2024-07-16 17:36:00
He seems incredible at 39 years old, Ramiro Ferreri I already have more than 25 years in the night and bar industry. At the age of 13 he was already working in a bar in his native Saladillo as a glass washer, and at the age of 16 he made the jump to the bar.
At 22, almost 10 years after starting his working life, he realized that gastronomy was a career and, already settled in Buenos Aires from the age of 18, he began his professional path that inspired it was created in 2012. RF, a company that brings modern and sophisticated cocktails to parties or social events in a bar format and has more than 50 permanent employees and another 150 temporary employees, and has also landed in Uruguay and Spain. Ferreri is also an ambassador for Bulldog gin, challenging his creativity to create the most original drinks using one of the most consumed alcohols.
News: What did you learn from those early years at the bar?
Ramiro Ferreri: It gave me fine motor skills, skill, took my pressure off, and by the age of 15 I was serving over 100 people a night on average.
News: There is a lot of mystique around the figure of the bartender, the bartender … it is a medium space for a psychologist, have you come across those kinds of experiences?
Ferrari: Everything happened to me, from a man who waited three hours for me at the door of the bar until it closed so we could grab a pineapple, to falling in love with an Italian woman who spoke neither Spanish nor Italian. The bar is very strange in that sense. Some colleagues, the guys from “Three Monkeys”, show the concept of the bartender: “He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t listen and he doesn’t see.” His resume has a lot of secrecy, which belongs to the professional. I am very much the style you come and I see that you are not comfortable, I try to get you, it seems very important to me to respect everything, to listen. In some ways that could be my superpower.
News: What are the first steps to professionalize what you were already doing?
Ferreri: A person in his early twenties has simultaneous objectives, a person wants to be a professional artist, known as, respect. I always wanted to be an actor, but I always worked in gastronomy, I was always a very artistic person. I realized that to be professional you had to learn from colleagues, to show that you are there to learn, that you are not competing, that helps you grow. We had a group of colleagues who wanted to reach more people, make the bars more profitable, build customer loyalty, and get more people interested in cocktails. I am also referring to the leaders in the world of catering, wedding planners, who have a very sharp and demanding vision. I’m an inside boy with a very simple background, I didn’t understand tableware, fashion, or good manners and suddenly when you add tools to your briefcase, you have a lot of resources.
News: How did the “old school” find them?
Ferreri: I was one of the great promoters of the great friendship among colleagues, for doing things together, not competing. The difficult thing was accepting each other, our egos, our insecurities. It can be difficult to say to another person: “Since I met you, I have learned to do this thing better, you inspire me.” As for the previous generation, some people made a way through praise, asking young people to work with them. I read a lot about Tato Giovannoni, Inés De Los Santos, Pablo Piñata, I knew them from books, magazines, YouTube, and I was also lucky enough to work with people like the Olivera brothers. I felt a lot of inspiration from colleagues I had read about but never met, as well as others I worked with. Of course, when a new generation comes in and overlaps with the previous one, short circuits are generated, logically. There are people who miss validity and don’t take it so well.
News: Why did you decide to dedicate yourself to events?
Ferrari: I have always been very responsible, at the age of 15 I had the key to the bar where I worked, I never had problems with responsibilities, the relationship of immediate dependence was always difficult for me, it was difficult for me to do what they told me do. , guess what, I’m still working on therapy, I’ve always had a vision of working myself one day. In that search, the possibility appeared to start working on gastronomic events. It started as a temporary thing, then I worked in a company that made me understand the commercial vision. I did a cocktail tasting for Fernando Gago and Gisela Dulko, it was very exciting.
News: Were they the first celebrities you served?
Ferrari: I think. By then I already had my own vision of my work, my identity. Before I did the wedding of Macri and Awada, but I did a classic cocktail. After that I started thinking about other things, about the tableware, about the people that the types of cocktails I made were aimed at. I have always thought of cocktails for people who are in a consumption event and an event that can be family, corporate, launch. That gave me a big advantage when planning my work. In those five years working in a company I understood costs, social relations, gastronomy, I learned a lot from sommeliers, bartenders, and cooks. Twice a week we talked to a molecular biologist who discussed with us the creativity of dishes and cocktails for the chemistry applied in gastronomy. Today they are more everyday things.
News: How did you get to work on Messi’s wedding in 2017?
Ferrari: The Messi thing has an introduction that was not so fun, in the semester before the wedding thousands of things happened, it seemed that he was not going to be part of the wedding. But that day, when I came with the 28 children who went to the hotel to do the event, there was something very nice in the air. At one point Yani Screpante, who was Pocho Lavezzi’s wife at the time, came to greet me, we knew each other and I asked him to take Messi to the bar.
News: What was it like when you met him?
Ferrari: “Pocho” walked to the bar and took it with him. I greeted him, congratulated him, asked him what he wanted to drink and he told me whatever I wanted. I prepared a cocktail for him with pineapple that we had grilled, ginger lime, with calm alcohol. It was one of the milestones of my career. At CCK we did the Barak Obama welcome committee, something completely different, a lot of security people, it was a consumer event unlike anything I’ve done before. I worked for Cecilia Roth’s birthday, Adrián Suar, I did Pampita’s wedding, Marcela Kloosterboer’s 40th birthday, I worked a lot for Carlitos Tévez. Now we are with the wedding of Dybala and Oriana Sabatini. These are all people who might ask for things in return, but they connect with this experience. Working for celebrities also inspires my team.
News: What are the trends in cocktails?
Ferreri: There is a lot of minimalism in terms of presentation, there is a lot of sophistication when it comes to the elements used to make the cocktails., like ice blocks, the ingredients that were before most juice, or pulp, now there are oils, kombucha, ferments, clarification of the liquid, there is a lot of cooking and technology within the proposal of large-scale crops. On the other hand, There is a tendency for the classics, for cocktails from old books, to return to the bars of the 50s, 60s, 70s, where vermouth plays an important role, where distillates are mixed with vermouth, liqueur. On the other hand, the huge trend, gin and tonic, aperol spritz…
News: In your role as a Bulldog ambassador, how do you think about applying gin to drinks, but with creativity?
Ferreri: I don’t feel very comfortable imitating, yes or yes, if something inspires me, I need to process it and understand how I would interpret that expression.. In my role as ambassador I jointly define a condition of the strategies. At Bulldog it’s the gin and tonic that sells the most, but I love bringing the martini back to the present day, a cocktail closely associated with the old age, there is some truth, a dry martini has nothing to do with childish palate, it doesn’t remind you of any candy. A martini is more Batman, James Bond, it is for someone who must have the criteria to appreciate a good or average martini. My favorite thing to do is to go back to my roots, attracting people who don’t go to bars to try cocktails. My role is to bring those signature cocktails to the present day and put them on different consumption occasions.
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