Samantha Withall, Beverage Director at The Hamilton on 14th Street, has certainly bounced around the biz locally. She has been a chef for nearly a decade, having worked at such venues as Cafe Atlantico and Restaurant Nora and helping to open Minibar on E Street and Oyamel Cocina Mexicano. At one point, she got out of the kitchen and served as Purchasing Director for the Park Hyatt Hotel. "After that," she said, during a recent interview with the Beverage Journal, "I did some restaurant consulting work before jumping into a wine and beer buyer position for an all-natural, organic market in Olney, Md."
That job ended up stoking her passion for the beverage side of the business, and she eventually accepted her current job at The Hamilton. "The Hamilton is the cruise ship of restaurants!" she proudly declared. "We are very large. We have a lot of square footage. In fact, the actual space that we are in used to be a Borders bookstore. Before that, it was a Garfinckel's department store. We have six bars and a live music venue in our basement. We offer a ton of all-American cuisine, but we also have our own sushi bar in-house that is manned by a full team of sushi chefs. We're owned by the Clyde's Restaurant Group, and we're very eclectic in what we offer."
As for her duties and responsibilities, they are just as eclectic. "I oversee our draft line-up, which for the upstairs restaurant is about 20 different draft lines. We focus on as much local, all-American craft beer as we can with a few imports that are popular brands. I also oversee about a 150 to 200-bottle wine list that focuses on small production wines, nothing more than 5,000 cases per vintage or per style per year. Even though we are a very large restaurant, we really look to focus on the more artisanal and smaller production wines and, similarly, that follows suit with the focus of our beverage program as well. For our cocktails, although we have a ton of the big-name brands that most everyone has behind the bar, we really look to focus on the resurgence of the American craft distillery movement. All of our specialty cocktails focus on small craft distilled spirits."