Imbibe 75 Person to Watch: Nicholas Jarrett

Photo: Denny Culbert

February 19, 2025

Whoever coined the bit of bar-business wisdom that maintains you can’t open a new dive bar never met Nicholas Jarrett. The veteran bartender, who has called New Orleans his home for 12 years, has long divided his skills between high-end cocktail dens (Cure, Peychaud’s) and dives (The Saint).

In summer 2023, he and The Saint owner Benji Lee opened Holy Diver, a dark-as-night corner bar that marries elements of both genres, perhaps better than any watering hole to come before it. “It’s a proper bar,” Jarrett rasps in a voice as gravelly as the bottom of a fish tank. “We’ve got a stage, we’ve got a jukebox, there’s a pool table. We have proper drinks. It’s a classic neighborhood dive bar, but with something for everyone.”

There’s also a cage, newly installed in one wall of the pool room, to be used for planned burlesque shows and go-go dancers. That the jukebox be free was important to him. He wanted to avoid a predictable Spotify playlist. Plus, he says, “Bartenders are not always the best curators of music in a space.”

All bartenders—a mix of those with and without cocktail experience—can easily deploy Jarrett’s batched classics, which are designed to require minimal effort from the bar staff and are far above dive-bar grade. The house Martini, for instance, is a blend of two gins and two vermouths. “I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t anything else quite like it,” he says of his new home. “It’s an homage. There was no place to get a good Martini or PM Spirit or mezcal while shooting pool.”

Click here to read more about some of 2025’s other Imbibe 75 People and Places to Watch.

Robert Simonson

Robert Simonson writes about bars, bartenders, cocktails, spirits and travel for The New York Times, where he has been a contributor since 2000 and the paper's primary cocktail writer since 2009. He also writes regularly for Imbibe, New York magazine, Vinepair, Esquire and other publications. His books include The Old-Fashioned: The World's First Classic Cocktail (2014); A Proper Drink (2016), the first history of the cocktail renaissance; 3-Ingredient Cocktails (2017), which was nominated for a 2018 James Beard Award; The Martini Cocktail (2019), which was nominated for a 2020 James Beard Award and won a Spirited Award; Mezcal and Tequila Cocktails (2021), which won a 2022 IACP Award; Modern Classic Cocktails (2022); and, most recently, The Encyclopedia of Cocktails (2023). His writing has been nominated for more than a dozen Spirited Awards and four IACP Awards. He was the recipient of the 2019 Spirited Award for Best Cocktail and Spirits Writer; and the 2021 IACP Award for Narrative Beverage Writing Without Recipes. He is the co-author, with Martini Doudoroff, of two apps, "Modern Classics of the Cocktail Renaissance" and "The Martini Cocktail." He is also the author of the Substack newsletter "The Mix With Robert Simonson." A native of Wisconsin, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife Mary Kate.