Actually, turning 30 was a milestone for me, you know, you're no longer in your 20s and and you want to do something special. One being Jeff Hollinger, who was a manager here for quite some time, who wrote a book Art of the Bar which is a fantastic book. I've been able to work with some of my mentors and become friends with some of the people I grew up reading books about. What's it like being so relatively young in such an established bar scene? Wow, all of this before you were 30 years old. Then I worked at Cantina for a little bit, and went from there to bar managing over at Quince, for about a year, then started working for Absinthe about two and half years ago when this position opened up.' I worked at La Mar for about two years I would say, and then went and opened up Cotogna and started working with the Quince group, then eventually was doing a couple shifts at Comstock Saloon, and that's when I first got involved with the company of Absinthe. I moved to Sacramento and worked in a tequila bar called Zocolo's, worked there for about two or three years and came out here. 'I've worked in the restaurant industry for quite some time, starting off as a hole-in-the-wall taqueria cook when I was 16, and then moved up through the ranks, bussing, serving and eventually bartending in a city north of Sacramento called Lincoln. Tell us a little about your background as a bartender and how you came to work here at Absinthe. One was because I was dating a girl at the time that got a job in San Francisco and decided to move here, following her, and two, one of my friends that I had met at the Bartender's Guild was opening up a new restaurant, La Mar, and I had the opportunity to go open up a new restaurant here in San Francisco.' Honestly though, I came to San Francisco for two reasons. 'I'm from Sacramento, and how I got here was by car. Where are you from and how did you get here?

We caught up with Jared to chat about the industry, craft cocktails, and of course, absinthe. He's currently the bar manager at Absinthe Brasserie and Bar, a Hayes Valley institution now in its 17th year. Jared Schmidt is just 30 years old, but he's already made some serious waves in the San Francisco bar scene, having worked at some of the city's top bars and restaurants since he moved here from Sacramento.

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