About Beth Dixon
Beth has been in the restaurant industry since 2001. Her bar career began behind the stick at Can Can in Richmond’s historic Carytown. In her almost seven years at Can Can she honed her skills as a professional bartender. She credits a lot of her success to the things she learned from service manager Joao Neri & sommelier Bob Talcott in her tenure at the French brasserie.
She was on the opening team of the much beloved, now shuttered, Pasture. Michele Jones, owner and front of house manager, hired her on the word of former co-workers on their opening night. Working behind the bar at Pasture for almost seven years, she fine-tuned her style with Southern flair and hospitality and eventually became the bar manager. The teamwork that Jones and her partner Jason Alley encouraged between the kitchen and the front of house teams allowed Beth the freedom to make her own mixers and work with kitchen staff to do an incredibly low waste bar program.
Known for her shrubs and high acid cocktails Beth was put to the challenge in her role as Bar Manager at Perch, Mike Ledesma's Pacific Rim inspired restaurant. This opened up a new creative window where the focus was on Polynesian style cocktails with tropical fruits and spices.
She has worked behind the bar of many other beloved Richmond restaurants, including Comfort, The Magpie, Heritage and L'Opossum.
Beth is the sole proprietor of Salt and Acid, where she focuses on cocktail menu consulting, bar staff training, mixology education and private events. She currently serves as President for the Richmond, VA chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild, and as a Northeast Regional Representative for the United States Bartenders’ Guild (USBG) National Council of Chapters.
Salt and Acid.
It sounds so simple.
These two concepts are the key to the success of Beth’s cocktails over the years.
It started with salt. A well known and beloved chef she worked with suggested adding salt to a drink she was working on and it lit the cocktail up. Suddenly a door opened up on balancing cocktails that she didn’t even know existed.
Over the years of training bartenders all around the city of Richmond, Beth noticed a common wisecrack from her mentees: “Needs more Acid.” They had come to know that, when presenting a cocktail to her for approval, she was going to tell them to add a sour note. She has become lovingly known as an “acid freak”.
This response is from years of being asked to make something “not too sweet”. Beth figured out that the sweetness is not really the issue in the cocktail, but a lack of balance, which is easily amended with the addition of something acidic.