PROFILE: From genes to gin - The double life of scientist Anup Devani

A few years ago, Anup Devani went out for a night on the tiles with friends in Nairobi. The club they chose that night was everything Nairobi nightlife prides itself on being; loud, sweaty, chaotic, with elbows and perfume and basslines thudding straight through your ribcage. He hated it.

“I could still hear the bass pumping in my ear the following morning,” he says. “My voice was hoarse from just shouting over the music in order to have a conversation. I realized at that point that that was not the kind of place I like to go to.”

When his wife and sister-in-law launched ATE restaurant on Kyuna Crescent, they were left with an unused space, a former garage that looked destined for storage. Devani’s wife spent months nudging, cajoling, and convincing him that if he wanted a bar where conversations didn’t require shouting, he should simply build it. Eventually, she wore him down, and out of that garage, the Revolver bar was born.

Devani isn’t your typical bar owner. By day, he is a clinical geneticist; the sort of man who can spend a morning unravelling DNA codes and mapping mutations - and then, when evening falls, slip off his lab coat and trade test tubes for tumblers.

From that garage-sized sanctuary, Devani has somehow managed to fire a shot heard around the world. Revolver has been listed, twice, among the World’s 50 Best Bars. It also sits pretty among the Top 10 best bars in Africa and the Middle East, combined.

For most, that would be success enough to sip on for a lifetime. But for Devani - who shrugs off accolades as though they were barflies at closing time - it is simply another milestone on a road he refuses to stop walking.

Describing himself both as “pig-headed” – which is to say stubborn - and as “an absolutely ridiculous person,” Devani spoke to Citizen Digital’s IAN OMONDI over a cocktail, in between pensive cigarette puffs. Besides being the co-founder of Revolver, he also serves as its Creative Director; meaning he’s the guy that comes up with all the cocktail menu ideas.

Why run a bar with only 36 seats? Do the profits make sense?

People are willing to pay for good things. Of course, we’d make a lot more money if we filled the place up and let a few more people stand around, but the quality about it would deteriorate. So, it’s just a choice you make between the atmosphere and the output, because you can’t really get both.

People who want to throw their money around and want to be seen still like to go to crowded places, but we have a more personal touch. We sit people at the bar and talk to them individually about their drinks; like what kind of specifications they have, if there’s a particular way they like their drinks, and if they would like to discover something brand new.

How do you actually go about designing a cocktail?

Inspiration, obviously. For example, we do seasonal menus which last between six and nine months at a time. Our current one, which is Season Three, is called Provenance, which just implies where things come from.

Let me just read out to you the concept from the current menu so you can understand it: “Every cocktail tells a story. In our third chapter, we trace ingredients back to their origins; the people, places and history that shaped them. From forgotten techniques to modern twists, each pour carries a sense of place, purpose and discovery.”

If you look at the actual menu, each drink is named after a country or region. We’ve got one named Kenya, for example, that has a lot of Coastal ingredients for this iteration The next time I want to do something from around Mt. Kenya, with a lot of the cool stuff that are found around there.

Why the name ‘Revolver’? What does it mean?

The gun thing is pretty obvious, but it’s actually Spanish. ‘Revolver’ means to ‘come back again,’ or to ‘mix/stir.’ Both meanings make sense because we want people to want to come back here, and we also mix and stir things here all the time.

If someone flew in from London, Tokyo, or New York and sat at your bar, what drink would you insist they try?

What we try to do is push the idea of premium cocktail culture; which is to say don’t drink a lot, but enjoy every sip. We’re very keen that people don’t do shots here, and so we charge a pretty serious premium on those. We’ve had people say “your shots are too expensive,” and there’s a reason for it; I’m not trying to take your money, I’m trying to keep your money in your pocket.

For people coming in from abroad, I like to start them off with our Old Fashioned. The reason is we used to have a lot of Americans from the U.S Embassy coming through here, they were the first discoverers of this place. By the time that first batch left, we had a lot of them saying they’ve never had an Old Fashioned anywhere in the world as good as ours.

As far as spirits go, there are a lot of whiskies in this bar, but it’s something that we love talking to people about; what kind of whiskey they like, narrow it down, and maybe give them something they haven’t had before, and while they’re drinking we’ll be chatting with them about alternatives and whatnot. It’s not even a question of convincing them, it’s just about giving them enough information to make their own decision about their next drink.

How did you convince your wife to get into this with you?

It’s actually my wife who convinced me. The back story is that when she and I went to the U.S on our honeymoon, I took her to a couple of bars that I’d been to previously, and she really liked that whole intimate kind of bar rather than noise. So, when they were looking for somewhere to rent for them to put up a restaurant and finally found this place, they realized that this ex-garage area was not going to be functionally useful to them.

So, she convinced me to open a bar featuring that intimate setting that we both liked here. I kept on saying No, by the way, but she finally wore me down and that’s when my brain switched on and I turned it into my little vanity project.

You guys opened your doors in 2019…

Yes. Three months before we were shut down for Covid.

What kept you still going after that?

There’s a guy that I went to secondary school with, who I ran into while we were doing the fit out, and it turns out that he worked for William Grant & Sons. We got to taking and he came by for one of the soft openings and we became re-acquainted with each other and became friends again.

As soon as Covid hit, they had already booked a lot of people to do whiskey tastings. So we’d make up cocktails for them to send out to all the people participating in them and enjoy on Zoom calls. So that kept us very occupied.

There are also a few large companies here that, as part of their corporate culture, have happy hours once a week for all their staff. They would make orders a couple days in advance and we would make them and put them in cool little bottle with everybody’s name and everything and dispatch them out.

The worst we did during Covid was take our staff salaries down to 90% of the original. We never had to fire anybody. We were very lucky that we had good people who wanted to keep us alive.

What is the most Nairobi thing you have ever overheard across the bar?

I’ve realized that many people don’t have their own reputations as such, and so they rely on the reputations of close relatives. Like, I’ve had some people here saying; ‘Do you know who my father is?’ That’s usually funny to me. [Laughs]

There are also the classic 'something-with-soda' guys. Like “I want a vodka and soda” or “a whiskey and soda.” We have very premium mixers that we stock here, and occasionally we do homemade sodas, but we don’t stock these popular sodas. That’s also because there are a lot of whiskies that people are very used to taking with soda that we don’t stock either.

Speaking of, which is the most premium whiskey on your shelf?

We have one of only six bottles of The Balvenie 40-year-old which were allocated to Africa. Two went to Nigeria, two to South Africa, and then two are in Kenya.

The Balvenie is by William Grant & Sons company; they literally send people out to find the places that they want to stock, and then you have to be invited to buy it.

But when people say “premium,” [in Nairobi] more often than not they mean in terms of price, and not exactly quality. And, see, the thing is, there are far more expensive whiskeys in Nairobi that I don’t stock because I just don’t agree with their value. And there are whiskeys here that are relatively inexpensive but, in my personal opinion, are fantastic and therefore deserve to be on my shelf.

It’s not necessarily cheap vs expensive; it’s value proposition – is this worth the amount of money that, a) we’re paying to buy it, and b) we’re charging people to consume it? That’s a key philosophy for us, the value proposition has to be both ideal for us and our customers.

People say bartenders are half therapists, half magicians. Which would you say you lean more towards?

I’m definitely more on the therapy side, no question about it. If you make people feel comfortable about the choice of drink that they make, then all of a sudden they’re already halfway into the conversation with you. People are going through stuff that they want to talk about, some are afraid to face their problems the next morning. It’s kind of semi-transactional; I’ll buy a drink from you, and you’ll listen to my woes.

Clinical genetics and bartending are kind of a strange mix-up, No…?

Once you get past the artistic, thought-provoking imaginative process of creating a cocktail, then it becomes a matter of precision – just like genetics. The part of your brain that you’re using then sort of goes away from the artistic side and into your analytical Scientific side.

If you consider anything that we eat or drink, at some point it’s biochemistry, and genetics has a big part to play in that. If you understand the literal chemical basis of what you’re putting together, you can derive a lot more flavour out of things than somebody who doesn’t consider it in that respect.

Alcohol is an incredibly interestingly molecule; on one side it dissolves in water, on the other side it can dissolve fats. So, it’s one of the very few things where you can get a fat-based flavour into a liquid that also has a high percentage of water so that it’s not exclusively dangerous for you.

What was Anup Devani like as a child?

I was really into Science, but I was also relatively quiet. I got louder as time went on. I had a really nice childhood, I enjoyed growing up in Nairobi; it just felt very idyllic.

I never really knew what I wanted to do, all I knew was that I liked Science. My Science teacher in primary school is still, to date, one of the most influential role models that ‘ve had. I never expected that I’d get into hospitality, but it’s been a ride.

Do you have any kids?

No. But we have many dogs.

Nine.

Why?

Because we – my wife and I – love dogs. When we got married in December 2016, our starter apartment was like a two-and-a-half bedroom. We moved from that to the next place so that we could have more space for dogs. And we moved from that place to our current place for an even bigger garden because we got more dogs and we wanted them to get their exercise in and run around.

What is the most random thing about you?

I’m an absolutely ridiculous person. My sense of humor can go all the way from cutting in sarcastic to incredibly childish within like two seconds. I like to laugh, I like to be happy, whenever I can.

People I’ve spoken to over the years usually have their own perceptions about success, what’s yours? What keeps you fulfilled?

What keeps me fulfilled is pig-headedness; refusing to back down. This bar has been through some rough times and, honestly, I should’ve shut it down. But there’s a part of me that has just refused to let something this special to me die.

I don’t consider myself successful yet. I mean, the bar pays its own bills and pays me from time to time, but it’s not a success story yet.

What do you want people to feel when they leave your bar?

I want them to feel like they’ve had an experience. I want them to feel like they entered into our imagination and found something that they love.

We tend to gently suggest that people don’t have more than three cocktails while they’re here. We don’t hold back on the alcohol, but we don’t want people to get completely trashed in here.

We want them to experience the flavours the way we created them. Because this is not the launchpad for the rest of your night; this is your night.