Clover Club’s head bartender on where he goes when he’s off the clock

This was one fateful Craigslist post.

Tom Macy started as a bar back at Clover Club in January 2009, a few months after Julie Reiner opened the Brooklyn cocktail bar. Today, he’s the head bartender of the neighborhood destination, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month.

“I was an aspiring actor like everyone else,” Macy, 34, recalls. “I had been working in restaurants throughout my early 20s and had sort of gotten interested in cocktails. That was just starting to become a thing.”

Macy went to an open call for bar backs at the fledgling bar and got trained from scratch by the “amazing team of bartenders working there” in its pre-Prohibition-style cocktails. 

“At the time, the cocktails thing was still pre-boom, so a lot of bars were opening up, but there weren’t a lot of bartenders with that skill set developed,” Macy says. “It was the right place at the right time.”