On a weekend night, Stanton Social, located at 99 Stanton Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, serves as an artful lesson in well-used space. An impressive number of people fit into the restaurant, considering how perfectly isolated you’ll feel at your own given table—especially when the cocktail brought to you in a martini glass arrives without the slightest spill over the brim.

In my case, the drink that didn’t spill was Cocktail No. 6. Made with D’ussé, Canton ginger liqueur, peach nectar, fresh lemon, and a dash of peach bitters, I’d thought the pink cocktail tasted like what the gods drank…only to find that the Brooklyn Lemonade (Brooklyn Gin, lemon syrup, fresh lemon, muddled cucumber, and ginger) was even better when I came back to Stanton Social to speak to the head bartender, Dante Alston.

While I sipped the Brooklyn Lemonade Dante had just made (he not being a huge fan of Cocktail No. 6, which I told him I’d enjoyed), he sat down with a Blood Orange-Jalapeño Margarita and told me how he got started in the business and why he’s still in it.

Drink NYC: How did you get into bartending?
Dante Alston: I was going to college and living above a restaurant at the time, and as I was walking downstairs to get something—I had just moved in—the manager/owner lived above me and he literally crossed my path on the stairway and said, “Hey, are you looking for a job? You just moved in. You want to work at the restaurant?” I was like, “Yeah, sure!” I used to be a busboy, and it was easy, but when he asked, “So what do you want to do?” I said, “I’d love to bartend.” I’d never done it before. He answered, “Cool, we’ll start working that out.” So I’ve been working at bars basically since the start of college.

DNYC: Where was this?
DA: This was in Albany. Ristorante Paradiso. It’s actually the place where “Ironweed” was filmed. They renovated it for that Jack Nicholson movie in the eighties, and then after it was renovated for Hollywood, the owners said, “Hey, this is already fully renovated. Let’s open this as a restaurant.” It was a very cool place.

DNYC: Why did you choose bartending, when he asked?
DA: It’s more fun behind the bar. I’ve been on both sides, by now, and it’s definitely more fun on this side.

DNYC: Do you remember the first drink you ever made?
DA: I do, actually. It was a Brandy Alexander for the wife of the dude who owned Ristorante Paradiso. It’s a really hard one to mess up. It’s basically nutmeg, milk, brandy, and a lot of sweetness.

DNYC: Where did you go from there?
DA: Then I did the on-and-off bartending thing. I came down here and worked at a couple places on the Upper West Side when I first moved about ten years ago. I worked at Temple Bar, opened up The Smith, and came here [to Stanton Social].

DNYC: How was opening The Smith?
DA: It was great fun. That was about six and a half years ago. We had like twenty bartenders they initially hired, and they dwindled down, falling off like a “Survivor” show or something like that, and it ended up being just five of us. That was a great amount of fun, and a few of those guys ended up coming through Stanton Social and kind of rotated in as we all tend to do as bartenders working in different restaurants in the city.

DNYC: When did you transition from just being a bartender to being someone who comes up with new cocktails and has a more complex role behind the bar?
DA: It’s the same thing. Everybody here comes up with their own cocktails. If you’re still doing it at this stage in your life, you’re probably into it a little bit; you geek out over the new things and classic things. Being a bartender and making up cocktails really goes hand in hand—it’s not just pumping out shots. If you’re working a place like this, you care about the actual construction of cocktails.

DNYC: Do you remember the first drink you came up with?
DA: Hmm… I’m not sure exactly, but at the Temple Bar is where I got serious about it. Temple Bar is an awesome, awesome cocktail bar. I applied there, actually, because I was desperate for a job at that point. I’d been working at one of those cheesy places up by Lincoln Center, and I quit. I was actually applying to be a waiter somewhere else, and the hiring manager said, “You look like more of a bartender to me.” So I said, “Oh, you need a bartender here?” And they replied, “No, but we have a place around the corner that does.” And from the first day I was there I realized it was a serious place. The cocktails are very serious, the education is serious, and everything was freshly juiced. We made our own, homemade ginger beer. That really opened up the world of bartending for me.

DNYC: What kind of “education” did they provide, exactly?
DA: Working there was education, because the bartenders who worked there were old school and had been in the game as mixologists for years. We had a lot of freedom to mess around with the ingredients there, too. We used to go in early every day, like two in the afternoon, to freshly squeeze all the lime and the grapefruit juice. Just working around those guys and seeing their variations on classic cocktails, I got to watch them making those that much better than I was used to seeing them done.

DNYC: What does it take to make a classic cocktail that much better? How did your Temple Bar coworkers take their cocktails up a notch?
DA: The difference of ingredients played a big part. Better ingredients and better techniques. The small things, like stirring a Manhattan instead of shaking a Manhattan. The subtleties.

DNYC: So how did you end up here at Stanton Social?
DA: I left The Smith, took a little time off, and then I needed a job really badly. I’d heard about this place, so when I learned about an opening through an ad on Craigslist, I contacted the general manager immediately and personally told him, “I want that job.” I came in and there were twenty people waiting ahead of me, but the manager picked me out as “the guy that actually contacted me ahead of time.” I got to go the front of the line, and the GM and I got along really well, so I got the job here, and it’s a cool place. I’ve been here five years almost. That’s a lot, for a bartender. That’s a long time. It’s been a long time for a good reason, though—this place is fun. So what brought you back here?

DNYC: I went pretty recently, and the food was great, the drinks were great. I had the Cocktail No. 6, which you mentioned earlier was not your favorite.
DA: That’s a good drink. It’s fine, and you like it. That’s all that matters. There’s a difference in the customers’ tastes and the bartenders’ tastes. Because we tend to taste more, so maybe more alcohol heavy is what we lean towards, and that drink tastes sweet to me, but maybe it doesn’t to other people. What I’m drinking is jalapeño, you know, so a little more savory.

DNYC: Can you elaborate on what you mean by bartenders’ tastes diverging from the customers?
DA: Your job is to mix good spirits and when that’s your job, you tend to—well, not to compare a bartender to a musician, but my brother’s a musician, and he’s been making music his whole life, and he just hears things differently, you know what I mean? So I think that if you’re a bartender you work with cocktails so much you kind of just taste things a little more acutely. Say you go out to dinner with someone who’s a chef. They’re going to have a different opinion on their food than we would.

DNYC: So what are some of the seasonal cocktails we can expect here?
DA: We haven’t decided yet. We’ve figured out a couple—a Vietnamese coffee cocktail and a Thai iced tea cocktail. The Vietnamese is a cold brew, sweetened condensed milk, Kahlua, a little Aztec chocolate bitters, and some vodka. There are a few others on there so far, too, like a honey lavender rum cocktail…We’re trying to make it a nice balance between the acid and the sweetness. The Thai Iced Tea is a half orange pekoe, half black chai tea steeped for a while, sweetened condensed milk again, and dark rum, or something like that.

But like I said, we haven’t quite decided yet. That’s why we’re having a tasting. The ultimate decision comes down to hopefully the chef but definitely the two GMs, the management…We’re all deciding how it works, what kind of glass we’ll need, etc. It needs to work for us on a busy Saturday night and at a private party. It needs to work in a lot of different situations.

DNYC: What you’re drinking right now, is that your favorite cocktail here?
DA: It is—the Blood Orange-Jalapeño Margarita. I think it’s the staff’s favorite cocktail. We all have a staff drink at the end of the night, and I would say 90% of the staff drinks the Jalapeño Blood Orange Margarita. It’s got a nice spice to it, and the blood orange—the acid—balances it out. And there’s the tequila, which we infuse in-house with the jalapeños. The spice disciplines you a little bit—it makes you step back for a second.

You can try the Blood Orange-Jalapeño Margarita for yourself at Stanton Social, located at 99 Stanton Street. Contact number: 212-995-0099.

Photos via Stanton Social