For a More Competitive Cocktail Program, Eliminate the Back Bar

For anyone who’s been to a bar recently, especially in cities like San Francisco or New York City, a craft cocktail under $18 can feel like a rare find. So when a new spot opens in a market like Chicago, offering an extensive menu of classic cocktails priced at just $12, it’s bound to turn heads. 

Enter Gus’ Sip & Dip, a cocktail bar and restaurant that opened in January 2025. The team behind it has created an approachable, classics-only cocktail program that delivers remarkable value to guests. How? By getting rid of the traditional back bar. 

Full Book spoke with Scott Kitsmiller, bar manager at Gus’ Sip & Dip, to discuss this unconventional approach, the challenges it presents, and why it’s proving successful for their business.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What was the thinking behind the bar program at Gus’?

When Kevin [Beary] and I were putting together the cocktail program for Gus’, the most important thing was approachability. We wanted to accomplish that through a couple of different avenues. The first was the list of cocktails — we wanted classic cocktails overall and to try to keep them as familiar as we possibly could. The other was the price point. Our big thing was trying to make a bar where you felt like you could go every day without having to dig into your pocketbook to have a couple drinks. Landing on the $12 cocktail was very important for us because we felt it was the perfect price point where we could still achieve the quality and expertise that we wanted on each of these drinks, but at a very value-driven price.

The key to our success with this approach was getting rid of the back bar completely. We realized that if we limited the selections and used our purchasing power to buy in bulk, it allowed us to get higher quality spirits at the lowest possible price. And doing one spirit per category was a huge selling point on this — only having one vodka, one tequila, one Scotch, one bourbon all down the line was the idea. 

I certainly wouldn't say we’re the first to do it, but Kevin and I had been kicking around this model in our heads for years. We revamped the cocktail program at RJ Grunt’s a few years ago with 10 classic cocktails all for $10, and a happy hour with half-off drinks. During that process, we realized that with a lot of these classics, you can have a pretty stripped-down ingredient list and dissect your cocktail costing in a way where you could still achieve a pretty aggressive 18–20 percent cost. We realized this was a more approachable model that we could do on a larger scale. When we started thinking about the next bar we wanted to do, this is the idea that kept coming up.

Do you get better deals because of this model?

We do. We’re buying in pretty large quantities. For example, I buy Ketel One by the 17-case 12-pack drop. I’m not ordering these products week by week, I’m ordering in large drops maybe once a month or so across the whole list of spirits. The biggest thing is that you have to have a liquor room where you can hold this stuff, which luckily we have. 

We went to each of these brands specifically and told them what our concept was and what we wanted to do. It was important to us to use spirits that we loved and could stand by — our tequila is Tequila Ocho, our bourbon is Buffalo Trace — not just the ones that made the most aggressive deal for us or had the lowest price. When you're telling someone that you only have one vodka and you tell them it's some brand that they've never heard of, they might be like oh well, I just drink Tito's. But if you say, hey unfortunately we don't have Tito's, but we have Ketel One, they're not going to bat an eye in my experience.

How do you handle liqueurs, modifiers, and other specialty ingredients?

When we were building out the program, I tried really hard to have a wide range of cocktails that utilized as many modifiers as we could possibly fit in there, and that we were able to make other stuff as well. With what sits in our well, we can build 100 classic cocktails — at least 100 that I've mapped out so far. I wanted to make sure that we had all the heavy hitters that you would find at any given cocktail bar, but there were a couple things that we went back and forth on, like Amaro Nonino. Do we want to carry Nonino just to make a Paper Plane? Or is that just one of the products we don't carry and that’s a compromise we need to make. 

We landed on having enough to make almost anything you would want, but there's going to be the occasional thing here and there that we just can't make. (We do not have Malört — I know, it's crazy. This is actually a legitimate conversation we had when we were building this program, but there are no cocktails to make with it and I had a hard time carrying a spirit purely for shots and nothing else.)

What is the guest response to this particular part of your program? 

Honestly, we’ve had very little pushback. I thought I would occasionally get it here and there, but really guests don’t seem to care at all. The only pushback I've ever gotten was for tequila because we don't carry Casamigos. But for the most part, guests have been very responsive, and we've been pretty open and honest about what our approach is. We only have one spirit per category, but the reason for that is so we're able to offer all these drinks for $12. Everyone just gets it, and especially when we're doing happy hours for $6 cocktails.

We also don't batch any of our cocktails, which has been another key to our success. We’re able to make modifications and meet guests where they are. Apart from a milk punch and our White Russian, which we’re layering, we make every single cocktail, which also makes it easier for us. I’m buying these bottles and they’re going straight from the case into the well — everything stays in the original bottle. This streamlines the program, which was also important to us. Coming from the land of Three Dots and a Dash and 250 plus rum bottles, this is a night and day difference. 

It also keeps labor costs down. We have one prep person who works two days a week on oleos, cordials, and other housemade stuff like that. But the last thing I want to do is to be spending labor dollars on dumping bottles into Cambros, and then those back into another bottle. There is a lot of value in that with certain programs, but when you're doing such an aggressively priced tight-margin program, we have to watch every single dollar.

What are the challenges?

There really aren’t that many. The hardest thing is staying updated on what guests are asking for. I keep a running list on me at all times of certain spirits, and then make the decision to bring them in or not. Do I want to bring in Chambord because guests are asking for a French Martini? Do I want to bring in Amaro Nonino? Those are little things to keep track of. 

And also just making sure that you're really on top of your staff integrity and what they're pouring out. We have a couple cocktails where we have to be specific about our specs when you’re dialing in on this $12 cocktail aspect. A Bijou is a great example of that. You’re doing an ounce of Green Chartreuse, an ounce of gin, an ounce of sweet vermouth — you have to make sure that’s not being overpoured on the Green Chartreuse. There's always going to be a little bit of wastage and a little bit of spillage with every program no matter what, you have to factor that into your costing, but it becomes especially important when you have such an aggressive cost model.

On the flip side, inventory is incredibly easy with this model. We do a weekly inventory — a lot of programs do inventory monthly, but we've implemented a weekly system — which I know seems crazy, but it really has helped to watch week by week exactly what is going in and out. So far it's been very consistent and right in line, so that’s been good news for us. 

Ultimately we've been really excited about this model. We get comments from people every single day that they’re ecstatic to have a place in the neighborhood for $12 drinks and especially a list so large. It would be very simple to do this model, purchase whatever you want at the lowest quantity, and then kind of mass produce it. But it was very important to us to do the opposite of that. We really take care with each of these cocktails to make sure we are hand-making every ingredient, like our syrups, or that we’re freshly juicing everything daily. All those small steps don't necessarily cost us a lot of money, they just take a little bit of extra time. But they go a very, very long way to making sure that the guest perception is met with positivity at this price point.