For Juyoung Kang, Every Drink Has a Story
Knowing the recipe for a drink is never enough for Juyoung Kang, TFM ‘02. She studies the story behind those ingredients and traces the origins of beverages to unexpected places. “I want my drinks to have layers,” Juyoung says. “If your drink doesn’t have heartbeats, it doesn’t do anything.”
Award-winning mixologist Juyoung Kang, TFM ’02, often jokes that she had her first lesson in mixology at age nine. Growing up, she loved the orange soda Orangina, but her mother, a Korean immigrant, refused to buy it for her daughters. The soda was often advertised as a mixer for alcohol, leading Juyoung’s mother to believe that Orangina itself was alcoholic. So Juyoung decided that if her mother would not allow her to purchase the soda, she would make her own. “I literally took Sprite and I took orange juice and I went, ‘Mom, look! Orangina.’”
These days, Juyoung has a story about every drink she creates. When she took her first job in the restaurant industry, it was simply a way to support herself through school. At eighteen, she talked her way into a job at a private club despite having no prior experience. “I told the manager that I deserved a place like this,” Juyoung recalled. “I told him he could be a pioneer if this became my career.” During those years of juggling classes with work, she absorbed everything from bartending and pastry-making to inventory and booking events. “I built myself an internship within the job,” she said.
Juyoung Kang.
Juyoung Kang.
Juyoung approached her studies at Temple in much the same fashion, taking classes in law and science in addition to those in the film program. She hadn’t yet figured out what she wanted to do with her life, but she thrived on campus. Her first days at Temple were spent in a summer program that allowed her to arrive weeks before other students. “I knew where everything was on campus,” Juyoung remembers. “I was obsessed with being on time. I timed my walking ability from when I was tired to when I was fast.” Long before most students in her class had set foot on campus, Juyoung had timed her walk from the subway to her favorite food trucks to her classrooms.
“I think Temple taught me resilience and management,” Juyoung said. “My time at Temple gave me the freedom to be gritty, to say yes to certain opportunities but also to say no to a lot of things. You must figure out where you fit in.”
A Look Inside the Doberman Drawing Room
Decades after talking her way into her first job, Juyoung partnered with Ryan Doherty, owner of Corner Bar Management, to open the Doberman Drawing Room in downtown Las Vegas. As Head of Beverage, she designed a menu described as having “a globally inspired, deeply intentional approach to cocktails.” She said the menu is personal to her.
“The process wasn’t about finding a really cool flavor, and then I put it in a cocktail, and then voila — it’s a chocolate gimlet,” Juyoung explains. “The menu was based on this idea of globetrotting. I thought of it as me traveling around the world as a bartender, in competitions or just for learning, tasting, eating, drinking and meeting people. That’s what the menu was about: inspiration from the places I lived, the people I worked with, and the places I visited.”
Still, Juyoung knows that a good drink is more than a story. “I want my drinks to have layers,” she said. “I want them to have this complexity where your first flavor is not your last flavor. Then you go back to that sip to get the first flavor again.” She describes her drinks as journeys, as living things. “If your drinks don’t have a heartbeat, they don’t do anything. If it’s just one note or one flavor, it’s dead.”
“If your drinks don’t have a heartbeat, they don’t do anything. If it’s just one note or one flavor, it’s dead.”
One of Juyoung's cocktail creations, the Sahara. (Photo courtesy of Doberman Drawing Room)
One of Juyoung's cocktail creations, the Sahara. (Photo courtesy of Doberman Drawing Room)
Juyoung gives an example of one of her creations, the Sahara, inspired by neighbors from when she lived in Los Angeles. Her neighbor Gloria and Gloria’s husband’s ran a taco shop. There, they sold a non-alcoholic beverage that fused a drink from his Mexican culture, agua de jamaica (a hibiscus-infused iced tea), with one from his wife’s Salvadoran culture, horchata (a sweet beverage made from rice milk and cinnamon). The result was a drink he called pink milk, a blend of rice milk and cinnamon topped with diced cantaloupe, a drizzle of hibiscus tea, and crushed peanuts.
“I was drinking it,” Juyoung explained, “and thought, this is fantastic. It reminded me of the drink I had as a child, but it was their own version.” The combination of rice milk and cantaloupe reminded Juyoung of the Korean drink hwache. At the time, she hadn’t begun crafting her own drinks — “I still thought bartenders just made other people’s drinks” — but a seed was planted.
As she designed the menu for Doberman Drawing Room, Juyoung finally had the opportunity to revisit the idea. “I just loved how this drink came together, and how it was this marriage of Gloria and her husband’s cultures, a story of how they became something. But there was also something there that I could take away,” she said, referring to the Korean drink from her childhood. “There was a note of something I was familiar with.”
Juyoung during the 30th Annual Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show in 2015. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)
Juyoung during the 30th Annual Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show in 2015. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)
As Juyoung played with her idea of turning pink milk into a cocktail, she researched its origins and ingredients, learning that horchata didn’t originate in Latin America at all—it came from Northern Africa.
The recipe traveled the world, adapting to whatever ingredients were locally available. “They used whatever nut milk was available. In Mexico at the time, they were growing a lot of rice, so they gathered rice and ground it into milk.” Juyoung decided to name the cocktail the Sahara as a reference to her discovery.
The recipe was perfect for Doberman Drawing Room, a bar Juyoung styled with her business partner to resemble the living room of a world traveler. “People forget little things like that,” Juyoung says, referring to the surprising origin of horchata, “and so they forget a little bit of history. They don’t know where it began. I think that’s cool.”
As worldly as Juyoung’s bar is, she still fights for a touch of Philly in every bar she works at: pretzel bread with yellow mustard. Usually her team pushes back, suggesting cheese instead of mustard, until she insists they try the pairing. “People always think I’m crazy until they try it,” she says. As different as Las Vegas is from Philadelphia, in many ways Philly is still home. Her parents, sisters, and closest friends are still there, which means that Juyoung visits often.
She also has a niece in Philly who just started at college. Reflecting on her time at Temple, Juyoung has encouraged her to be open to new experiences and to use this time to figure out what she likes to do. Still, she reminds her niece: “you don’t have to figure everything out now.” Juyoung, of all people, knows the importance of the journey.
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