The Bon Vivant: Maggie Savarino

Age: 38
Current Neighborhood: Madison Park
Favorite Place in Seattle: Loretta’s Northwesterner
Last Book Read: The City & The City, China Miéville
Favorite Movie: Blade Runner

Maggie Savarino learned to bartend from her mom. She’s since worked every position in the booze industry, accumulating enough expertise to fill a book. Literally.

Sasquatch Books published Savarino’s The Seasonal Cocktail Companion: 100 Recipes and Projects for Four Seasons of Drinking last fall. It includes instructions for making your own bitters and liqueurs like limoncello and nocino as well as inventive recipes for cocktails like the Black Irish Manhattan. 

“DIY is not a meme, it’s a necessity,” she says, singing the praises of a drink’s scent and taste with a proletariat attitude toward making things yourself using real, seasonal ingredients.

“I live for when rhubarb comes out,” she says.

Savarino is planning a trip to Turkey in 2012. In the meantime, she is hosting and bartending at Madison Park Conservatory, which she says served as the laboratory for her book. Says chef and owner Cormac Mahoney, “Maggie has become the coolest, baddest big sister I could’ve dreamed of: tough as fuck, smarter than most of the room, takes it as good as she gives it.”

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Photography by Kyle Johnson at Melrose Market Studios.