photograph by bruce vanwyngarden
Austin Weisenborn with a “Lost Bayou Rambler.”
“I did a lot of manual labor — construction and whatnot — after high school. Then I worked at AutoZone, where the older guys had me replacing a lot of headlights and batteries. Then I worked in a warehouse for a while, before deciding I wanted to hop into the restaurant industry.”
Austin Weisenborn has channeled a lot of job experiences into the ten years that have passed since he graduated from Germantown High School, and that didn’t change after he decided to “hop into the restaurant industry.” He began by working as a bar back at Hog & Hominy and has since plied his trade at P.O. Press, Salt/Soy, Lucky Cowboy, Puck Food Hall, and Cameo, before landing his “destination” job as bar manager at Chef Jimmy Gentry’s downtown restaurant, The Lobbyist, about a year ago.
photograph by bruce vanwyngarden
It turned out that Hog & Hominy was a fortuitous place for Weisenborn to get his start in the food business. “I met a ton of people there,” he says, “some of whom I still work with, including Mitchell Marable, the guy who taught me how to bartend. He was the manager at Hog & Hominy.”
In 2018, Weisenborn accepted an offer from Gentry and Marable to work at Gentry’s Collierville restaurant, P.O. Press. He stayed on there for a while before taking a bartender job at the since-closed Puck Food Hall on South Main. Then came the great restaurant diaspora — also known as the Covid pandemic.
“Things were really slowing down,” he recalls. “I quit around the time of the six-feet rule. During early Covid I did a whole lot of nothing — went for a lot of long drives with my dog. Then I worked at Salt/Soy for a while. After that, I was a valet at The Pyramid, a bartender at Cameo, and worked at Buster’s Butcher — doing three jobs at once. Around the time I found out my wife and I were going to have a baby, I got the offer from Jimmy to become bar manager at The Lobbyist, so I quit my three jobs and came over here. It feels like a destination.”
photograph by bruce vanwyngarden
Weisenborn says that’s because of his boss. “The whole reason I’m here is Jimmy Gentry. He’s the best chef in the city — so creative with his special dishes, a lot of fun to work with, and a very easy-going guy for a chef.”
Weisenborn points to the menu lying on the bar: “The corn mash just got named one of the best 26 dishes in the United States by The New York Times,” he says. “The menu is fantastic. And we make cocktails that complement the food.”
Which prompts me to point to the menu and ask, “Which of these drinks should I try?”
“My favorite cocktail is the ‘Lost Bayou Rambler,’” he says. “Mitchell [Marable, who bartends one night a week] created this menu, since I was involved in having a baby at the time it came out, but that drink is so good and so unusual. It’s got Sazerac Rye, Cynar [an artichoke liqueur], Grand Marnier, lemon juice, and house-made holy trinity syrup.”
photograph by bruce vanwyngarden
“What’s the holy trinity?”
“In New Orleans cooking, it’s bell pepper, celery, and onions. We make our own and substitute shallots for onions. And then we add roasted tomato oil.”
“This drink sounds like a salad. I think I have to try it.”
Weisenborn gets to work, pouring and shaking, and soon sets a frothy coupe glass on the bar. He drips a little of the aforementioned roasted tomato oil onto the surface and it separates like a lava lamp.
Let me hasten to say, the “Lost Bayou Rambler” does not taste at all like a salad. There is a tiny hint of savoriness, but the lemon juice and Grand Marnier balance the flavors beautifully. It’s fine dining in a glass.
“This is good,” I say. “I wasn’t sure I’d like it.”
“It’s a very interesting drink,” Weisenborn says. “I like to try to read people’s faces when they taste it. The real question is always, ‘Would you order this again?’ Most people say they would.”
“It’s hard to explain, but it has a really fresh taste,” I say.
“That’s because we make all our house syrups and bitters, and we hand-juice everything. Nothing is bottled,” says Weisenborn. “We even make our own tonic.”
“It’s a complex drink but it’s not showing off. It’s impressive,” I say.
“We make cocktails like we mean it and we’re always trying to come up with new, creative, fun ideas,” Weisenborn says. “We don’t pre-batch anything. It’s all fresh, which is, I think, the thing that really separates this bar from other bars.”
The Lobbyist, 272 S. Main St.
