From humble beginnings working at a pizzeria during high school to helping run a hip Manhattan cocktail bar, New Jersey native Izzy Tulloch has worked her way up the hospitality ladder. Following a post-high school barbacking stint, she landed her first bartending gig at a private dining club in 2013. “I mostly worked weddings my first year, but my boss really loved craft cocktails and would share books and insights,” she says. When the dining club’s downstairs bar was transformed into a cocktail lounge, Tulloch’s boss encouraged her to contribute to the cocktail menu and eventually she started teaching cocktail classes to club members. “He introduced me to how creative cocktails could be and a bartending future beyond the monotony of a banquet bar,” she says.

Bolstered by her experience at the dining club and other bars over the next few years, Tulloch joined the New Jersey chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild in 2016 and a year later entered a cocktail competition that took place at Clover Club in Brooklyn, New York, where she met owner Julie Reiner—a meeting that would prove fortuitous for Tulloch. Reiner encouraged her to move to New York City and she eventually did just that. Tulloch was running the bar program at HiHi Room in Brooklyn and occasionally working shifts at Clover Club when Reiner asked her in 2022 if she’d come on as head bartender for a new concept she was opening later that year, a revamped version of a SoHo bar called Milady’s that had been around for decades before shuttering in 2014. “While change terrifies me, I said yes and couldn’t be happier with the decision,” Tulloch says. 

The new and improved Milady’s is a cocktail bar (drinks are $15-$22) “focused on joy and nostalgia,” Tulloch says. “It’s a quirky menu inspired by the drinks, food, music, and trends of the late 1980s through the ’90s.” Her Raisin’ Hell ($19), for instance, is inspired by the “ants on a log” snack, comprising raisin and celery seed-infused peanut butter whiskey, Bourbon, vermouth, lemon juice, celery, and club soda, while her A Very Happy Tulip ($20) is a spirit-forward sipper blending vodka, Lillet Blanc, Oloroso Sherry, quinquina, saline, and Peychaud’s bitters. “My approach to bartending is making people feel good—I want everyone who walks into the bar to feel like they’re among friends,” Tulloch adds. “We’ve created a space where people want to come back and come back often. I’m proud of that.”