Top-shelf mixologist teaches her craft to others

April 23, 2017

12:00 AM

Photo courtesy of Cris Dehlavi

Upper Arlington resident Cris Dehlavi has been in the food business as long as she can remember.

Her father owned a restaurant while she was growing up in Arizona and she started waiting tables there as soon as she finished high school. A few years later, Dehlavi moved to Upper Arlington and started working at high-end Cameron Mitchell restaurant M at Miranova, where she found a passion for creating unique cocktails.

“Working at M, of course, we do really high-end mixology and craft cocktails,” Dehlavi says. “So I just got more and more interested in it.”

Dehlavi is now the head bartender at the restaurant and has become deeply involved with the mixology scene, both in Columbus and much further afield. On the local scale, she is the president of the Columbus chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild, an organization that connects bartenders across the country by holding competitions, seminars and classes.

Dehlavi is also involved in the community through the city of Upper Arlington. She teaches Lifelong Learning throughout the year, demonstrating four original cocktail recipes.

“They sell out every time,” says Dehlavi.

But when the time slots available for last year’s winter season sold out, she just added another class to her already busy schedule.

Dehlavi’s enthusiasm for teaching the art of the perfect cocktail has not been confined to the beginner level, or even to Ohio, for that matter. After she became an experienced mixologist, Dehlavi started traveling all over the world to take part in competitions that would test her skills.

“Now I judge a lot of competitions,” she says.

She also spends some time passing on her skills to mixologists who are just getting started by running the apprentice program for Tales of the Cocktail. It is the largest cocktail festival in the world, taking place for one week during July in New Orleans.

The festival’s apprentice program gives new bartenders a chance to learn the ropes from some of the most experienced and successful mixologists in the country. Dehlavi was accepted into the apprentice program a few years ago and has worked her way up to run the program since then.

Every year, Tales of the Cocktail does a miniature version of the festival in a new location across the globe. Last year, the event was held in Mexico City, and this year, it ventured across the pond to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Still, Dehlavi enjoys coming home to Ohio.

“It’s pretty tremendous, the community,” she says. “There’s a huge mixology scene here in Columbus.”

Though she is always busy, Dehlavi plans to spend a lot of time outdoors with her daughter this summer. She still appreciates the lush greenery of the Midwest, which she says was difficult to find while growing up in Arizona. The sun and heat of summer will eventually become a burden however, so she might just end up making a glass of her Red Chile Gimlet cocktail.

“This cocktail embodies summer,” says Dehlavi. “It is light, refreshing and herbal.”

In its simplest form, a gimlet is made up of gin, lime and soda, but Dehlavi’s version takes it up a couple notches.

“Ancho Reyes is a liqueur made from red chiles, and has a hint of heat but mostly very complex chile flavors,” says Dehlavi. “It elevates what would otherwise be a very basic drink. It is quite simple to make for anyone, whether a working bartender or an at-home novice.”