April is a 20 year veteran in the beverage and hospitality industry. She worked in every role from busser to bartender to beverage director to brand ambassador to beverage consultant.

She has developed recipes for the likes of Lincoln Center Kitchen and MetLife Stadium, and has taught cocktail classes to over 3000 students. Her classes and personal philosophy of hospitality were featured in The Wall Street Journal and on the Sundance Channel. April has made multiple appearances on The Today Show, Fox & Friends, Heritage Radio Network, and many other media outlets..

She still teaches public cocktail classes at 5 schools in New York City and Philadelphia.

For a more complete press list, please click here.

In her spare time you can find April cavorting around Brooklyn rock climbing, practicing yoga, playing the ukulele, or dancing tango.

Formally trained in photography, Gates Otsuji also has a career in food & beverage spanning more than two decades.  Upon joining The Standard in 2009, Gates set aside silver halides to focus completely on ethyl alcohol, and he's been running the cocktail program there ever since.  He prefers to approach flavor as an abstract concept, like memory, and tries to operate with as few preconceived notions as possible.  "Flavor," he says, "is more complex than the words we use to describe it.  Dynamic flavor is almost always more surprising than we think it will be."

This line of thinking led to six years of wildly imaginative cocktails & mixers on-menu at The Standard's New York hotels, including the highest volume cocktail program in New York City.  "For me, the challenge isn't in constructing one delicious drink," he says, "rather, it's about how to make that experience happen for thousands and thousands of people, one drink at a time."