Imbibe 75 Person to Watch: Daddy Long Legs

Is this Imbibe 75er a pastry chef or a bartender? And is he Michael George or (his preferred name) Daddy Long Legs? For George/Long Legs, it’s all one and the same. A Chicago native and Le Cordon Bleu graduate, he headed straight out after graduation for the kitchens at an Alaskan resort, turning out trays of desserts for hungry visitors to Denali.

He followed the seasonal work circuit to a ski resort in Park City, Utah, and bounced around the service industry until a manager offered him a way to expand his expertise. “He said, ‘I want to make you my lead bartender, because you have a culinary background and a palate, and you know how to build flavors,’” he says. “And he took me under his wing, and taught me about bartending.” Now in Salt Lake City, George/Long Legs is working at two bars, Water Witch and ACME, and has moved from developing his bartending skills to showcasing them.

“I wanted to translate those flavors into something that told my story, and told where I’m at and where I want to go, and how I create.”

Last year, he won the Black Bourbon Society’s Black Manhattan competition with a Manhattan riff inspired by a Black Forest gateau. He dubbed his cocktail the Blackest in the Forest, because, he says, “the Black Forest gateau was one of the first things I learned to make in culinary school. And pulling from my experience of being Black in Utah, and Black in Alaska, I was literally the blackest in the forest all the time, one of the only people of color in these spaces. I wanted to translate those flavors into something that told my story, and told where I’m at and where I want to go, and how I create.”

His career may have started with pastries and led to cocktails, but now he sees the two as inseparable. “I fell in love with pastries in high school, and with spirits in my adult life. I could never see myself doing one without the other. They completely inform each other without me even having to think about it.” Try his take on the Daiquiri, which blends rums from Martinique and Hawai’i.

Click here to read more about some of 2024’s other Imbibe 75 People and Places to Watch.