In the West Village of Manhattan, Euclides “Victor” Lopez is sitting with me in the back of the Four Faced Liar, an Irish pub, wearing a shirt that reads “Mixteca.” It’s the name of his bar, which is set to open across the street as soon as the liquor license is delivered, and, according to him, “it’s very, very Mexican.”
Lopez was born in the state of Puebla in the Mixteca region of Mexico, a mountainous territory whose namesake is derived from the Nahuatl word for “between the clouds.” He dreamed of becoming a doctor, but when money put that dream out of reach, he followed an ill-fated romance to New York. Over the next six years, he fell in love again, welcomed the eldest of his five children and kept the lights on by selling hot dogs and hamburgers from a kiosk in Central Park. When a temp agency sent him to a recently opened hot dog stand in the Lower East Side called Crif Dogs, he was surprised by “how punk everything was.”
Lopez would make hot dogs and do deliveries there for five years before Jim Meehan opened the bar Please Don’t Tell. “I thought it was going to be like shots and Gin & Tonics, like the bars I used to go to on St. Marks Place,” says Lopez. “But when I saw Jim making cocktails…when I would see the expression on people’s faces, I started to ask myself how they did that. I wanted to learn.”
Lopez began barbacking for early cocktail-renaissance figures Don Lee and John Deragon, who had barely begun bartending themselves. “Victor had a natural talent,” says Deragon. Composed and attentive, he knew what the bartender needed before they asked. He barbacked his way into an apprentice position, then eventually earned a full-time shift. PDT shot to global fame—winning a James Beard Award and topping the 50 Best Bars list—while Lopez held down the service bar Tuesday through Friday, without interruption, from 2008 until this July. It was a run matched by few, both in its longevity and its quiet, precise influence.
Mixteca, Lopez’s first bar, opened this month in New York. (Credit: Eric Medsker, Christian Rodriguez)
On his last day at PDT, Lopez’s colleagues and fans watched him, as they have for the last dozen years, set up and run the bar all his own. He greets everyone the same—bridesmaids from Nebraska, a kid in a Fernet-Branca vest, two Brazilian tourists sharing one beer—and makes a vodka-soda with the same care as a Ramos Gin Fizz. Always with a real smile.
Current PDT owner and Mixteca partner Jeff Bell started as Lopez’s barback in 2010, learning the ropes. “Standing in the service area and watching Victor crank out cocktail after cocktail was mesmerizing,” says Bell. “Nothing phased him. Ever.”
Meehan calls it “anachronistic”—in an era where bartenders chase every shiny opportunity, Lopez stayed in one spot, focused on the work. “When I started working with him at 25, everyone got along with him. The same was true for the 25-year-olds five years later, 10 years later, and now,” says Bell.
It wasn’t just the staff. “He became a real confidant in my life in New York,” says Priya Krishna, a former bar regular and reporter at The New York Times. “I brought my parents there. I brought my boyfriend before he became my husband. Victor was always there, and he always knew my order.” PDT bartenders always looked to Lopez for information like that: what regulars would order, how to make classics. He could rattle off recipes from eight or nine past menus without pause, building countless drinks at once while the rest of us just stared, struggling to keep up as he cracked eggs one-handed. We all wanted to be that good.
It’s no coincidence that these qualities could just as easily describe PDT itself. The bar exists outside of time and place: Windowless, it could be anywhere, and the music shifts from rap to rock to cumbia depending on who has the aux cord. It doesn’t anchor itself to any single vision of culture beyond great drinks and well-dressed, deeply knowledgeable bartenders making them. “PDT was my school. PDT was my house. PDT was my everything,” Lopez says, eyes shining a little.
Lopez’s true power is his softness. He is unbelievably silly. He slips eggs under your tins, or convinces you—and every other white bartender—that PDT’s hot sauce is his family’s secret recipe from Puebla, only for you to find out three years into telling people that it’s just Cholula Chipotle. An inside joke with him feels like its own little universe.
“It’s almost like he said, ‘I had to be fucking perfect because these white people are going to judge me if not.’”
Lopez’s bartending story is shaped by a stark reality: He was, at one point, one of very few Mexican bartenders working in largely white cocktail spaces. “I didn’t see another Mexican person behind a cocktail bar like me for most of my early career,” he says.
Lopez’s presence at a bar as austere and celebrated as PDT drew many aspiring Latin bartenders to watch him work. “Even when I was just drinking at PDT, Victor would take the time to teach us,” says Jose Bermeo, bartender at PDT and Mixteca. “You didn’t see many other established Latin bartenders at the time, and I asked myself, why not? All my friends would say, ‘Well, my English isn’t that good, so I can’t,’ and they would limit themselves.”
Lopez, too, had faced a language barrier. “He worked so hard to balance out the disadvantages,” says Santi Dady, who worked with him for 10 years at PDT. “It’s almost like he said, ‘I had to be fucking perfect because these white people are going to judge me if not.’”
As he is inclined to do, Lopez shrugs off the assertion of any hardship in this situation when I bring it up: “No matter what, when anyone tried to disrespect me, I tried to be as polite as I could. Whatever they feel, that’s fine. If someone comes to me about my race, or my religion, that’s fine. I have no reaction. That’s their problem.”
For Lopez, a word, much like an ingredient in his drinks, is never wasted.
Mixteca is decorated with elements like talavera Poblana tiles and folkloric symbols. (Credit: Eric Medsker)
Annexed behind a taco stand on Cornelia Street in the West Village is a Mexican bar on the verge of opening. The walls are covered in a jewel-toned mosaic of talavera Poblana tiles; beneath them, under the bar, are hand-painted with folkloric symbols—jaguar masks with bottle-cap eyes and razor teeth. Managers stack invoices and unbox point-of-sale systems while someone peels plastic wrap from a double-wide glass chiller. On the bar, an eight-quart container of huitlacoche-infused tequila sits, its straining time nearly up, marked for R&D.
Sunlight hits Lopez, who has worked in a windowless room for the better part of two decades, as he shows me all of the odds and ends of his new work station. I tell him the queer people of the West Village are going to make him do lots of tequila shots with them. He laughs and says, as always, “Oh shit, buddy.” I get misty-eyed. For the first time—in the theater he has built of his culture, his voice, and, as he tells me so often, “his dreams”—he may be seen clearly.
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