Slinging spirits and smuggling mezcal with Ivy Mix

By Brian Braiker

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Nothing in Ivy Mix’s background—except maybe her name—would suggest she’d turn out to be one of the most celebrated bartenders in the country by her early 30s. Author, philanthropist and co-owner and head bartender of the Latin-inspired Leyenda on Smith Street, Mix grew up in tiny Tunbridge, Vermont, with artist parents and a twin sister. Her first ambition was to be an Olympic horseback rider.

Mezcal would change all that. While traveling in Guatemala at age 19, she amassed a large tab at a local ex-pat hangout that ran on the honor system. She paid it off bartending, and in the process got her first taste of behind-the-bar culture. And her first taste of mezcal, which she actually began smuggling over the border from Mexico with, fittingly enough, the brand Illegal Mezcal.

“We used to dress up as missionaries to smuggle the mezcal back over the border because booze is very heavy,” says Mix, who is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “The other thing that’s as heavy as booze are books. So you just put some books on top of the booze and then you’re pretty much good to go.”

After moving to New York in 2008 (and a miserable stint working at the Gagosian Gallery), Mix became a cocktail waitress and began apprenticing as a bartender. As she mastered the art of mixology, she couldn’t help noticing that the majority of the people in her field were, well, dudes.

“Everyone has curly-cue mustaches and the beards and the fucking pork pie hat and suspenders,” she says.

So she and fellow bartender Lynnette Marrero launched Speed Rack, an all-female high-speed bartending competition designed to highlight up-and-coming women in the cocktail industry and raise money for breast cancer.

“We created this cocktail competition that was created, at first, to create a platform for women to stand on in a male-dominated industry and say, ‘Yo, I can do it just as well as that guy, if not better.’ It doesn’t matter what sex you have,” she says. “And we’re going to raise money for breast cancer while we’re at it.”

That was 10 years ago this past June. In the intervening decade, Speed Rack has seen more than 3,500 women compete and has raised more than $1.25 million for the cause.

In 2015, Mix would open Leyenda, a Brooklyn bar and restaurant that pulls from her Latin American experience and mezcal expertise, that in 2019 would be nominated for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program. All of this would go in to her first book, which had the unfortunate luck of coming out during the peak lockdown months of the pandemic. “Spirits of Latin America: A Celebration of Culture & Cocktails, With 100 Recipes From Leyenda & Beyond” is as much a travelogue as it is a recipe book, though, which afforded some small taste of escapism for its readers.

“There’s a cultural terroir in the things that we eat and drink that should be celebrated and guarded just as much as our famous art pieces,” she says. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, no one is going to go to Bolivia, but maybe I can give them a taste of Bolivia.’ You can kind of go there.”

And this year, as if she didn’t have enough going on, she opened Fiasco!, in Crown Heights with two partners—a bottle shop with an emphasis on female, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ producers, as well as local favorites, sustainable brands and some hard-to-find drinks. (It’s called Fiasco! because Mix and her partners weren’t able to open the store for 13 months after they signed their lease due to Covid.)

“We’re just trying to make a better liquor store,” she says. “Not only do things have to taste good. But who’s making it? Are you doing things that are good for the planet? Are you an underrepresented community member who is trying to break their way into this space and make really good wine or spirits.”

For all of that, and more, listen to the podcast, wherever you cast your pods.