An Unlikely Mentor
A friendship between a fresh-faced kid and a godfather of cocktails that was as sweet as soft-serve.
illustration: bashel lubarsky
In the early days of his bar, before he even opened the doors, Harrison Snow would shake up a new creation and slide it down the bar. Sitting at the end was Brother Cleve, a legend in the bar scene.
Born Robert Toomey, Cleve was a musician, DJ, and bartender. Legend goes that Cleve discovered classic cocktails in 1985 at a diner in Cleveland while on tour with a band. Not long after, he helped usher in the return of classic cocktails to the Boston bar scene and trained a city full of protégés. Snow remembers his mentor saying, “Maybe try a little bit of this, and then, nah, try a little bit of this.” At some point, Snow told Cleve about an idea he had to create a cocktail with Dole Whip, the Disney park soft serve. Cleve’s response? “Dude, I’ve been wanting to do that for years.” The duo spent two months in research and development before the drink ended up on the menu at their Lower East Side bar, Lullaby. It’s also among the last drinks they worked on together. Cleve died at 67 in September 2022, leaving behind a legacy of bartenders who credit him for helping start their careers.
Snow met Cleve in 2020 at Paris Creperie, where Cleve was running the bar. “Cleve and I immediately connected.” At that point in his early 20s, Snow had a boyish face, something that often led coworkers to ask if he was old enough to serve drinks. It was never that way with Cleve, however, who had immediate respect for Snow. “We had this massive age gap and massive life gap,” Snow says. “On paper, it was bizarre that we would be friends, but we were, and it was great.”
On Mondays, Snow would come in on his days off while Cleve did inventory, and afterward they’d hit the old-school bars in Boston to drink their way through Cleve’s encyclopedic memory of drinks and spirits. They both quickly realized they had a good working dynamic, and they started on their first cocktail together not long after, a version of a Bohemian. They called it the Bohemian Rhapsody, a nod to Cleve’s music background.
When the pandemic shut down the bars in Boston, Snow found himself slinging drinks alone in his apartment. Sometimes he’d get on video calls with his New York City friend, Jake Hodas, and they started talking about what their perfect bar would look like: a high-caliber cocktail experience with the hospitality of a neighborhood bar. The talk started getting serious, and Hodas recalls finally saying, “Yeah, I would open a bar with you.”
Snow moved to New York City, and they signed a lease in the summer of 2021. At some point in those early days it suddenly hit Snow that they should bring in Cleve: “Holy shit, what if we just partnered with him?”
Dole Whip: Spiced Rum, Fernet Branca, Sherry, Coconut Cream, Lime, Pineapple Soft Serve, Mint, Toasted Coconut
bartender harrison snow | Photos: Will BLUNT
When Cleve came to help open Lullaby, it was big enough to earn headlines, including one in the New York Times that read: “A Boston Bar Legend Comes to New York.” Working through every drink on the menu, Snow and Cleve would tweak and adjust endlessly. Hodas, who runs the bar’s marketing, remembers sitting at the bar watching the two of them work. “It was remarkable, honestly. I don’t have the background they do, so it was kind of like wizardry to me,” Hodas says. “Obviously, they had this remarkable chemistry, but there was also a connection on an emotional level that was really beautiful.” When Snow would throw out a wild new concept, Cleve would say, in the words of their coworker: “Try it. Let’s drive it off a cliff.”
Over the course of two months, Snow and Cleve dissected the Dole Whip idea. Adding booze to the soft serve wouldn’t work, because the alcohol would keep it from freezing. They tried making their own pineapple soft serve at first, but it didn’t have Dole Whip’s artificial flavor. They tried store-bought soft serve, but adding it to the top meant the drink had to be so sour that it couldn’t be sipped on its own. Then finally Cleve said: “Why not put a bit of the Dole Whip in the shaker tin?”, which gave the drink a better sweet-sour balance. Snow recalls: “That little bit of the soft serve in the cocktail jump-started things.”
Lullaby opened in early 2022 in a basement space below a sushi restaurant on Rivington street. The final version of the nine-ingredient Dole Whip cocktail is served in a nostalgic paper deli cup and has earned the bar dozens of headlines dedicated to the drink. With Cleve’s sudden passing in September, Lullaby now serves as something of a memorial, Snow says.
These days, Snow works on drinks without his mentor. As he creates, Snow says he mixes up an early draft of a cocktail and imagines sliding it down the bar to Cleve. He can still hear Cleve’s voice in his head, suggesting some new addition or subtraction. Let’s drive it off the cliff.
