James Beard-nominated cocktail whiz Toby Maloney is already working on another book

For Toby Maloney, a James Beard nomination for his cocktail book, The Bartender’s Manifesto, is a win for the whole team behind it.

“The restaurant industry is a team sport, you don’t do anything alone,” he said. “It’s an amalgamation of many people’s works, and the book is very similar to that. I’m the author, but there is no chance I could have done it without my coauthor and the people at Clarkson Potter.”

The Bartender’s Manifesto: How to Think, Drink, and Create Cocktails Like a Pro, coauthored by Emma Janzen, was nominated for the James Beard beverages with recipes category last month,joining Friday Saturday Sunday, Amanda Shulman of Her Place Supper Club, and other Philly-area nominees. Maloney is no stranger to the James Beard Awards, with a 2015 win under his belt for outstanding bar program at the Violet Hour cocktail bar in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

“It’s an amazing accomplishment to create something that comes out at the top — I don’t know how many cocktail books were released in 2022, but to be one of the few that was tapped for this particular award feels really great,” he said.

Maloney’s book offers advice for every level of cocktail enthusiast, from home bartender to seasoned professional. But it’s more advanced than your average bar book. Two-thirds of the book focuses on how to create your own cocktail using recipes from the bartenders at the Violet Hour “to show how their minds work.”

“The people I was trying to reach were not the ‘I don’t know how to do anything’ beginners but somebody who’s been around the block for a little bit and has a decent grasp of the basics,” he said. “There’s a bunch of amazing cocktail 101 books out there and we might be the next part of the evolution after you’ve done that.”

Maloney moved to Philly and began a cocktail residency at Hop Sing Laundromat in Chinatown in late January, early February, where he makes drinks and answers questions for the eight seats at the bar that often fill up for two to three turns on Fridays and Saturdays.

Part of the residency is research for Maloney’s next book.

“It really is research to figure out what I want to write about,” he said. “Doing this thing where I get to make any drink I want, it’s kind of showing me what I’m most interested in and helping me hone in where the direction of this [second] book will go.”

“The Bartender’s Manifesto,” Toby Maloney with Emma Janzen and the bartenders of the Violet Hour, Clarkson Potter, $30.23, bookshop.org