The Director of Liquid Performance: How Holly Grimshaw is Turning the Bar into a Stage

Written by Tom White

At some point during a night at Maybe Sammy, something shifts. It happens at different moments for different people. Sometimes, it is when a drink arrives, and the smell hits before the glass does. Sometimes it is the timing; the way a cocktail is placed down at exactly the right beat in the room's rhythm. Whatever the trigger, the effect is the same. Guests stop talking, they look, and they receive. It is the same involuntary pause that happens in a theatre when the lights go down, and it is not an accident.

Holly Grimshaw, the Head of Cocktail Development and Preparation at Maybe Sammy, has spent over a decade in the hospitality industry working toward exactly that moment.  She builds the conceptual architecture behind the bar's menus, develops original cocktails, refines the ideas of her fellow bartenders, designs prep and evaluation systems, and turns creative concepts into experiences that actually function under the pressure of a full room. In a field where many bars settle for good service, Holly has been quietly insisting on something more like a performance.

Scripting the Guest Experience

Holly grew up in Manchester, England, and her career path was never mapped out. It grew, as she puts it, 'organically', out of a love for creativity and connection, and a curiosity about what hospitality could actually be. When she eventually made the move to Sydney to join Maybe Sammy, she was stepping into one of the most ambitious bar programmes in the world, and she has spent her time there pushing its ambitions further.

Making it to the top hasn’t been easy, and the path here asked more of her than it does of most. She navigated it the way you navigate anything that asks more of you than it asks of others, by being better prepared, by working harder, and by refusing to measure against anyone else's timeline. "Nothing is given, it's earnt," she says.

What Maybe Sammy gave her was a platform built for the kind of thinking she was already doing. The bar's menus are full of creative concepts, built around a world and a mood the way a production designer builds a set. Showtime: Maybe Sammy and The Grand Maybe Sammy Hotel are both concept-led programmes that sit at the intersection of theatre, cinema, and live presentation. Individual cocktails carry names like Interstellar, The Big Lebowski, Do Not Disturb, Aromatherapy, and Buffett. Each one is a story compressed into a glass, and each one is the result of a development process that Holly leads.

The Work Behind the Show

Her work happens in the development phase, in the conversations about what a new menu is trying to say before a single drink is made, in the evaluation sessions where a concept is tested against the reality of execution, in the systems she designs so that a cocktail can be reproduced with precision across hundreds of services. It is the kind of work that makes everyone else look good, which is exactly what the best backstage operators do.

When a younger bartender brings her an idea, the conversation starts at a way earlier stage than the flavors. What is this saying? What does it feel like to receive it? Where does it sit in the arc of the evening? These are questions that would be recognizable to anyone who has worked in theatrical production. The fact that they are being asked over a mixing glass says something about where the upper tier of the cocktail world is heading.

Holly’s standing in the global industry was confirmed when she was shortlisted in the top ten of the Moutai Enter the Dragon cocktail competition, one of the most prestigious competitions on the international circuit. This accolade came as a natural recognition of the kind of practitioner she has become, someone whose work lands in the wider conversation about where the craft is going.

A Cultural Shift the Industry Is Still Catching Up To

Across the global bar scene’s upper tier, something has been changing for a few years now. The most interesting bars are releasing menus in limited runs, like theatrical seasons. They retire cocktails the way shows close. They hire people with backgrounds in food science, narrative design, and even performance. The ambition is no longer to serve great drinks; the industry has raised the bar. The final aim in modern mixology is to curate an experience that a guest carries with them when they leave. Holly has been an important part of that shift, and Maybe Sammy, a long-standing fixture in the World’s 50 Best Bars and voted No. 1 in the world in the 2023 Top 100 Bars has become a reference point for bars worldwide because of work exactly like hers.

She is direct about where she thinks the industry needs to go. The bars she admires, and the one she is helping to build, treat every service as a live event, something with stakes, with intention, with an audience that deserves more than a well-made drink. The showmanship and the craft, in her view, belong at the same table.

For the Broadway World readership, that framing needs no translation. Everyone who follows theatre knows that the magic of a production rarely lives in one person. The magic lives in the lighting designer who found the shadow, the choreographer who built the pause, the producer who greenlit the strange idea nobody else believed in. Holly is the last of those, the one working before the doors open, making sure that when the moment comes, it lands.

What Comes Next

Holly Grimshaw is now focused on developing further as a hospitality professional, on finding more effective ways to approach menu development, and on carving out more space in the industry for the kind of creative ambition she has spent ten years building toward. She wants the people who do her kind of work, the development, the systems, the behind-the-scenes architecture of a great bar programme, to be understood as authors, not just operators.

Next time you find yourself at Maybe Sammy, order something from the menu and pay attention to when the room shifts; remember that someone spent a long time making sure it would.

Photo Credit: Holly Grimshaw