Kenneth Vanhooser
If you’re drinking a crafted cocktail in Nashville these days, there’s a decent chance Kenneth Vanhooser helped develop the idea for what’s in the glass. He’s mixed drinks at some of the best bars and restaurants in New York (including Tenpenny, Piora and Eleven Madison Park), and the Nashvillian is now cooking up creative cocktail ideas at the spaghetti-Western-themed Four Walls in the Joseph Nashville hotel, and directing the sake bar, omakase tasting and other cocktails at Present Tense in Chestnut Hill. Before taking on these two new projects in 2023, Vanhooser was the beverage director at the Le Loup, Star Rover Sound and other chef Ford Fry concepts.
We wanted to get to know the guy behind the bars. Here are six things you should know about Vanhooser before you choose your next cocktail.
1. He was Nashville before Nashville was cool.
Vanhooser grew up in Nashville, Hendersonville and Gallatin. “I moved to New York in 2009,” he says. “And by 2009-and-a-half, everyone was asking, ‘So have you ever heard of Nashville?’” He intended to go to New York, learn a lot, come back, bring what he learned home, and open a place of his own. “Literally six months after landing in New York, everybody was talking about Nashville. And while I did know Nashville, of course, I did not know the Nashville it was becoming.”
2. He’s one of those Nashville natives who isn’t embarrassed to say he still likes Broadway.
Vanhooser worked at several bars on Broadway for nine years. “True Broadway,” he says. He likes that Four Walls is close enough to get to Broadway, but it is almost removed enough from the “chaos” for those who want a break. He refers to that ring of increasingly popular places around the perimeter of downtown as “the halo.” Still, you’ll catch him in Rippy’s Honky Tonk, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and Robert’s Western World. “Whenever I have people in town, I say, ‘You have to go and see these places, because they are Nashville.’”
3. He doesn’t believe in secrets.
“Spill secrets, not cocktails” is the mantra for Four Walls. You can have the exact recipe with the exact same ingredients, and still your cocktail experience won’t be the same as it would be in a bar with a professional mixing it in front of you. So inside the Four Walls bar is a typewriter (Olivetti, which is Italian, because everything at the Joseph has Italian roots) where they’ll type out the recipe to a cocktail if you ask. Some drinks at Four Walls use the Joseph’s custom olive oil and balsamic vinegar blends.
4. He likes to keep a lot of creative irons in the fire.
Currently, that means directing beverage programs at Four Walls and Present Tense. And he has a garage of screen-printing supplies — he’s just waiting for some downtime to use them again. The history of screen printing in Nashville led him to learn the art while he was in high school. “I was the weird guy in college that had a basement with a screen-printing press.” He’s also worked in textiles, colorization and digital prints. The Joseph is known for its art collection. (The Pizzuti family, which owns the hotel, has a contemporary art museum named after them in Columbus, Ohio.) Head to the hotel’s eighth floor to admire Vanhooser’s favorite pieces in the Pizzuti collection.
5. With its spaghetti Western theme, Four Walls is not the first bar he has been involved with that has a connection to film.
Syndicated Bar Theater Kitchen in Brooklyn is a diner and theater. “We played cult films — every day there was a new film playing. So we were creating cocktails on a daily basis that revolved around the theme of the film. Four Walls was the chance to kind of run with an idea. It wasn’t just creating a drink menu based off of what I like. It was trying to make a menu that stays true to the roots of the Joseph.”
6. He’s not afraid to put something on the menu that everyone doesn’t love. Four Walls, for example, has nine different Negronis.
“Negronis are a classic cocktail that are very polarizing,” he says. “People either really like it or they don’t. I consider a Negroni a bittersweet tea, and I grew up on sweet tea.” One of his favorite things is to get one in the hands of a customer and see what they think. You can try it yourself: This Saturday, Sept. 23, Vanhooser and lead bartender Mickey Stevenson will have more opportunity to do that when they lead a Negroni Week Cocktail Class. They’ll cover the history and technique of the Italian classic, with three variations from the Negroni family tree.
