Health & Hospitality

TALES GOES BEYOND THE BAR

The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation is leading the way for wellness.

Over the last few years, there has been a greater focus on the physical and mental wellness of those in the hospitality industry, and the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation has been one of the entities at the forefront of promoting these important conversations.

“For you to have a long career, for bartending to be what you want to do, you have to invest in yourself and in your body and your mind,” says Caroline Rosen, President of Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. “What I think has been really beautiful is our community is to the point where we can talk about this. For so long, it was you suck it up, you don’t talk about it.”

The Foundation launched Beyond the Bar in 2018 in an effort to offer programming designed to further its mission to educate, advance, and support the spirits and global cocktail communities.

BY ASHLEY BRAY

“We’re excited because this is something where we can directly help get tools to people,” says Rosen. “We wanted this to be something where we could share these resources with each individual so they could have the resources at their fingertips and do this on their own.”

Beyond the Bar continues today, and it featured heavily in this year’s virtual Tales of the Cocktail where it offered sessions tackling issues like mental health, finding balance, and zero-proof and low-ABV cocktails.

Tales recognizes that there’s also a social component to wellness, especially recently, and this year’s Beyond the Bar also hosted discussions surrounding gender identity, diversity and inclusion, and other topics relating to the Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI) movement. “I think this is the time that we need to be conscious of it more than ever and do the work behind it,” says Rosen. “Tales started doing the work, and we’re going to continue doing the work—it’s not the sort of thing where you hit the goal line.”

When it comes to making changes and doing the work in your own establishment, Rosen has some advice. First, she says there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. She encourages operators to commit to having the hard conversations but to also invest in the help of experts and other resources aimed at promoting a more inclusive and safe workspace.

“Everybody wants their team to feel like they have a community, they have a space where they work that they can feel supported in,” she says.

Rosen also says it’s important to include your entire team in the process. “As a leader, it’s your job to help engage and obviously set the course, but what I’ve really enjoyed is having our entire team involved in these conversations and really making sure that they are true partners in this process as well.”