Today we’d like to introduce you to James Huertas.
James, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started in my field at 18 years old. Although I didn’t think it was going to lead me where it has. At the time it was a way of me making money whilst traveling and living around the world. The first place I started was a world-renowned and internationally awarded cocktail bar in Barcelona, being half Catalan, Spanish, and half English allowed me to converse with guests from all around the world and make meaningful connections with them. Here I started to learn the bar trade, predominantly learning the origins of the craft and an overall education in the spirits, wine, and craft cocktail world. From there I bartended in the French Alps, Italy and then London.
Arriving in London was daunting, it was at the beginning years of where the craft cocktail industry was seeing a boom and there were lots of great places to keep learning and applying my trade, I was lucky to continue finding jobs in venues that were creatively pushing boundaries culinarily. From there I moved to Australia, Sydney, and Melbourne for two years. By this point in my career, I had learned, seen and helped craft drinking environments in six cities over two continents on a global level that had lead to multiple of these venues winning international awards. After leaving Australia, I moved back to London, found work managing a cocktail bar in central London for a little while and then the opportunity to purchase into the business was presented. The business wasn’t performing and I was asked to turn the space around and inject capital in. I did and the following year we were nominated and won multiple international awards. After I sold my part, I was approached to move to Austin, Texas to open a private members cocktail lounge, and to the Hamptons to open a health conscience cocktail lounge.
After two years in Texas and Long Island I moved to Los Angeles eight months ago and set up a Hospitality consultancy company, I currently have multiple clients with two of them being long-standing West Hollywood bars, I mostly now find my time crafting drinks in a small room inside one of the venues for a small amount of people that can find it. I use seasonality in my drinks, I utilize a lot of technical pieces of culinary equipment in order to make the most out of the product and produce I have. I like using ingredients that are local to our environment, it pushes me creatively to see how I can get the most out of things but most of all I enjoy creating recognizable flavors and using them in weird ways.
Has it been a smooth road?
Like with most things, there are smooth parts of the road and bumpy parts of the road. From visa struggles to business partner struggles, to personal life struggles, but without these adversities, we wouldn’t find a way to overcome and grow. Creatively speaking you struggle with originality early on, you see peers around you creating these incredible things and if you don’t have your own voice, then it’s difficult to understand how to keep up. But then you relax and just have to think about you, and what you are doing, what you are interested in, then it falls into your lap. You go into a state of flow of making great concoctions that people enjoy. After those earlier problems leave you the largest problems currently facing me is to be able to break through to a larger audience during an era where there is so much content and noise. Traveling has provided me with a widely educated palate but reinventing yourself within a new city is always a fun challenge as you need to build an audience from the ground up again.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the JH Hospitality LLC story. Tell us more about the business.
My consulting company is new so it’s not known for huge amounts just yet! However, I personally am known within the mixology/spirits/wine/hospitality space.
I largely focus on creating things that utilize “experimental” techniques that extract as much flavor as possible from the items I’m using.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Major trends include sustainability, an increased amount of owner/operators, the environmental element, smaller supply chains (i.e., people foraging for ingredients and knowing where they come from).
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @tap.dancing.oyster
Image Credit:
Edible East End
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
