Colleen Hughes Cements Her Spot as One of Charlotte’s Top Mixologists

For a split second after walking into Leluia Hall in Dilworth on a recent Thursday I got the briefest glimpse of what it might be like to work for Colleen Hughes, one of Charlotte’s most renowned mixologists and beverage director for the distinguished Tonidandel-Brown Restaurant Group.

When I arrived, Hughes was staring at the back service well, envisioning the restaurant group’s newest restaurant on its busiest day and forming a plan for how exactly her team can best utilize that well — or “maximize for full-throttle output,” as she later put it — once Leluia Hall opens and the customers start streaming in.

I wasn’t rudely brushed off nor was I warmly greeted as I entered. Hughes simply got to business, leading me to a back booth where she had apparently already envisioned the interview taking place. She remarked that I looked familiar and she was sure that we had met somewhere but she didn’t appear interested in digging back through the memories to recall how or where that occurred; she was ready to be interviewed.

I could barely turn on my voice recorder app before Hughes was off, deftly recollecting her start with Tonidandel-Brown at Crepe Cellar and Growlers Pourhouse 15 years prior then running through her experience helping them open establishments that have since become Charlotte staples: Haberdish, Supperland, Ever Andalo.

The experience, while intense, was not a bad one by any means. I always prefer to let interview subjects decide on whatever aspects of the experience will make them most comfortable. It was clear that Hughes had done this before and I respected the fact that, with only a couple weeks left until Leleuia Hall was set to open, I was just another task on a daunting to-do list.

In fact, I was honored that a luminary like Hughes would give me the time of day under such pressure. She was clearly in her zone; opening new restaurants is just what Colleen Hughes does.

Read more: How Aesthetic and Atmosphere Play Into the Haberdish Experience

With her “partner in crime” Rhea Buck taking on the bar manager role at Leluia Hall, Hughes has been helping in somewhat of a consultant role. Having worked closely with Buck, who has already worked as bar manager at Supperland for years, Hughes jokingly described the situation as, “She makes it happen and I take credit.”

And credit is coming in droves — well-deserved credit despite her jokes. Having already been recognized by a slew of awards and acknowledgements in both the local and national press, Hughes marked a new accomplishment in January when she was named a semifinalist for a coveted James Beard Award in a brand-new category: Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service.

While she was not named a finalist, the nomination alone was a meaningful milestone, especially as someone representing the food and beverage industry in a city that is considered a minor market.

Sitting in our corner booth, we discussed how that nomination led to one of the most overwhelming days of Hughes’ career, retraced her journey in mixology, and how she’s become comfortable in the stressful days leading up to a restaurant’s grand opening.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and trimmed down from a notably longer conversation to adjust for space.

Queen City Nerve: When you came on at Growlers Pourhouse in 2010, was it just meant to be a bartending gig like any other or did you know you were pursuing a career?

Colleen Hughes: I definitely at that point would have described myself as a service industry lifer. I enjoyed the service industry. It was my main thing. At that time, I don’t think I realized or wrapped my mind around the fact that I was going to be in a hospitality career for life. It was more like, you know, it’s a good job, I like the job, it’s good money. I really didn’t particularly care for college and I realized pretty quickly that this was one of the few situations where I was going to be able to make a good income without having to get a degree.

That being said, in my early days of bartending when I was still at Crepe Cellar and Growlers but I wasn’t like a manager at any point, I did get into that great tradition of bartenders: I got my real estate license because I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. But it was actually in that time where I was getting my real estate license actually when I started getting a lot of press for my cocktails. I was getting a lot more recognition for doing them. And up until that time, I wasn’t really getting paid to do them. I was just doing them because I thought they were interesting.

I was kind of bored and so, after I finished real estate school and got my certificate or whatever, I worked in real estate for a short period of time. But I really was much better at making a drink than I was at selling a house. And the cocktail side was really taking off, so I just, you know, changed my focus back.

What was it that made you realize you were really good at that aspect of it?

Colleen Hughes: I think it takes everybody, especially in a creative space, a long time to recognize that they’re good at something or better than someone else. I got into it early. I got in it when there wasn’t very many people in Charlotte doing it. Craft cocktails were starting to hit off in bigger cities on a more national level, but here there really was only a handful of people engaged in it. And so part of it was just like good timing … I was very much self taught in the early days, but you know, the acknowledgement, guests coming in and watching, wanting to try my stuff, that kind of stuff really helped me bring it [to another level].

People were bringing their friends in to drink [my cocktails]. I think it was just because everybody’s got a subtle amount of self loathing or whatever, so just having people tell me that they enjoyed it kind of helped push me through. I had a lot of regulars who were coming in pretty often and being very encouraging. After a while, the bosses started to recognize the fact that I was doing well, that liquor sales were really starting to overtake all the other aspects before that.

I remember Jeff [Tonidandel] at one point telling me, “For the first time ever, we have sold more dollars in liquor than we have beer and wine. It’s outsold beer and wine for the first time ever.” So that’s when they kind of started getting behind me. But it took a while. You know, by the time when they built Haberdish, it was built to be my bar. It was the first time I was, to a certain extent, given free rein over the program and what I wanted to do. And it opened and it was very successful. So that’s really probably when the wind kind of hit my sails.

You’ve scientific when it comes to mixology. What brought that about?

Colleen Hughes: There was this long gap in time with COVID where I wasn’t in a restaurant early on … But after COVID had started [Jeff] basically hired me back on and he’s like, “I know there’s all these things that you’ve always wanted to learn how to do or master or just have the time and the brain space to figure out, so take that time now. You don’t have to worry about writing the menu, but just all these things I know you want to figure out how to do, do them.”

I always wanted to learn molecular mixology, but there’s no books on it, so I literally had to just learn it. I had to experiment. Getting more anti-waste or more into greening up our bars, cleaning up our operations. How do we get better, faster and essentially more green in our operations? I’d taken classes on it, but I never had the time to figure out how to quite implement it on the scale that I needed to implement it in because the scaling is huge.

So for about six months I just kind of made the same, like, eight things over and over again to really hone them in and make sure that we could deliver them. And I worked on learning things like … cocktail airs, foams, spherification, acid adjusting, bigger things that still no one’s really written a book on. I got that opportunity to do it and really suss it out. It’s not sexy to talk about acid adjusting. We don’t talk about it a ton but it’s something we do and a lot of times we are doing it to sort of amp up our anti-waste goals or reduce our carbon footprint. We use science to help us get greener in a certain way.

I’ve read that you have a full R&D kitchen at your home to experiment with making cocktail menus. Is that where you come up with your ideas or do ideas come to you throughout the day like songs to a musician and you have to remember them for when you make it to the kitchen?

Colleen Hughes: I usually have these pretty well sussed-out ideas on paper before I ever even start trying to make anything. It just makes it easier. I can shop for all of them all at once and do all that. But the ideas come from everywhere. You can get inspired by pretty much anything. Sometimes I’ll just think of a really cool name and I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m building a drink around that name.” Sometimes I’ll be in another restaurant and I’ll have a food dish that just has some elements of it that are really compelling flavors that I think, “Man, this would probably be a good flavor combination in a cocktail. I never thought about it before.”

I keep low-lying, short notes in my phone. Just anytime I think of something that I think, “Man, that would make a good cocktail,” boop, boop, boop, I plug it into my phone. I’ll take that idea and I will expand on it and expand on it until I actually get to the point where I start to make it.

And what does that process look like then if you’re, say, creating cocktail menus for all the establishments?

Colleen Hughes: It takes a while. At the start of a season, I’ll usually take two days where I go through all of the ideas that I’ve had, look at what I need, and I’ll spend two days just literally out there with my books, reference points, all this stuff, and I’ll sit there and I’ll think through each idea as deeply as I possibly can to almost the point of being able to write the recipes.

Depending on how many drinks I need, say I need 30 drinks, I’ll try to have 35 [ideas] because a few of them are just not gonna work. That’s just the way it is … And then over the next week or two, I’ll develop each of them. Because I have such an organized plan, I can look at all these hard starts and be like, “Okay, I need to go to Super G to buy pandan and palm sugar. I need to go to Compare because I need this specific kind of chili. I need to go to this spice store.” So I can very quickly create shopping lists.

And then when I’m going to actually start, I’ll spend a couple days where, the specific prep for every drink that I need, I’ll cook all those preps at once. I don’t even put them with alcohol. And then on drink development days, I can only work for so many hours. I’m tasting alcohol and even when you’re spitting it out, you can’t do that very long. You get palate fatigue. So it’s like once I’ve got all those preps and everything ready, I usually test for however many days I need to do it because sometimes things will work perfect on the first pass, it’s exactly the drink I dreamed of, and sometimes they don’t. That’s when you have to go back through and refine.

I’ll work in four-hour shifts. Four hours in the morning on cocktails, I’ll take a good long lunch break … give myself an hour, hour and a half to just reset, and then I’ll go back and work for another four to five hours and then I’ll close up shop for the night and I’ll just do that for a series of days until essentially everyone’s got a menu. It just seems to work.

You’ve opened quite a few of the Tonidandel-Brown restaurants as beverage director. Has it become easier?

Colleen Hughes: The Speakeasy at Supperland really is operationally its own restaurant. Like, it is not the same menu, it’s not the same food. I kind of think of it as its own teeny restaurant. Basically, we open a new restaurant every 10 weeks. That restaurant runs for 10 weeks, we close that restaurant, and we open a new teeny, tiny restaurant that runs for 10 weeks with a new food menu and new cocktails.

It’s a cocktail tasting menu, so it’s a lot of details, but we’ve gotten very good at, like, finding out the tiny details in advance because we’re every 10 weeks opening a new little restaurant. We’re about to launch the 20th menu of The Speakeasy at Supperland. So thinking about opening 20 teeny, tiny little restaurants. You get a lot of practice with that sort of thing.

What’s new that you’re looking forward to at Leluia Hall?

Colleen Hughes: Maybe you’ve realized this, but no one in Charlotte has ever successfully pulled off a tropical tiki or rum bar. I try to personally steer clear of saying tiki bar, it does have some cultural appropriation issues, we prefer to call ourselves like a sort of more tropical-minded cocktail program. Anytime anybody’s opened one [in Charlotte], they have closed within a couple years. Some of them have been good, some of them have been bad, but they have just never stuck around in this market. So a very strong rum is our primary focus and especially, intrinsically, a lot of rums that you can’t purchase in North Carolina.

Read more: Leluia Hall Proves Tonidandel-Brown’s Penchant for Preservation

Pisco is kind of our second littler piece because I like to have a main piece and then a littler piece. And no one, with the exception of Yuma, has really focused on Pisco in this market, either. And we’re really good at actionably figuring out how to deliver our cocktail menus at a volume that we need to and in time that we need to. A lot of times, pitfalls with your more traditional tropical cocktail bars is that they aren’t good at figuring out how to not have drinks with 67 fucking ingredients that every single one has to be poured on the spot and they just take too long. So you could order a round of six drinks and you’re waiting for 25 minutes for them all to come out.

We’re very good at [managing] speed bump cocktails. We put volume drivers in kegs because if we’re gonna have a drink that takes two minutes to make, we have to have, like, four drinks that can be done in under a minute. That kind of thing sort of decompresses our wells so we can actually get these drinks to the table. Because I hate personally if I’m at a restaurant and my appetizers have hit the table and my drinks still don’t show up for 15 minutes. That drives me insane. So we try very hard to make sure that our wells and our drinks are set up in the specific way to make us as fast as possible.

You’ve been open about your own struggles with dyslexia. How do you work that advocacy into the way you train your staffs?

Colleen Hughes: We’ve been working on it while we’re implementing our bar training here, being a little bit more conscientious of it. I’ve even said to them, “Sometimes it’s going to seem a little repetitive,” but we’re trying to make sure that our major training is “see, read, do.” We’re hitting all three. I’m an audio learner. Some people are visual learners.

Some people really just like learning hands-on. So we’re trying to make sure that we address all of that in our bar training program here. And it’s kind of like our incubator for it. We’ve gotten a little bit better at Supperland about it, but really just saying, “This is how we will train moving forward.”

And on the national level I’ve been working within the [US Bartenders’ Guild] to talk about alternative learning styles because a lot of people choose bartending because, like me, college just really wasn’t a great fit for them, because the way you learn isn’t the same way that they want you to learn in academia.

This year you were named a James Beard semifinalist. What did that mean to you?

Colleen Hughes: In the moment I was super excited and then I was extremely overwhelmed. I think in that first day that the [nominations] came out, I had, like, hundreds of people texting me and DMing me … I was so overwhelmed. I think I went through every emotion in the world, from just bawling my eyes out to completely freaking out, being okay, like every gamut of feelings you could have.

Read more: Three Charlotte Culinary Leaders Named James Beard Semifinalists

Now it is really nice. There’s only a few major awards in the bar industry and when you look at those, you rarely see smaller cities, minor markets, as we call smaller cities, or control states, and we are very much a control state, we have a lot of odds stacked against us. We can’t just buy whatever we want whenever we want it. You know, we can’t buy a lot of stuff. We have to special order. It takes a lot of thought and planning. You just can’t say, I want this random X and it just shows up the next day. That’s just not how it works.

Also, a lot of times when you see those other big awards, they’re in cities that people — industry people or people in general — just travel to a lot anyway. Your New Yorks, your Miami, your New Orleans, they’re in Vegas … Seattle, places that people go to a lot anyway on vacations or for events or for whatever. You tend to see them more centered there and, very rarely, occasionally, but not always outside of there. And usually if there’s somebody who’s gotten nominated in a major award like that, they’re from a big market and they’re very well-known and then they move to a smaller place and open a bar, which I’m sure is amazing, but is it really a homesprung thing? Not never, but it’s less common.

So for me, just the acknowledgment of how hard I’ve been working, how hard the city’s been working and how hard all the other bartenders have been working to just even get that kind of acknowledgment here … I know I personally got nominated, but I also know that I wouldn’t have been able to if a lot of people hadn’t been doing their jobs well. You know, it’s like it is a personal award, but it really isn’t, especially in a city like this.

I think maybe it would be different if we were in New York and you were like, I got this nomination because you’re in so much already, but here it really took a lot just to get to that level. So I’m certainly very thankful for that. And I don’t forget that, you know.

Anything else you think is important to mention? 

Colleen Hughes: Don’t judge a new restaurant in its first two months.

Leluia Hall is set to open on Tuesday, May 6. Follow the restaurant’s Instagram for updates.