Joaquín Simó
Death & Co alumnus, Pouring Ribbons co-founder, and creator of the Kingston Negroni—the 2010 cocktail that brought Jamaican rum into the Negroni vocabulary and helped define the bitter-aperitivo wing of the modern revival. Tales of the Cocktail’s American Bartender of the Year in 2012.
The Kingston Negroni guy, and a lot more.
Joaquín Simó was born in Ecuador and raised in the United States. He came up through the New York craft-cocktail world in the late 2000s, joined Death & Co around 2010, and within two years had won Tales of the Cocktail’s American Bartender of the Year award (2012)—one of the youngest winners in the award’s history at the time. He has remained one of the most respected American bartenders for the decade-plus since.
The Kingston Negroni
His most famous cocktail is the Kingston Negroni, created at Death & Co around 2010. The build is simple: equal parts Smith & Cross Jamaican rum, Campari, and sweet vermouth. The premise is more pointed than it sounds: most rums get steamrolled by Campari, but Smith & Cross—an ester-heavy, funky, high-proof Jamaican pot-still rum—has enough character to stand up to the bitter intensity. The result is a Negroni where the gin’s juniper-and-citrus role is replaced by rum’s tropical-funky one, and the bitter-aperitivo framework still works.
The drink became one of the most-imitated cocktails of the era. It also helped establish the broader Jamaican-rum renaissance that Smith & Cross, Hamilton Pot Still, and other ester-forward Jamaicans rode through the 2010s. Simó wasn’t the only bartender pushing serious Jamaican rum into the craft mainstream, but the Kingston Negroni was the single most quotable drink in that argument.
Pouring Ribbons
In 2012, Simó co-founded Pouring Ribbons in the East Village with several Death & Co alumni. The bar’s signature feature was its menu, organized as a matrix on two axes—comforting to adventurous on one, refreshing to spirituous on the other—that let guests find drinks by mood rather than by spirit category. The matrix was widely copied. Pouring Ribbons closed in 2022 after a decade of operation.
Simó’s cocktail work at Pouring Ribbons extended his Jamaican-rum interests into a broader bitter-aperitivo register: amaro programs, herbal liqueur education, the territory where Italian cocktail tradition meets American craft. He’s one of the bartenders most responsible for the modern American craft-cocktail world’s deep engagement with amari.
The educator
Beyond bar work, Simó has been one of the most prominent industry educators of his generation. He teaches at Tales of the Cocktail, the Bar Convent, and various brand-sponsored seminars. His writing appears in industry publications. He’s a recurring face on cocktail-industry panels and competitions. The educational work matters because it propagates technique and historical context to younger bartenders coming up; Simó has done more of that work than most.
The personal arc
Simó has been notably open in interviews about being a Latin American immigrant working in a craft-cocktail industry that has been, historically, both white-dominated and slow to credit non-American influences on its own canon. He’s discussed his work on Latin American spirits (pisco, cachaça, mezcal, Caribbean rums) as partly an effort to bring the cocktail world’s attention to the regions and traditions that produced those spirits in the first place. That advocacy has been quietly consequential.
What he made
A great cocktail, and the bar that hosted dozens more. Two-degrees-of-separation from the broader Jamaican-rum revival. A teaching career that has shaped the next generation. The Kingston Negroni alone would be a meaningful contribution; the rest of the work is what makes Simó a figure worth profiling at length rather than just noting in passing.
To go deeper
- Cocktail Kingston Negroni is the headline. Several other Simó originals appear in the Death & Co book.
- Reading Interviews in Imbibe, Punch Drink, and Tales of the Cocktail publications.