Creating drinks that stand out isn’t just about flavor. It’s about delivering an experience that guests remember, talk about, and hopefully even come back for. The question for operators is how to craft beverages that not only taste good, but also capture attention the second they hit the table.
Scott Taylor, CEO of R&R Brands, thinks about it in terms of theater. His hospitality and entertainment group spans about 50 locations across multiple states, and he likens the strategy to the timeless restaurant move of sending out a sizzling plate of fajitas. The sound and aroma turn heads, and suddenly other guests start thinking about ordering fajitas for themselves.
“It’s the same thing with a drink, whether it’s a smoked old fashioned or whatever it may be,” Taylor says. “What can you do to create some buzz when people see it go by?”
At Party Fowl, an R&R concept specializing in hot chicken and big, boozy drinks, that buzz comes in the form of oversized, eye-catching, and playful drinks that Taylor says are designed to “create a moment.” The lineup includes technicolor slushies topped with mini airplane bottles, a bloody mary garnished with an entire fried chicken, and brunch cocktails served with IV bags that drip directly into the glass.
The Urban Cowgirl Cocktail—made with vodka, prickly pear, lemon, and prosecco—arrives in a disco ball cowgirl hat cup. (“And yes,” Taylor notes, “you get to keep the cup.”) Inside the restaurant these drinks create buzz, and online they extend it, with guests posting plenty of photos of the eye-catching presentations.
Tapster has a similar goal of creating memorable, shareable experiences. The self-pour tasting room features 40–60 taps across categories including beer, cider, wine, cocktails, hard seltzer, and more. Guests tap their card on the screen above each selection and are charged by the ounce as they pour. “The beauty is that we really promote sampling and trying different things,” says founder and CEO Roman Maliszewski. “I always say it’s the Froyo of drinks.”
The model puts control in guests’ hands and reduces staffing needs, but it doesn’t come at the expense of social interaction. “You see somebody with a drink that looks interesting, or they’re pouring from a tap you want, and it’s so easy to engage with them,” Maliszewski says.
Visual appeal plays a role here, too. He notes that a brightly colored cocktail or an experiential twist like a slushy can quickly catch on. Once one person pours a glass, others follow. And with every Tapster location designed with swing set tables and large communal areas, the environment encourages both in-person conversation and social media sharing. “I think just going up to the taps themselves is Instagramable, too,” Maliszewski says. “People just love to go up and try different things.”
As the COO of Thompson Restaurant Group, Alex Berentzen oversees a portfolio of 70 restaurants across 16 brands. He sees the beverage landscape shifting with more consumers cutting back or abstaining from alcohol altogether. But for those who do drink, the data show growth in two directions: budget-friendly and ready-to-drink options on one end, and premiumization on the other.
On the premiumization front, one restaurant in the portfolio has a $22 smoked old fashioned that recently became a top seller. Another hit is the Prescription for Peaches cocktail, which Berentzen describes as a playful nod to Prohibition. “It comes to your table in a hollowed out book with a flask in it,” he says. “It’s a batch cocktail, and we’re just pouring it table side. It’s about the easiest thing we can do, but it works. And it sells.”
The bigger story is how to empower staff to create these kinds of experiences consistently, he adds. Thompson Restaurants invests heavily in bartender education, sponsoring programs like Bar Smarts and the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET). “When we talk about innovation, it’s about arming people with knowledge,” Berentzen says. “It starts with training so that they have the confidence to sell the product.”
COJE Management Group operates a diverse collection of restaurants, cocktail bars, and nightlife venues in Boston. Beverage director Ray Tremblay says the goal is often to transport guests beyond the city. Rather than walking into another pub or steakhouse, he wants visitors to get a sense of escape.
Mariel, for example, is a Cuban-inspired concept that blends restaurant, bar, and lounge. The space evokes pre-revolutionary Havana through the food and the atmosphere.
“It’s always something different and unique with the drinks, too,” Tremblay says. “We have daiquiri trees. We play around with fire. We have something that involves dry ice. We have batch cocktails that can go very large.”
But Tremblay emphasizes that spectacle only works if the team knows how to execute it. He points to the practical need for training: understanding how to safely use dry ice or fire, how to balance dilution in large-format cocktails, and how flavors evolve or degrade over time.
“Education is really at the root of it,” he says. “We can come up with these ideas a millionfold over, but if we’re not actually teaching them how to execute it, it tends to fall flat.”
The same principles of presentation, experience, and creativity apply to the non-alcoholic segment. If anything, these beverages require just as much if not more attention to keep guests engaged.
At Tapster, non-alcoholic choices are built into the model. Every location has taps dedicated to kombucha, CBD seltzers, mocktails, and cold brew coffee. Maliszewski says they’re popular across different age groups and rarely sit unused. And while Gen Z is often cited as the driver of the non-alcoholic trend, he points out that it’s not the same everywhere. Tapster opened earlier this year in Lexington, Kentucky, and “the Gen Z crowd is definitely drinking there,” he says.
Peter Kiley, brewmaster and co-owner of Atlanta-based Monday Night Brewing, agrees younger consumers are drinking less, but thinks the headlines can be misleading. “Some of the numbers that are coming out now are showing that they simply don’t have as much disposable income,” he says. “It’s not always that they don’t want to drink.”
He also worries that younger drinkers have come of age during what he calls a “race to the bottom” in beverage quality. “There’s so many people that have this mindset of ‘What can we get away with?’ or ‘What’s the cheapest thing that we can sell our customers?’” Kiley says. “Can you imagine how much different your experience would be if everything that you purchased, the person that made it cared about offering it to you at the highest quality and the most affordable price? This doesn’t exist anymore.”
Regardless of the reasons, the numbers are clear. A 2025 Gallup survey found that just 54 percent of U.S. adults said they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest level in three decades. The shift is especially pronounced among young adults, whose drinking rate has not only declined steadily over the years, but now sits slightly below that of middle-aged and older consumers.
“But they’re not trading in flavor for alcohol,” Tremblay says. “In fact, they’re expecting a little bit more.”
That expectation is forcing operators to rethink how they approach non-alcoholic beverages. Gone are the days when a “mocktail” meant a sugary, flat drink in a plain glass. Today, zero-proof drinks are expected to have the same creativity, presentation, and guest appeal as their boozy counterparts. When done well, they also justify premium pricing.
“If we’re charging up to $25 for a cocktail, we need to make sure that we’re letting people know that these alternatives are not devalued drinks—that we’re not giving you the swell, the bottom, the low-quality,” Tremblay says, adding that in some cases, non-alcoholic spirits are actually more expensive per ounce than the liquor they replace. “When I’m pricing, these drinks are usually around 70-90 percent of what I’m charging for a cocktail, because we’re using the same quality of ingredients, the same prep, and the same love that we’re putting into all of our other beverages.”
