Since founding spirits marketing and trade advocacy agency The Bon Vivants in 2009, Josh Harris has built a mini-empire in San Francisco. He opened the widely acclaimed bar Trick Dog in 2013, and later joined forces with the venue’s opening bartender Morgan Schick to launch BV Hospitality in 2016. The duo debuted a second bar, Bon Voyage!, in 2018.
“At Trick Dog, we offer a well-rounded selection of cocktails so that everyone can find something they like, but we also feature a lot of experimental flavors,” Schick says. The cocktail menu (drinks average $15 each) changes semi-annually, with each menu centered on a theme; past themes have included zodiac signs, conspiracy theories, and the Pantone color wheel. Trick Dog’s 14th menu list, entitled “The Whole Dog Menu,” debuted this July. “It pays homage to Stewart Brand’s iconic Whole Earth Catalog, which acted as a how-to manual, literary review, and advice column, among other things, during the late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture movement,” Schick explains. The Moccasins cocktail ($15) from The Whole Dog Menu (recipe below) is one of Trick Dog’s more popular current offerings.
Bon Voyage!, meanwhile, is more rooted in classic builds and has a tropical theme. The venue’s Singapore Sling ($14) features Tanqueray gin, house-made “Sherry Heering” liqueur, Bénédictine herbal liqueur, lemon juice, house-made pineapple-ginger soda, and Angostura bitters.
At the core of The Bon Vivants is a commitment to charitable giving. “We just did our tenth annual Pig & Punch event, a fundraiser we host at the end of Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans,” Harris says. “This year we raised $94,853 for various charities, and a team of over 100 drinks industry professionals recorded 425 volunteer hours at a local charter school.” To date, The collective has donated over $600,000 to nonprofits, $90,000 of which comes from sales of Trick Dog’s theme menus—available for purchase at the bar—and related events.
