Chockie Tom is on a Mission

©  Adam Lynch 

Female Leadership in Bars: An Article about Chockie Tom by Millie Milliken

From working in rock ‘n’ roll bars to banning indigenous products from cocktail programmes, Chockie Tom is a leading voice for her Indigenous community.

It all began with a family frybread booth. “From the time I was tall enough to count money, my family would occasionally put me to work running our frybread stand – that was probably my first foray into hospitality,” says bartender turned writer and activist, Chockie Tom.

A common food among Indigenous communities, frybread is a complex culmination of the relocation of indigenous people from their farming and foraging lands to government-controlled reserves, and the innovative ways in which Indigenous people have had to work to survive constant and generational upheaval. It’s a meaningful place to start when talking about the career of Tom.

Originally from California, Tom lived her early years in LA, before spending the majority of her bartending career in New York City, and moving to London where she currently resides. Her cultural background is mix of two distinct halves: her dad's side being Indigenous, and her mum’s being non-native

Hailing from the Pomo and Walker River Paiute nations, Tom has become an extremely visible and leading name in the Indigenous community within the bar and drinks space, and it is the work she does around amplifying Indigenous voices, pushing for representation and educating the industry on culturally appropriated ingredients, that has brought her to this point in her career.

Early journey

Her beginnings behind the bar weren’t perhaps the most conventional: “I decided to take up bartending as a fallback plan and something easy I could do and make decent money… I didn't come into the industry looking to do craft cocktails, or looking to learn very much or do much beyond surviving,” she says of the early days. She cut her teeth in rock ‘n’ roll and dive bars in New York City, before burn out and a stint making cupcakes in a shop in the East Village – “called Butter Lane, which actually recently closed, which I'm sad to hear about” – dropping off leftover cupcakes at the end of the day at local bars.

When she finally got back behind the bar, she worked happy hour at dive bar The Local 269, before a stint as a manager at Beauty Bar which set her back on track with a slew of cocktail programmes, high-volume gigs and smaller projects. Tom has worked brand-side too. Her first role saw her work with Berlin tonic water brand, Thomas Henry – a role which allowed her to work across multiple alcohol categories and a transformative one in terms of how Tom goes about her work: “I got to learn about a lot of different products and work with everybody. And it really made me rethink my whole approach to everything.”

Tom’s work as an advocate for Indigenous people in the bar industry has its roots deep in her own heritage and life experiences beyond the bar. Her father’s role as a builder of community is a vivid memory that seems to have manifested in how Tom now wants to move through the world of drinks – although it took her a while to get there. “My dad would do fundraisers every year at Annual Christmas Powwow. He would put together like a what we call a ‘giveaway’, where if you have a lot of something you share it rather than hoarding your wealth. He would hold different rock ‘n’ roll benefits at like different rock venues throughout southern California, so I grew up with all of that. Unfortunately, when my dad passed away, I did lean away from some cultural things for a while, but it was kind of painful.” 

Finding her voice was the next step. Despite having come up through a myriad of punk subcultures, Tom didn’t feel safe speaking up on her own about it. But by the time she launched Doommersive in 2019 (then known as Doom Tiki, a pop-up which confronts colonisation and raises money for Indigenous communities) she realised that by working with brands and by doing different events and starting to speak up more, that the worst thing that was going to happen was that she would identify people or brands or venues that she didn't want to associate with. “That kind of started the momentum going forward… that was kind of a big turning point.”

By the time she moved to London in 2020, Tom was working on an ambitious new product, baijiu brand, Ming River: “I wanted the challenge because I knew if I did a good job with that, I could work with anything.” As well as stretching her skills, it was also a chance to embrace spirits which came from countries and cultures outside of the western world. “I found that the more I moved away from spirits categories that had a Eurocentric value, like gin or cognac, that I wanted to work with categories that weren't necessarily as respected, even though they have long histories.”

Speaking up

Now, Tom speaks regularly at industry conferences, and has worked with drinks publication PUNCH and Beam-Suntory’s platform The Blend to educate bartenders on the work her and her community are doing. including running the first Indigenous panels at Tales of the Cocktail and BCB Brooklyn. “It was just kind of being like, ‘Yes, we're here. We are people that work among you. We've been here.’ It kind of went to confronting some of the common misconceptions within the industry, and explaining to people that they've been using our ingredients for a long time.”

Finally having access to these types of platforms shines a light on just how long it has taken the industry to understand the importance of the work Tom and her community is doing. “The first talk we did at BCB Brooklyn was the first time there has ever been an indigenous-led conversation. It’s kind of striking if you consider that all of these industry events take place on our lands. There's always this effort towards diversity but you don't have a diverse panel or presentation unless you're including the people on whose land you exist. So when we have these discussions about the metaphorical seat at the table for everybody, you can't forget whose table that the land is on.”

Tom, Alex Francis (director of bars at Little Red Door and LRD Projects) and bartender Acadia Cerise Cutschall’s presentation reflected on what the experience of doing intercultural collaboration, presented ways for people to be considerate, and also addressed Tom’s personal passion project –the discontinuation of ingredients that there's no ethical way to use, such as white sage or Palo Santo. Their upcoming talk at BCB in Berlin will cover that ground too, as well as further the discussion of banning ingredients like this in cocktails and spirits. “When people see these ingredients on menus or in drinks, I want them to have the same like visceral reaction they have when they see activated charcoal on a cocktail. I want them to be like, ‘No, you shouldn't do that’.

This year also saw the launch of ‘The Corn Silk Road’, an event series with Little Red Door in April 2023 driven by Tom and Francis, spurred by the bar’s farm-to-table menus. “They understand the value of going somewhere… learning from the people there and collaborating with them, rather than going in and being like, ‘Hey, we're doing this or I'm going to your farm this is how this works.’ So bringing that idea of mutual respectfulness, and the parallels between land sovereignty and sustainability, both cultural and environmental, are tied into this.”

Tom is soon to also do a BCB Takeover with Heaven Hill where she will be taking corn and presenting some cocktails which will be heavily Indigenous in influence and ingredients, including her famous Waggon Burner Old Fashioned.

Building a community

For Tom, all this work comes back to her obligation to her Indigenous community. “As much as I get recognition from it, it's meaningless unless the people in my community that I work with are getting something out of it too. If I don't create the right pathway, and if I don't use the connections, opportunities, attention, recognition within the industry to do something while I have it, then what's the point of doing it if tomorrow nobody cared about what I did?”

And she’s built up quite a community: Danielle Goldtooth, a rancher, farmer and owner of DiiIINA Food Start to Finish; Elaine Chukan Brown, wine expert, writer and activist around community representation; Roxanne Tiburolobo, distiller at Sonoma Distilling Company; Curt and Linda Basina, co-founders of Copper Crow, the first distillery to open on Indigenous land; Shyla Sheppard and Dr Missy Begay, co-founders of Bow And Arrow Brewing Co; and Tara Gomez, the first recognised Indigenous winemaker – to name but a few.

Tom sees the ever-looming issue of climate change as something her community can combat within the industry too. “We can't deny that every part of our industry is affected by climate change. Indigenous people of America have had our foodways disrupted, we’ve had our environment destroyed, and yet we're still here and we're still maintaining these traditional foods. If there's anyone that's going to give solutions and would know how to lead the way and it's going to be us.”

Continued education around ingredients will also be a focal point – “tomatoes, corn, chocolate, chilli, quinine, different fruits like mangoes, you've been working with indigenous ingredients throughout your whole bar career but just didn't realise it” – as will be addressing terms like ‘spirit animal’, the disrespectful use of Indigenous religious iconography and appropriation in Tiki ‘culture’.

For Tom, it goes further than her community too. “We’re not the only community that deals with the same issues. There are other communities throughout the world that are having similar issues in their hospitality, industry existence. It’s not just a conversation about us, it's actually a global conversation.”