Star bartender raised in VT hunts the ‘big shebang’ of a James Beard

Ivy Mix knew only small-town life growing up in Vermont. In 2003, she decided that needed to change.

“I realized the world was a very big place,” she said recently. “I thought I might want to go someplace and see something.”

She left for Guatemala to volunteer and teach photography in an orphanage. She hung out daily in a nearby bar, enjoying the environment at least as much as the imbibements. When she realized she couldn’t pay off the tab she had racked up, Mix started pouring drinks to offset her debts.

A celebrated bartending career began.

The Tunbridge native is a semifinalist in the Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service category of the James Beard Awards, the top honors in the American food-and-drink industry. The nod recognizes her work at Whoopsie Daisy, the bar she co-owns in Brooklyn. The author and five-time nominee hopes this is the moment she can finally call herself a James Beard winner.

The 20 bartenders in her category include Kate Wise, who grew up in Stowe and works at Juniper at Hotel Vermont in Burlington. Wise said she’s stunned she’s in the same category with a woman she saw give a cocktail-making demonstration years ago at Waterworks Food + Drink in Winooski, the sort of event celebrity bartenders do.

“She is so talented,” Wise said of Mix, who has owned two successful bars.

Catching on to the cocktail boom

Mix spoke with the Burlington Free Press while driving from New York City to Tunbridge. She splits her time living in Brooklyn and her hometown.

“Tunbridge when I was growing up was small and really rural,” Mix said. “It’s still rural, but it was before the demise of the dairy industry.”

Mix and her twin sister, Tess, are the daughters of glass blower Robin Mix and Susan Dollenmaier, founder of the Vermont-based textile company Anichini. They lived off a dirt road with only one house nearby. Mix attended a Waldorf school and then Chelsea High School and became obsessed with horseback riding.

“I horseback rode all the time,” she said. “Before I went to college that’s what I thought I was going to do. Olympic riding was my goal.”

She stayed in Vermont to study philosophy and fine art at Bennington College. While in college she spent time in Guatemala, sowing the seeds of her bartending career.

Mix graduated from Bennington in 2008. She sold her horse and thought she’d become a professor. The economic collapse that year changed her plans. She lived in New York, worked for free at art galleries and hated it. Mix began working at cocktail bars just as that trend was catching on.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is cool,’” she said. “The cocktail revolution was really booming.”

Shining a spotlight on female mixologists

The cocktail revolution, though, felt like it had little room for women.

Mix said the speakeasy “meme” was big then, which meant men in moustaches, arm garters and suspenders. She and friend Lynnette Marrero in 2011 started Speed Rack, which as the movement’s website explains has “been able to shine a spotlight on female mixologists thriving behind bars around the country; and while they are at it, raise money for breast cancer research, education and prevention.”

That’s when her career really took off. She was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s most innovative women in 2015 and honored by Wine Enthusiast as Mixologist of the Year in 2016.

The first time she was up for a James Beard Award was two years later. Her bar, Layenda, was up for the Outstanding Bar Program category. (It would also be a semifinalist in 2019 and last year before closing.) She scored a second Beard nod in 2025 as a media-award nominee for her book “A Quick Drink: The Speed Rack Guide to Winning Cocktails for Any Mood.”

She co-owns the Brooklyn wine shop Fiasco! Wine + Spirits and runs Whoopsie Daisy with Piper Kristensen and Conor McKee. Mix said she used to play Little League baseball against Kristensen, who’s from Strafford.

‘I want to go to the big shebang’

Mix said Vermont helped shape her career because of the sense of community it inspires.

“I can make a good cocktail, but if you’re not having a good time and you don’t feel welcome, it’s not going to taste good,” she said.

The small-town tendency to take good care of people “has really infiltrated my sense of hospitality,” Mix said.

She would love to finally win a James Beard Award after her string of nominations. She said she’s been lucky to have “a mountain of accolades” that she’s proud of. But the Beard honors are different.

“Accolades — it’s such a funny world. Do they matter? Yes. Do they dramatically help your business? Absolutely,” Mix said.

“For me to get a medal around my neck, that’s the one I really want to get,” she said of the James Beard Award. “It kind of puts you on a whole different playing field.”

Finalists will be announced March 31. Winners will be revealed June 15 in a ceremony in Chicago.

“I want to go to the big shebang,” Mix said.

If you go

WHAT: Whoopsie Daisy bar

WHEN: 5-11 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 5 p.m.-midnight Friday; 3 p.m.-midnight Saturday; 3-11 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: 225 Rogers Ave., Brooklyn

INFORMATION: (347) 365-4193, whoopsiedaisybk.com

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@burlingtonfreepress.com.