice over the olives, it proved technically difficult to improve on the regular olives-in-saltwater-and-vinegar that bars were accustomed to using. “The olive juice in the jar is pretty low grade and only meant to keep olives from going bad,” Tecosky said. “To make a better version of that took a lot of research.” Since he launched American Mixers Inc. in Studio City and Dirty Sue Premium Olive Juice in 2005, Tecosky said the company has expanded its distribution. Last year, it launched a line of stuffed olives, pepperoncinis and other garnishes under the brand name Dirty Sue, and this spring the company will serve up Dirty Sue Bloody Mary Mix to the market. “I think Dirty Sue was sort of a trailblazer in terms of the notion that you can add something to the drink to make it special,” said Elyse Glickman, a freelance food and beverage writer in Los Angeles. “There was a lot of care put into that product that would make bartenders look good and bring back customers.” International flavor Tecosky moved to Los Angeles after college to help a friend produce shows. When that relationship soured nearly eight months after his move, he was desperate to find a job. Several challenging bartending experiences later, Tecosky said he landed at eatery Jones Hollywood as a bartender in 2001. It was there that his dirty martini frustration grew and he had the inspiration for Dirty Sue. Getting the brand off the ground proved to be a financial challenge, though. “In the very beginning, it was all out of pocket, like most ’90s entrepreneurs. I thought I could start a company on the money I made bartending. Very quickly I found out what I expected my costs to be were a fraction of what they were,” he said. He reached out to friends for financial backing and pounded the pavement to sell Dirty Sue to local bars and restaurants. “Because it was new I would often hear the question from bar managers, Why would I buy something I can get for free? The answer was you get what you pay for and the stuff in the jar was really low grade,” Tecosky said. However, he said his persistence paid off and his product found a place at the bar. “It was like a domino effect – once I had a bunch of quality accounts I could walk into a cold account and list off my top accounts. It made it easier to get people that didn’t know me and (weren’t familiar with) the product,” he said. Today, some of the brand’s top accounts include Craig’s, a bar and restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood; Killer Shrimp in Marina del Rey; and Dan Tana’s, also in West Hollywood. Although competitors have entered the market, including juices from Santa Barbara Olive Co. and Boscoli, Dirty Sue has developed a following. Michael Neff, bar director at Holiday Cocktail Lounge in New York and bar consultant for Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, said Clifton’s started carrying Dirty Sue early last month when its bar reopened. “I’ve known about Dirty Sue for years. In the battle days of making dirty martinis, we would strain the olive juice from the olive container. You would even see people straining the juice through their fingers,” Neff remembered. “Dirty Sue solved what I thought to be a pretty big problem – how to hygienically serve a drink that a lot of people drink. They’re still pretty popular and the packaging is amazing. It always looks nice on display in the back bar.” Though he initially targeted bars and restaurants, Tecosky has expanded his reach to everyday consumers by selling through retailers. With a 10-year track record, Dirty Sue olive juice has found space on the shelves of wine, spirits and liquor retailers across 18 states, including Bristol Farms and Total Wine as well as local retailers K&L in Hollywood and Gelson’s in Calabasas. Tecosky said the company is working to expand into Canada and key parts of Europe by next year. “A lot of bartenders and home consumers use Dirty Sue in their Bloody Mary mixes, and a lot of cooks told me they use it in salad dressings and other sauces,” Tecosky said. In mix The bar scene in Los Angeles has changed drastically since Dirty Sue first hit the market 10 years ago. For starters, the term “mixologist” had not yet hit the mainstream. Nowadays, bartenders often serve up off-the-cuff inventions such as bacon-inspired drinks and savory cocktails infused with black pepper, curry and other unusual ingredients. “Back then, we weren’t considered as progressive with our cocktails as San Francisco and New York were. The Los Angeles cocktail scene was more about mass cocktails, profitability, what the flavor of the month was – not about creativity,” Glickman said. “Now I think we have completely caught up and I think we are one of the leaders in the cocktail scene in the U.S.” Jeremy Allen, general manager of Hollywood’s MiniBar, which opened last month, said that fresh, better-quality ingredients have become a priority in the bar industry. He noted that bar owners and wine professionals are actively seeking out and investing in smaller companies with better production practices for their cocktail mixers and ingredients. “I think consumers expect more. You’re even seeing craft drinks on menus like T.G.I. Friday’s now,” Allen said. “If you care about your job, then you’ll care about what’s going into the customer’s body.” The line of Dirty Sue Bloody Mary Mix will launch this spring. Tecosky hopes the product will duplicate a popular Bloody Mary recipe he developed at Jones Hollywood. “If they market it correctly and find a way to reinvent the Bloody Mary as they did with the martini 10 years ago, I think that it’ll be great,” said Glickman. Dirty Sue olive juice retails for $5.99 and up. Tecosky said the company broke even nearly five years ago and has been profitable since, and sales continue to grow by double-digit percentages every year. “I feel like Dirty Sue was a little ahead of its time,” Tecosky said. “Now that (bar owners) are sourcing much better ingredients than they used to 30 years ago, the company is really hitting its stride.”

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