Age: 38
Originally from: Žilina, Slovak Republic
Profession: Bar owner & bartender
At: London
- Sign up for our Newsletter; About; Contact; Shop; Menu.
- You read that right, you can book your private masterclass with The Gibson Bar manager and owner, Marian Beke, he is an internationally known bartender, famous for his outstanding creativity. He is constantly looking out for new tastes, ingredients and inspiring people all around the world.The package includes 3 of The Gibson Vintage Cocktails of your choice, delivered to your home, and 1h.
- Marian Beke Slovakian born Marian Beke, moved to London at 16 years old like so many others who wanted to work on their English speaking skills.
Growing up in the little city of Žilina in the country then called Czechoslovakia, Marian Beke always knew he wanted to work in hospitality. “My father has a wine business in our home town, selling from the cellar and distributing in restaurants and bars,” he says. “Since I was 9 or 10 I was helping him with the snacks and serving wine by the glass.”
Mute events menu gallery press contact.
But his original idea was to be a sommelier, or follow in his father’s footsteps. Žilina, Slovakia’s third city, has a population of barely 150,000, and Beke didn’t come across cocktail bars until he moved to Bratislava to study hospitality as a teenager.
There were three or four international-style bars in Prague at the time, among them Bugsy’s and Tretter’s, which are still going today, and a trip across the border to the Czech Republic proved eye-opening. “The personalisation for each guest was what fascinated me the most,” Beke recalls. “It was liquid cooking, not just opening a bottle of beer or pouring a glass of wine, but customising the drink.”
Beke’s school didn’t teach bartending, not least because the students were too young, but after graduating he started work at a well-known Bratislava bar, Paparazzi (no relation to the Warsaw Paparazzi).
Marian Beke Wikipedia
The training and inspiration worked a little too well. Beke decided on the spot to leave Bratislava, move to London, study English and learn to bartend. With both social media and smartphones in their infancy, no Google Maps and no Ubers, adapting to a new city where he didn’t speak the language – and a city double the population of his entire country – was tougher than it would be today.
The paint brush cover. “My language school had an internet café and you’d sit there and do your emails,” he recalls. “The first thing you’d do when you came to London, everyone advised, was buy an A to Z [London’s iconic street map]. So you’d take undergrounds, you’d know the tube station, and at the tube station, you’d open the page of the A to Z, and then you’d be walking the streets for half an hour trying to find the place.”
There was at least one familiar face in the big city: Erik Lorincz, now head bartender at the American Bar. “Erik was one year ahead of me, and he’s Slovakian: I knew him because he used to work across the road from me in Bratislava, and he left one year before me,” Beke recalls. “He got me my first job, at a nightclub called Attica: he was already a bartender, but I was a bar back.”
Moving on from Attica, newly acquired language skills in hand, Beke embarked on a learning programme that could hardly have been better calculated. First was Townhouse, the second bar from the team behind LAB, one of the most influential bars of turn-of-the-millennium London, where he learned to work fast, fluidly and with fresh fruit flavours.
Next up came Montgomery Place, a speakeasy then run by Ago Perrone. “That was something different to be doing classic cocktails, from Champagne to Negroni, and I learned Italian hospitality and how to socialise with guests,” Beke says. After three years, Perrone left for the Connaught, while Beke went to Artesian, where he worked alongside Alex Kratena, another émigré from the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia.
After Artesian, the next step was Purl. “That was a learning experience for me because they’d been doing liquid nitrogen and foams – it was nice to play with liquid nitrogen, dry ice, those kind of things,” he says.
And from there came the invitation to set up Nightjar, the much-awarded Shoreditch bar. “I started from zero, literally designing the bar, defining the team and creating the concept,” Beke says. “But after five years I was getting a bit comfortable there: after five years everything works, and you’re just doing a new cocktail menu once a year.”
The prospect, also, of having a family, and of getting old, weighed on him: nobody wants to be working 16-18 hour days with young children, or indeed in old age. The logical next step? To start his own place. And so, three years ago, he found a spot on Old Street and opened Gibson, soft launching from November 2015, and opening formally in early 2016.
The transition from manager to owner was quite the culture shock. “Running a business is not about how good a bartender you are, or how good a cocktail it is – you can make the best cocktail in the world, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to open the bar and operate,” he says. “There could be a million factors that could close your bar, from hygiene to licensing.”
Gibson is already much praised – it entered the World’s 50 Best Bars list at number 6 within weeks of opening – but Beke feels it’s barely hit its stride. “I was figuring it takes three, six, nine months to get the bar started, but now we’ve been open for one and a half years, it will take another six months to fix the social media, the music….” he says. “At a bare minimum, it’s two years.”
His logic is interesting. “It takes really two years to go through the menu and understand the menu, because it’s not about you: it’s about your clientele, what they like, your team, how to work with them, how to choose the right ones, how to fix the mistakes and establish the brand,” he says.
And what does his father, the wine merchant, make of his bar? I ask. Here Beke’s perfectionism glitters, hard as granite. “They’ve never been,” he says. “They know I opened a bar, but I want to fix the bar first. After two years, when I see it’s nice and settled, I’ll bring them in: there’s no point opening and just bringing them in two months later. That would just be stress.”
Born at the turn of the 20th century, the Gibson is the Audi to the martini’s Mercedes, the Tag Heuer to its Rolex, a perfect example of the design principle to which uber-designer Raymond Loewy attributed his success—MAYA, or Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. A gin martini garnished with silverskin, or “pearl,” pickled onions, the Gibson is familiar enough to entice a martini drinker yet different enough to satisfy the adventurous. Nowadays, a good dozen of the world’s 50 best bars serve signature Gibsons, and acclaimed Gibson-inspired bars can be found in cities, like London andSingapore, that celebrate the cocktail. The Gibson is back—and bartenders haven’t been wasting any time putting their own spins on the classic.
The rising trend may have kicked off first at Dear Irving in New York City. Meaghan Dorman, the group beverage director, together with the head bartender at the time, Tom Richter, decided to update and feature the Gibson not long after the bar opened in 2014. They created a $17 Gibson with citrus-forward Tanqueray No. Ten that was softened not with extra-dry vermouth but with bianco-style vermouth from the producer Carpano. Dorman’s Gibson is a best seller to this day. It soars on the savory notes of that bianco vermouth—and its onion brine, which contains salt, coriander, and Champagne vinegar. “People know they’ll be getting a good onion at Dear Irving,” says Dorman. “A fear of sad onions was something we found deters potential Gibson drinkers.”
Marian Baker Eddy
Next up was the two Gibson cocktails that were created at London’s Gibson Bar, which was founded by the multiple award–winning Marian Beke, who previously helmed Nightjar. The entire ethos of the bar, opened in November 2015, was inspired by its namesake cocktail with its savory brine. That savory quality of the brine is also incorporated into all of the other cocktails throughout the menu, in the form of chutneys, relishes, and ketchups. The first of Beke’s Gibson cocktails is a bargain at $14; it features a special-edition Copperhead Gin made especially for the Gibson Bar and a pickling spices–infused Mancino Secco dry Italian vermouth and is served with double-pickled onions and lemon zest. “We serve it with a jar of pickles to refresh your palate,” says Beke, “and Parmesan to balance the kick of the alcohol.”
Marian Bekerja
Don’t miss the latest drinks industry news and insights. Sign up for our award-winning Daily Dispatch newsletter—delivered to your inbox every week.
The bar’s other Gibson is an altogether different beast—the whole cocktail consists of gin, vermouth, pickling spices, lemon zest, and onions left to macerate for 72 hours. The mixture is then redistilled in a rotovap to between 55% and 60% ABV. Beke sells this cocktail for $17 and says it’s a cocktail for the dry martini lover. He describes it as “an overproof, naked martini with the savory flavor of a Gibson.”
At almost the same time that Beke was opening his doors on London’s Old Street, another Gibson bar was opening on the other side of the world. The bar manager Aki Eguchi, a Japanese native who made his name with bars like Jigger & Pony and Sugarhall in Singapore, opened The Gibson Singapore. Eguchi was inspired to reinterpret the cocktail using local flavors. “In our view,” says Eguchi, “a guest who orders a Gibson cocktail at the bar is someone who really knows what he likes, has high standards, and rather peculiar taste. Thus we take this approach at the bar: Very high and particular standards, with unusual twists.” Eguchi’s house Gibson now features the Japanese gin Roku with a special sake vermouth. The drink is served with delicate condiments—smoked quail’s egg, wasabi leaves, and pickled onion—that steer the savory-briny flavors that define a Gibson in new directions. He sells the cocktail for $17.
In New York City in September 2016, yet another Gibson came onto the drinks scene when the Walter Gibson appeared on the menu at The NoMad. It was a $32 serve for two people that was named after the NoMad wine director Thomas Pastuszak’s son, an infant at the time. The Walter was designed with full NoMad treatment: It contains Edinburgh Seaside Gin—which “gives it a wonderful saline minerality,” says NoMad’s East Coast bar director, Pietro Collina, who oversaw the development of the drink—as well as Old Raj Navy Strength Gin and Absolut Elyx Vodka.
“I wanted our Gibson to appeal to both gin and vodka martini drinkers,” says Collina. The spirits are combined with a sweet wine, as well as both extra-dry and bianco vermouths from Dolin, an apple eau-de-vie from St. George, and a bar spoon of pineapple gomme—all served premixed and prediluted in a wax-lined bottle that’s been in a freezer for about five days. And that’s not all. The drink comes with an assortment of pickles: onions in a sweet pickling sauce, carrots in cinnamon brine, fennel in coriander brine, and celery in fennel brine. It’s hard to imagine a better Gibson for the modern age.
Perhaps the most heartwarming Gibson story, though, is from a place where the cocktail never went away. The Four Seasons in midtown Manhattan was one of the spots where power-lunching was invented, and such lunches were often of the three-martini kind, so Gibsons never stopped being a popular order. After a 2017 overhaul by Major Food Group that saw the restaurant divided into The Grill, The Pool, and other spots, the bar director Thomas Waugh took the opportunity to elevate the Seasons’ standard Gibson to a creative level appropriate for the 21st century. The updated drink is a premixed and prediluted combination of Boodles Gin, which Waugh says he loves “for its dryness and its strength” and because it gives “less citrus, more savory” flavors; Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth; and a teaspoon of house-made onion brine—which Waugh does his damnedest to freeze. And how does this $20 cocktail go over with the tribe of true devotees of the Gibson, who kept ordering it, even through its darkest days?
“They love it,” says Waugh. “For them, Gibsons at The Grill are like coming home.”
Japplis toolbox app. More than 50 text utilities in 1 software. Text manipulation such as codec, lines, regular expressions, hashing, statistics.
Signature Gibson Recipes
The Gibson by Meaghan Dorman (Dear Irving, New York City)
2 oz. Tanqueray No. Ten gin
1 oz. Carpano Bianco vermouth
2 barspoons onion brine (with Champagne and apple vinegars)
Stir with ice.
Serve up with a pickled onion.
The Gibson by Marian Beke (The Gibson Bar, London)
2 oz. Copperhead Gibson Edition Gin
0.25 oz. Mancino Secco Dry Vermouth infused with pickling spices
Stir with double-frozen ice.
Serve in nickel-plated martini glasses. Garnish with 3 double-pickled onions (1 week in balsamic vinegar, 1 week in white wine vinegar) and lemon zest. Serve with jar of pickles and Parmesan cheese.
The Redistilled Gibson by Marian Beke (The Gibson Bar, London)
The above recipe, but all ingredients (gin, vermouth, pickling spices, onions, lemon zest) macerated for 72 hours then redistilled in a rotovap low-pressure distilling apparatus to between 55% and 60% ABV (110–120 proof).
The Gibson by Aki Eguchi (The Gibson Singapore)
1.5 oz. Suntory Roku Gin
0.25 oz. Japanese Sake Vermouth
Garnish with smoked quail’s egg, wasabi leaves, and pickled onion.
Marian Beke Nightjar
The Walter Gibson by Pietro Collina (The NoMad, New York City)
1 oz. Absolut Elyx Vodka
1 oz. Edinburgh Seaside Gin
0.5 oz. Old Raj Blue Navy Strength Gin
0.5 oz. Dolin Dry Vermouth
0.5 oz. Dolin Blanc Vermouth
0.5 oz. Moulin Touche 1994 (sweet wine)
0.25 oz. St. George Apple Brandy
Bar spoon pineapple gomme syrup
Premix and predilute, then freeze. Serve in a wax-lined bottle with pickled onions, carrots, fennel, and celery—and two glasses.
The Gibson by Thomas Waugh (The Grill, New York City)
3 oz. Boodles Gin
0.5 .oz Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth
Teaspoon house onion brine
Premix, predilute, and freeze. Garnish with pickled onions.
Philip Duff owns the on-trade consultancy Liquid Solutions. He founded Holland’s first speakeasy bar—Door 74 in Amsterdam—and owns the award-winning Old Duff Genever brand. Duff has published articles in Drinks International, CLASS magazine, Imbibe UK, Mixology (Germany), Australian Bartender, and Reuters. He also serves as the educational director for Tales of the Cocktail and is a judge for the IWSR, the World’s 50 Best Bars, and the Spirited Awards. He lives in New York City with his wife, stepdaughter, and a crested gecko.