Staff Focus: Will Southard

Tell us a little about your background. 

I grew up in Augusta County, like 40 minutes west of here, and spent a little time in Charlottesville growing up. I ended up going to UVA and graduated with a degree in Environmental Science and Global Sustainability, and later started working as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for a small nonprofit called the Richland Creek Watershed Alliance. I focused on community oriented education advocating for waterways; what people can do on their own properties to better conserve the water quality in their local environments.  

What brought you to Common House? 

I met Logan, the Membership Director —we’d known each other socially for a while, and he then ended up coming into the bar that I was working at on a whim. He was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t know you worked here.” We talked for a while while he was sitting at the bar and he suggested I come bartend at Common House, so he put my name in and the rest is history. 

What do you like about Common House? 

The team is probably the best part for me. Honestly, don't get me wrong, members are great, I love establishing a rapport with members. Something unique about this place is that the majority of my customers are regulars, essentially. Right? That's a really interesting and overwhelmingly positive space. But the people that I work with truly make it. My management's great. I've never been so respected as a human being, in a service industry job as I have been here. And that's wholly due to the culture the team creates. That's awesome.

You’ve managed to become lead bartender within 6 months of working here, can you talk about that? 

So I started full time, which is just not super normal, from what I understand. I have this philosophy that if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it well, or at least I'm going to try to do it well. So I’ve worked hard and have really tried to learn as much as possible. I don't know,  like with any promotion, I was just doing things that needed to be done and they noticed I was doing these things already and offered me the position. 

What excites you about your job? 

I'm pretty stoked for the Spring cocktail menu. We do a new cocktail menu four times a year, and this one has very much been a collaborative effort. Each bartender that wanted to do one got a cocktail on the menu. So, I'm really excited about both that, and the creative outlet as a whole.

What is your favorite cocktail on the new menu? 

So I have two! The first, is one I created. I keep coming back to making drinks with our house-infused jalapeño tequila, and recently I've been experimenting with sparkling wine finishes on drinks. Combine the two and you get Contents Under Pressure. The real curve ball in the drink is some muddled cucumber, which adds a bit of freshness and rounds out the spicy tequila.

The other one on the menu I really love is Sacred and Profane. I have to give so much credit to Olivia Lowery, Lead Server, for coming up with it —it's a riff on a New York Sour, which is a whiskey sour topped with a red wine float. She made it her own by infusing the bourbon with orange and adding some orange liqueur to the mix, and what you get is what she calls a "Florida Sour." It's a really bright and citrus-forward cocktail that changes as the red wine diffuses into the drink. I'm a big fan.

A question from our GM —why is your favorite Wes Anderson movie not the best one? 

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I would not consider myself a film buff. I like movies. I like them a lot. Though, I haven't even seen the one that he thinks is Wes Anderson's best movie. I haven't seen The Royal Tenenbaums. 

I love Moonrise Kingdom so much, it's whimsical in the way that all the other Wes Anderson movies are whimsical, but it's one of those movies about childhood that hits all the correct things that you feel as a kid, and also does this really cool thing where the adult stories are happening in the background. Their stories are very poignant but they’re not front and center. 

Every character in that movie is experiencing something that's really true to life. The married couple is dealing with an affair, the scoutmaster is feeling like he chose the wrong path in life, and the police officer is lonely as he ages. There's all this peripheral stuff going on that makes the main arc of the two kids running away feel more real. The universe the story exists within feels authentic despite having that completely ridiculous dialogue and set design that Wes Anderson is known for. I love Moonrise Kingdom. Moonrise Kingdom is a fantastic movie and I won't hear anything else about it.