We recently connected with Nick Mechak and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nick , thanks for joining us today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

At the first commercial kitchen I operated at the owner was a nice guy but a bit… sketchy at times. I’m not great at time management and when I left late at night he’d sometimes be sleeping on a couch in the cafe, usually alone, sometimes not. He rented a pallet in the basement to a student at one point. She’d sit there on a blanket with her Macbook Air working in the basement of a cafe and I’d have to step over her sleeping sometimes to get to my equipment, which she was somehow totally fine with. Another operator in the space once walked in on her showering using the sprayer from the dishwashing sink. There are so many other stories I could tell about that place. The price was good enough that the weirdness was worth it as none of it was really harming the state of the kitchen or my business, but eventually I scaled up enough that it wasn’t feasible to stay. Eventually the place shut down without much warning while the owner was doing god-knows-what in Hawaii.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I went to school for classical music performance. I eventually realized I would rarely be performing music I actually loved, and would be scraping by playing music I really didn’t enjoy performing. I briefly switched to political science and very quickly realized I didn’t like hanging out with lawyers and politicians, and pivoted back to music and earned a music composition degree, which I still enjoy doing.

There’s no money in classical music composition (but there should be!), so naturally I worked in restaurants. I started as a busser and moved up for about 10 years until I was eventually a general manager and wine director where I stayed for about another 10 years. I’d always been a problematic drinker, often drinking more than I intended. I slowly became an unhappy mess and I’d tried so many times to regulate my drinking that I decided to quit completely. With the extra time, and gallons of free wine, I started making vinegar as a hobby.

That hobby went straight down the deepest of rabbit holes. I was barrel ageing mushroom vinegar, experimenting with kelp, reusing discarded honey distillates, and cooking watermelons at low temperatures for weeks at a time in a rice cooker on the “keep warm” setting. I turned it into my first brand: Sour Humanoid Vinegar. Turns out people loved my products, but getting them to buy it without me there was extremely difficult without a marketing budget.

Eventually I met my wonderful wife, Tawny Lara, and we started experimenting with a vinegar-based herbal medicine called an oxymel, which originated in ancient Mesopotamia. I was working part time at a really high-quality amaro distillery in Brooklyn and asked them how they came up with their recipes. They referred me to herbal medicine. At that point, I had the infrastructure to produce the vinegar, the flavor knowledge from being a sommelier, the technical understanding of herbal infusions from working in amaro production, and the publicity connections that could lead to sales via Tawny, so we created (parentheses) Botanical Spirits.

We talked a lot in the beginning about how accessible to make it, and in the end we decided to keep it pretty niche. More recently we released a ready-to-drink version that is more accessible after realizing we were going to have the same problems as Sour Humanoid. We’re really starting to find our audience and are learning how to communicate that we’re making something sophisticated and complex but not inaccessible or snobby.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I was outgrowing my second commercial kitchen and the cost was going up, so I “moved in” with two other businesses in a commercial kitchen with more space, lower costs, and less restrictions regarding coming and going. I rented a cargo van and got two friends to help thinking at worst my 5′ x 10′ storage cage would take about an hour to load into the van and would probably take two trips, so conservatively I’d be buying my friends dinner near the new kitchen and returning the van before 8 pm.

I was very, very wrong. One of my friends had to leave for work at 4 pm. Eventually I was driving a clearly overweight cargo van about 15 mph on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (illegally) at about 1 am. While going downhill towards a busy intersection a light turned yellow at exactly the wrong time where I knew if I continued I would be running a red light (and it wouldn’t be close) and if I broke as fast as I needed then the few hundred gallons of vinegar in the back might tip over.

I decided to brake, and luckily my friend was able to hold up some of the buckets that were falling over. My other friend came back (after he worked a shift at a busy restaurant) to help until about 5 am.

Yes, they’re still my friends. Obviously there’s a lesson about planning better here, but sometimes you just need to get something done.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I had a drinking problem and was a sommelier I beat myself up quite a bit for having a music composition degree and not composing. When I quit drinking there was a composer that’d come to the restaurant I managed and I asked, “What’s a good way to get started with composing?” He said “Find some players and pay them, find a venue, pick a date, and write the music after.” I did all that while 4 months sober and breaking up with my long term girlfriend that I lived with. I procrastinated and ended up sleeping every other night and spending every waking hour writing music for about two weeks. There was a lot going on, but I thought about it afterwards and I realized that this thing I wanted wasn’t going to lead to a life I wanted. I looked for other ways to make music and be creative that didn’t involve a career in classical music.

That pivot was really about how I define success and a “good life.” I make sure that I have goals and vision for my business with a clear idea of what it looks like at the next steps. I do a lot of things I don’t like doing to grow my business and am definitely working harder than I would with a “regular” job (and making less money,) but having vision and clear goals means that I can steer the business towards something that’s self sustaining, so if I want to leave I can sell, and is moving in a direction that if I want to keep going it’ll be something I can live with happily.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://drinkparentheses.com
• Instagram: @drinkparentheses
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-mechak-3907b724a