Aashi Bhatnagar Is the Country’s Best Bartender

In an industry woefully short of women, the winner of the 2023 Diageo World Class, the Oscar of bartending competitions could provide a much-needed inspiration

Diageo World Class is a bartending competition unlike any other. Aashi Bhatnagar, this year’s winner from Pune’s Cobbler and Crew calls it the ‘Oscars of Bartending’, but to my mind, having had a ringside view this year, it’s more like the decathlon; putting contestants through a series of challenges to emerge triumphant from, laurel wreaths on their heads. More than 300 cocktails from bartenders across India are carefully narrowed down to a Top 100. These Top 100 are then given 6 cocktail challenges, each linked to a unique brand and theme out of which 3 need to be responded to and run as a menu in their bar for a week. During this period, a 2-person jury visits each outlet across India and tastes and scores the cocktails (a good job if you can get it!).

The Top 15 are thrown into the cauldron of a 2-day finale, where they’re quizzed, prepare a carbonated Johnnie Walker highball, create a signature serve, run the gauntlet of a media round, and assigned 4 cocktails to make in 6 minutes in the Speed round. It’s no wonder that the bartender, who made it all through this has an Instagram handle of @Pocket_Dynamyte, a sobriquet coined for her during her stint at Aasmana at the Ritz Carlton, Pune. So inspired, she named her signature serve for last year’s World Class as the Pocket Dynamite, and the story of that cocktail is a whole separate article in itself. Aashi was one of only two contestants in this year’s Top 15 who also reached the Top 12 last year and who narrowly lost last year.

Everything has its moment though, and a mentor always helps. Mayur Marne, formerly with Diageo Bar Academy, had trained Aashi in 2022, and was now opening Cobbler and Crew, a bartender’s bar in Pune, for which he recruited Aashi. Tirelessly they strove to prepare for World Class this year, from rehearsing the scripts at 6 in the morning to practising on the speed round at night (“I froze in the Speed round in 2022”, she tells me).

Aashi has had World Class in her sights, ever since the start of her bartending career, that is in fact only 5 years old. Fashion design’s loss was bartending’s gain, as NIFT in Shillong was a little too far for her family, and she instead chose hotel management in Dehradun, and in year 1 of her course, she was hooked on F&B (food and beverage) as a specialisation. So much so, that during an internship at Pune’s Double Tree by Hilton, she feigned an injury by colouring her toes blood red, taking the opportunity then to wipe glasses behind the bar, and watch the bartender in action.

A year-long course in bartending followed, done side by side with her final year in college, post which she joined the Piano Bar at the Oberoi, Gurgaon, which is where she learnt “the true art of hospitality”. A short stint at Kimono Club in Delhi followed, where she was dubbed the Mise Lady (in bartending as in the kitchen, the mise en place is a term that refers to all the grunt work of the prep). Aashi took to it with relish as she wanted to learn techniques like fat washing and clarification and make the perfect cordial, the latter also to stand her in good stead this year.

Despite having worked with the alcobev industry for more than two decades, I’m still always amazed by the creativity and innovation I discover every year, and Aashi’s account of her signature serve for this year’s finale completely blew me away. The folks at Pune’s Moonshine Meadery were distributing ‘Bee Hotels’ across bars, wooden structures with bamboo in them, that solitary bees who play the crucial role of pollination could come and find refuge in. That was all it took to light a spark in Aashi, especially as this year’s Signature Serve challenge tasked her with making a cocktail that captured the spirit of her city and embraced sustainability. The cocktail she thus created was called ‘Bee Hotel #48 created with Tanqueray Nº Ten, her favourite spirit, and it used mustard honey, whose rich citrus notes went well with the citrus forward gin and that was garnished with bee pollen. A garden cordial was also made for it using hitherto wasted coriander roots (citrus flavour again), cucumber and Riesling wine.

The Bee Hotel #48

To top it all, Aashi during her presentation, also gave each judge, Chef Manu Chandra and Jenna Ba (global brand ambassador for Tanqueray Nº Ten), a VR headset on which they could play a film that had her whole ‘bee journey’, “so that they could feel the emotion behind her cocktail and experience what she did”. “Why is Tanqueray Nº Ten your favourite?” I ask her. “I really admire the efforts of Charles Tanqueray”, she says, “to create this fabulous gin after 2 years and 300 experiments”. “A woman pilot is called a pilot”, she says, “so why can’t a woman bartender be just called a bartender?” While not disagreeing with Aashi, I do feel that her triumph this year is a landmark moment in Indian bartending, that can help inspire many more women to join this industry in which they are so woefully underrepresented.

“This is the best year of my life”, says Aashi, and here’s hoping that it only gets better this September in Sao Paulo, where she will now represent India in the Global World Class Finals 2023. Dare we hope that an Indian bartender can win this and cross that final frontier?