Welcome to our series Secret Weapons & Hidden Gems, a photo series where we highlight the most impressive staff in the restaurant industry. From bar backs to beverage directors, hosts to line cooks, meet the people making your favorite restaurants run like well-oiled machines.
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Slip-proof boots at the Penny Pound headquarters. Photo by Bruce Kramer of @saltoftheearthprojects .
Hector Lopez Flores Cuts The Prettiest Cocktail Ice in L.A.
Flores puts a giant block through one of the Penny Pound’s many ice-cutting machines. Photo by Bruce Kramer for @saltoftheearthprojects .
Hector hoists a 300-pound block of ice up for cutting. Photo by Bruce Kramer of @saltoftheearthprojects .
Have you ever looked at the ice in your cocktail glass? Really given it a hard stare and appreciated it?
There is a lot of fixation on detail and craft behind the bar these days: people are touting their housemade bitters and brewing carefully composed revivals of old-school Tiki ingredients, for crying out loud. There are Scotch directories bigger than old phone books and expeditions to Mexico for mixologists hellbent on finding the next great Mezcal. But at the end of a long day, what sometimes matters more than anything is that whatever you’re picking up and putting to your lips is ice, ice cold.
This is where Hector Lopez Flores comes in. For the last five years, Flores has been cutting giant, custom-shaped, crystal-clear ice cubes for some of Los Angeles’ hippest bars as the Ice House Foreman at Penny Pound Ice in Downtown Los Angeles.
He first got into the bar world by working at the back of one. It wasn’t just any L.A. bar, however: it was Osteria Mozza’s. He was hired conditionally; he was recommended to the general manager by friends, but spoke no English and had never worked at as high-end and highly-trafficked a restaurant as Mozza.
“He told me, If you don’t do great the first week, I’m going to fire you . Mozza is the best restaurant in L.A. There were a lot of professional, very educated people working there. It was really organized.”
Flores, who is originally from Veracruz, lasted the week, and eventually crossed paths with one of the restaurant’s most hyper-organized staff members: master mixologist Eric Alperin, who had moved West from New York after working with cocktail legends like Sasha Petraske. Hector was thrown into the bar back position when the restaurant was short-staffed one night. “I was doing everything at Mozza, from bussing to running food to working the saute station,” Flores tells me. “They called me 911, because I took on all the emergencies.”
Alperin admired Flores’ speed and precision behind the bar, and the two instantly clicked. “I had a great first night with Eric; I spoke no English at the time, so he was speaking French to me so I could understand better, because it’s similar to Spanish. He really liked me, and offered me a full-time bar back job.”
Flores learned everything he could about bartending, from handcrafting syrups to picking the right garnish and grade of liquor. When Alperin left Mozza, he promised Hector he’d come back for him—just like a Western hero chock-full of bravado. “I thought to myself, yeah right ,” Flores said.
But Alperin did come back, and brought Hector on to help open The Varnish, the jewel in 213 Hospitality ‘s L.A. crown of bars that includes 4100 Bar, Cole’s, and Golden Gopher.
The next logical step after expanding their locations, of course, was getting crystal-clear, precision-cut premium ice into their customers’ glasses. Many high-end cocktail bars turn to ice delivery services instead of doing it themselves, in large part because cutting your own can add almost a dollar to a drink’s price, according to WIRED . For a perfectionist like Alperin, however, there was no choice but to try it out.
“Our first couple blocks were fucked up,” Flores says. “It was taking too many days. We didn’t know what process to follow.”
Eventually, after cycling through a range of different tools, from japanese chain saws to hammers—”Lots of trial and error,” Flores recalls with a laugh—they figured out the process. It used to take 8 or 9 hours for two people to cut down one 300-pound block; now, Hector does one block in about four hours by himself. They use several Clinebell CB300X2D ice machines that slow freeze two 300 pound blocks over the course of two or three days; then Flores and his team of three go at it with their saws. Hector cuts an average of 720 two-inch rock cubes daily; those then grace the glasses of the award-winning drinks sipped by everyone from you and your friends to Christina Hendricks and Daniel Radcliffe, who both no doubt appreciate the Varnish’s secretive, speakeasy feel.
“The hardest part of my job is people think it’s simple. But it’s not true; there are so many details and danger,” Flores says. “We have to be safe — we use big chainsaws and knives; we’re walking in the freezers when the floor is slippery. I’m proud to say we’ve never had an injury in my five years as ice house foreman.”
To stay warm, Hector and his staff wear Canadian Goose jackets on the job; a rare sight in L.A.’s perfectly sunny weather patterns. Perhaps that’s how their warmth persists—Hector promised us custom ice ice shot glasses when we come to town next. Did he have a lesson for us East Coast dwellers, we wondered, on how to stay kind and hardworking in such frigid conditions?
“If I don’t feel love for what I’m doing, I don’t do it,” he says. “If you like something, it’s not going to feel like a job.”
