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I first met Cameron Bogue at a meet-n-greet in 2006. He was living in Vegas at the time, and had won his way into being Smirnoff’s Brand Ambassador / Mixologist via a cocktail competition, which Cameron calls “a great way for young bartenders to gain publicity and build a repertoire.” He won the contest while working on a proposal for Pure Management’s Japanese venture called The Social House. He says, “Since my kitchen was filled to brim with Asian inspired ingredients I recreated Smirnoff's Moscow Mule with a saffron roasted pear infused Smirnoff vodka, yuzu juice and house fermented gingerbeer; a cocktail I named the Beijing Mule.” Wish you could try it? Well you can, as he is now Chef Bartender at Bar Pleiades in NYC. But, I digress from my original introduction of one of the most forward thinkers I’ve come across behind the bar.
So, back in early 2007, I met up with Cameron at a dive bar in Silverlake and during our chat, he set a package of sushi on the table. After a while, he asked if I wanted to try his latest cocktail. I figured he’d jump behind the bar or something – but, no – he pushed over the sushi tray. Read more about that here. At the time, not too many bartenders were doing “deconstructed cocktails,” particularly out West, so the concept blew my mind.
Cameron says that the next couple of years as Smirnoff’s ambassador “were full of amazing travels where I was fortunate to observe regional cocktail trends across the continent and meet talented bartenders and journalists, like my favorite blogger The Liquid Muse. I hope Camper doesn’t read this.” (Oh, don’t worry Cameron, I will make sure Camper English reads this.)
Obviously, a slick talker with incredible taste in bloggers, Cameron, who is originally from Portland, Oregon, says he first got behind the bar in 1999 in Whistler “for the purpose of having free days to ski, make good money, and meet easy…. I mean nice girls.”
He considers his first mixology mentor a talented chef named Jeff Sansone of Canoe in Toronto. Cameron explains, “While there I was quickly taken by the passion put into the cocktail program utilizing current trends of the time. From there, I took the ideology of fresh ingredients, premium spirits and infusions back to Whistler and implemented them in my first cocktail menu at the Mallard Lounge in the Fairmont Chateau Whistler in 2001.”
Cameron also credits the Mai Tai as his first cocktailian inspiration. “Upon moving to Las Vegas I realized that every bar I worked in mixed their own putrid concoction of rums, juices and of course Rose’s Grenadine called a “Mai Tai”. Even mainstream, sub-par, cocktail books couldn’t agree on how much of which shitty ingredient the recipe called for. Between the library and the internet I discovered, as we all now know, that Mr. Bergeron created this delicious drink in 1944 at his Oakland haunt. This started the domino effect into complete nerd-ism as I knew every drink had to have its own history as well.”
He won the Smirnoff job while working in Vegas, and in 2007, he left that job (ie: Diageo) to ride his motorcycle from Alaska to Chile, visiting boutique distillers and blog about it along the way. Unfortunately the trip was cut short when Cameron was rear-ended by a hit and run truck driver on a highway outside of Sayulita, leaving him to spend the next six months rehabilitating in Vancouver BC. However, the happy ending to that story is that is where he met with Daniel Boulud’s restaurant group and was hired to open and manage both bars at Lumiere and DB Bistro Moderne.
Bogue says that Bar Pleiades' cocktails will parallel the inspiration behind the menu at Café Boulud next door, with its four culinary muses that strongly influence Daniel’s career: la tradition, classics; la saison, seasonal inspired flavors; le potager, market inspired; and le voyage, the flavors of world cuisines. He explains, “The cocktail menu will completely change the first of every season as will the region featured in le voyage, which are the flavors of China this fall.”
On a night off Cameron calls himself a “beer guy. Jeans, white t-shirt, and neighborhood bar with cold beer and I’m happy, as long as they’re not skinny or v-neck.”
I asked “if given the choice to have a drink with anyone in the world - living or dead – who would it be and why?” to which he replied:
“I’ll take living for 500. My grandmother, she no longer drinks due to the rainbow colored assortment of medication that comes with turning 90. (Happy Birthday Grandma!) When prohibition ended federally in 1933 it lingered much longer on a state to state basis. In Iowa my Grandmother raised 4 children as a single mother working multiple jobs, one of which was bartending at an illegal watering hole. I love to pick her brain as it is still sharp as a tack. I have heard stories about off location storage and tubes running to basement to send the spirits in case of a bust, and I know that enjoying a few cocktails with her would bring out many more juicy stories.”
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Outside of bartending, Cameron says he simply enjoys life. “I try not to be fully immersed in one discipline as I would rather be good at many things than perfect at one.” We think he’s pretty close to perfect in several.