Claudia Cabrera

Kaito del Valle, Mexico City

A Mexican mentor promoting equality across the bar arena

As a child, Claudia Cabrera dreamed of being an animator, which was a far cry from the Mexican bar scene she has come to call home. While indeed still animated and artful, the bar world she has carved her place in over the past two decades is almost incomparable to the one she first encountered – a place where people mixed cheap soda pop with good quality mezcal and female bartenders were a rarity.

A born and bred Mexico City native, Cabrera’s love for her country and its culture started from birth. Her appreciation of good food was nurtured in a household which valued the culture of eating, and where wines and digestifs were the family’s daily bread. Her love affair with the hospitality world began as a teenager, working as a waitress in a French restaurant where, every week, a guest sommelier would come in to educate the staff on a world of wines and intricate, flavour-balanced pairings.

It was the eight years she spent working at Los Danzantes bar in Oaxaca, however, that kindled a life-long love of agave-based spirits and a profound appreciation for all things mezcal. Cabrera was working at the Oaxaca stalwart at a time when only intellectuals, politicians and artists drank mezcal and when she herself primarily drank gin or vodka. Seeing the craft and the producers behind mezcal spurred Cabrera to begin researching the origins and applications of the spirit in earnest, poring over books and mining local bartenders for knowledge while still studying for a degree in animation.

Her studies took her to Vancouver, but she ended up leaving her degree to enrol in the Metropolitan School of Bartending in Calgary, before travelling back to the Mexican capital to work at Corazón de Maguey, the first well-established mezcalería focusing on the eponymous spirit and organic cocktails. Here she leant the craft of bitters, liqueurs and jellies, all made using locally sourced ingredients.

From there she threw herself into the cocktail competition scene, competing in numerous contests across the world. While she travelled, she couldn’t help noticing that Mexico was still a difficult country in which to be a woman – particularly a woman in bartending. Cabrera noted unsafe working conditions and unfair wages on top of the daily discrimination females faced, as they were continuously forced to prove their worth in order to stand behind the stick. In 2016, she found a new home in Kaito del Valle, which was the first and, at the time, the only fully female-run bar in Latin America.

Cabrera’s dedication and resolve to encouraging more women behind the bar is manifest in the way she recruits, mentors and develops her staff, welcoming female talent from across the world to shake cocktails at Kaito del Valle. Her support for the industry also extends beyond gender: Cabrera was a co-founder of Mexico’s first bartenders’ guild, which economically supported more than 1,000 workers during the glbal pandemic and used Kaito del Valle as a base for competitions, photo shoots and a space for the guild to meet.

Cabrera’s undaunting advocacy for women in the industry, her outspoken views on quality cocktail craft and the demonstrative support she gives her beloved Mexican bartending community have earned her the Roku Industry Icon Award as part of North America’s 50 Best Bars 2024.

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