Meet Your Favorite Bartender’s Favorite Bartender

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 2012 until this July. It was a run matched by few, both in its longevity and its quiet, precise influence.