Although he has a thick beard, partly grey, he is a child devoted to the mystery of the sea that roars, washes and dirty. he just got picked within the ten most influential in the world of cocktails and hospitality, but in their conversation the reflection on the mission, humanity and the universe appears and there is nothing about drinks or ingredients. He created his own brands, a distillery in Mendoza and lives on tour around the world, while playing the internal arm wrestling to calm down and enjoy his house, in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, surrounded by green and drinking mate . In 2020 his peers distinguished him as the World’s Best Bartender and is the creator of Atlantic Florist, considered the fifth best bar in the world, however, in 2021, it was two days away from closing that bar forever. Although he is the creator of Brasero Atlántico and Abajo Londres (one of the best bars in London), he knows that his true mission is to communicate.
Now prepare the third edition of the Atlantic Festival, in Jujuy, where it invites more than a hundred people from all over the world to talk about sustainability in the industry and highlight local producers. “Success, recognition, overwhelms, tires her. And, in the vortex, in the eagerness to say yes, you don’t realize it, but when you stop, within you there is that search to reconnect with nature, with meditation. I grew up and many of the things that were very easy for me, like talking and dealing with people, today are difficult for me, I prefer silence, the connection from another side, and if it is with people, with people who are more linked to the land. It’s part of listening to yourself,” she says.
News: Did you get where you wanted?
Tato Giovannoni: I haven’t arrived yet and I won’t arrive, there are so many places I want to arrive. Success is more for the third parties that look at you. In one it is the personal satisfaction of achieving the goals and those goals are a constant struggle. I always have a new challenge.
And he says that recently he took six foreigners to the north, on a product search trip, where they ate with local producers, in the middle of the mountain, people who live the land and work it with their hands. On the last day, one of the guests, owner of a well-known bar in Rome, told him: “Tato, thank you, you have given us a slap in the face of humanity.” “Those are the achievements that really fill you up,” he says.
News: Is it true that you find it easier to meet goals than to grow them?
Giovannoni: Yes, it’s something I’m still learning and it’s something I dedicated a lot of my last years to, understand how I continue to be happy with something that is already concrete, or that you think is concrete, so that it continues to grow. Because I also left things unfinished because I felt that I had arrived. It is understanding that, for example, Florería, today is the dream of many more and is a source of work. We were two days away from closing forever.
In 2021, as soon as they finished a major refurbishment work on the air conditioners, the pandemic restrictions tightened. They came from bloody months without activity, and with his wife and his partner Aline, they resigned themselves to the definitive closure. They set a date, it would be a Monday. But the previous Thursday, the Buenos Aires government announced that the bars could reopen. “And we opened, without a kitchen, with a bar where there was no longer a bar manager, a menu that we had made with Felipe Piña for a year, and with the boys without training. To the punches, but we reopened and today we are rearranging everything. Even so, I feel sorry and ashamed of some service things, things that we did well that are going wrong, there are negative reviews like there were none before and most of them are right. But we are coming back and it makes you happy that all these people who took the pandemic with us, almost without working, almost without salary, are happy, ”he maintains.
News: How did that hit you emotionally?
Giovannoni: Bad, very bad. Internally I thought that I had assumed the closure of the Florist, until we reopened it and I realized that I had not assumed itbecause the effort we made…
News: How was the festival bet born?
Giovannoni: It was after several years of inviting foreigners to Argentina, for me it was very important that they get to know the country. And a wave was generated abroad, everyone wanted to come because Argentina is beautiful. So we decided to bring the references of cocktails and gastronomy that are linked to sustainability. We did the first one in Valle de Uco, Mendoza, it was great. We were going to do the second one in Bahía Bustamante, in March 2020. This year we are organizing it in Jujuy, in August, for Pachamama day. It obviously helps Florería a lot, but it helps Argentine cocktails, because those people are going to go out of bars, go to restaurants, I’m going to be able to show them a beautiful place and they’re going to get an image of a super beautiful country and they’re going to want to return
News: He is a great communicator, although he says that now he prefers silence, right?
Giovannoni: Yes, I began to understand that one of my functions is to communicate. So, I do things that have a certain relation to cocktails, because it is what opened the doors for me, but what I want to communicate are many other things. You are born in this human body and with all that it means, sometimes you are afraid to express yourself because of what others will say. You say: “I’m not going to talk about the universe or the energies, because out there they say ‘look at this asshole’”. But one breaks down those things and ends up finding people with whom he talks about the same thing, or understands how to get the message across from another side.
He has two lines tattooed that run through each of his hands and arms and meet at his heart. One is curved and represents the sea; she made it on the day of Yemayá, goddess of the seas. The other is dark blue and straight, the sky; she tattooed it in Greece, “under that sky where the philosophers communicated”. And she plans to make another one, that goes from the heart to the foot, the earth. The earth, the sky, the sea cross and mark this man hypnotized by the waves of his native Pinamar. “I give talks that are filled with people who leave happy, without having spoken to them about cocktails. I am not interested in keeping a recipe for a drink, but rather in going after their dreams and happiness”, close.
