Shift Drinks: Celeste Rangel-Ruiz on Being a Fancy Drunk at the 715 Club

I am standing ankle-deep in the ocean, playing the game where your feet slowly sink into the soft sand as, inevitably, another wave comes in and you brace yourself, digging in. Only I’m at the 715 Club, and the surf is composed of Celeste Rangel-Ruiz’s legion of best friends and adoring fans. She can’t help it; her lure is the force of the tides, and her moon now rises over Denver.

The 715 Club on East 26th Avenue (pronounced "seven-fifteen" and never "seven-one-five") doesn’t trade in kitsch, like some dive bars. The spartan layout gives you the feeling that it’s days away from opening, or from running a fire sale on the remaining booze before it closes that afternoon. This is intentional: A trio of dive savants — Sudhir Kudva, Corey Costello and Michael Reilly — had to guarantee to keep the character of the place before the previous owner, the Bean Foundation, would accept their offer to “respectfully” renovate the joint.

Opened by Five Points legend Charles Cousins, who bought up properties across the area decades before gentrification would make that an en vogue practice, it was his foray into business after eschewing the life of a Pullman porter like his father. Then called the 715 Bar, it was the neighborhood hub in the heart of Five Points before eventually closing the doors and lying fallow for decades. Now it serves as a community center for bartenders from Kudva, Costello and Reilly’s other properties (the Squire and Matchbox, among others) to grab a pre- or post-shift drink and shoot the shit.

“This is why I love 715,” Rangel-Ruiz tells me as another friend tells her how cute she looks before disappearing onto the ample patio. “It doesn’t matter what day of the week it is — you’re always going to see your friends. We also work in a very tiny community; every single one of us are best friends.”

Other than the expanded tap system and renovated bar top, I imagine the space looks like an old friend you hadn’t seen in a while, too. Exposed rafters and facade intact, it’s a cornerstone for a changing neighborhood.
Rangel Ruiz has been through plenty of changes herself. A self-described “fancy drunk” and bartender at both Middleman and Gold Point, she was born in Mexico City to a fiercely independent single mother who worked just about any job you can imagine to support her precocious only child. “I was two years old when other people had to take care of me,” she tells me over a Twisted Tea as we sit at the 715’s bar. Change became the constant, uprooting when a gig fell through or an opportunity presented itself. “I went to fifteen different schools in my whole life,” she notes.

Her mom eventually meets a business guy from the States who whisks her off to Europe while Rangel-Ruiz heads back to CDMX to stay with her grandmother. The phone rings. “Her favorite joke is to tell me every year. April Fools' in Mexico is Innocents' Day, which is right before my birthday. Every year since I remember, her joke is that she was pregnant,” Rangel-Ruiz recalls. “She calls me one day, and she’s still traveling, and she goes, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and I say, 'Hahaha, are you pregnant?' and she didn’t laugh.”

“Oh, my God, are you pregnant?”

This sets off a chain of events that eventually leads Rangel-Ruiz from the largest city in North America to East Lansing, Michigan.

As a kid in the U.S., she desperately wants to work, to find something to do with her time that's a direct pipeline to the service industry. Quickly moving on from the Dairy Queen where she’d smoke cigarettes and drink coffee out back to being a host at a Big Boy, the iconic American chain diner where it takes an entire plate to hold a single burger, being around strangers comes naturally to her. “I taught myself English in six months,” Rangel-Ruiz mentions to me, almost in passing.

The whirlwind romance that began south of her new border between her mom and stepdad is starting to crash back to reality, so the moment she can leave, she’s gone. Things deteriorate quickly after that. “My mom had to flee back to Mexico,” Rangel-Ruiz recalls. “I think [my stepdad] has an alcohol problem, and it got to a point where he pulled a gun on her.” She’s alone in a foreign land, bartending at an Elks Lodge that hired her while she was blacked out on her 21st birthday.

She’s the big fish in the small pond that is the basement bar. “I’m young, and I think I’m hilarious and the hottest,” Rangel-Ruiz says with a cocky confidence. Still, she jumps at an opportunity to get the fuck out of there when a friend offers a place to crash in San Francisco's Mission district. “I had a bag full of money and a backpack. That’s it. I left everything behind.”
The only hitch? The girlfriend of her buddy in the Mission, who apparently didn’t sign off on the young, hilarious, hot new roommate. He pawns her off on a stranger, a slightly older, leery SF punk named Erica, who of course becomes one of her best friends. “Erika wound up being a lifesaver; she showed me the ropes, how to get cheap BART passes and stuff,” Rangel-Ruiz explains. Still, she was homeless in a city that couldn’t care less about another girl from the Midwest trying to make it. “I was, thank God, not sleeping on the street, but I was at the mercy of people I had never met before.”

She quickly found that what made her a unicorn in Michigan was par for the course in her new city. “Everyone was hot and spoke two languages,” Rangel-Ruiz says with a laugh. She’d bartend nights, pick up random gigs in coffee shops and the like, but she felt like she could never get ahead. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely as I did in San Francisco," she admits. "I felt broken, like I didn’t know who I was. I was also very, very young.” A stranger interrupts the interview to tell her she has the fanciest pants he’s ever seen, and she gracefully thanks him.

Less than a year later, she tried heading north to the infamous Emerald Triangle, back in the days when its primary economy was based around vaguely legal cannabis. “I worked at weed farms, I worked at coffee shops, I worked at the perfume kiosk at the mall. I did it all,” Rangel-Ruiz says.

A friend had picked up a gig trimming marijuana that came with a personal chef and yoga instructor, so she looked for weekend weed work. Her experience was markedly different. “I was sleeping outside with the goats in a camper that leaked,” she says. “We weren’t allowed to be inside the house. We were just the help.” She still romanticizes her time there, cherishing the little things like getting eggs from the chicken coup. “I feel like having a positive attitude has helped me through all the crazy shit I’ve been able to do without getting too down,” Rangel-Ruiz tells me.

Now, I’m not a fancy, big-city life coach, but if a man you meet at a drum circle asks you to move to Portland, I advise you to politely decline. Rangel-Ruiz did the opposite, as is her wont, crashing with him for a few months in what I can only surmise is some sort of commune she describes as filled with “old people, high-schoolers, and 27-to-early-30s people.” It’s not the soul-crushing anonymity of San Francisco, but she also doesn’t turn down a chance to get a one-way ticket to Denver to meet up with a friend named Lena whom she had only previously spoken with on the phone. One-way tickets are kind of her thing.

Their first stop after the airport is City, O’ City, as she always travels light. “I was hungry… and needed a drink,” she says with a laugh. Unfortunately, Lena isn't feeling too hot, so Rangel-Ruiz calls a friend from Michigan who is housesitting at a place we can see from the 715 Club. All the liquor stores are closed, so he takes her to Meadowlark, where she immediately clocks the two hot bartenders, Eric and AJ.

When her companion makes it increasingly clear that his intentions are not merely that of a cultural chaperone, she makes a big show of hitting on the guy pouring her drinks. “I write my number down on a napkin and say, ‘I’m going to be here for a week, you should call me. My name is Celeste.’” AJ saves the napkin (and still has it to this day, as far as she knows) and invites her to his punk show the next night.

The band is playing their last show at the infamous DIY venue Mouth House because his best friend is moving to Portland. When she arrives, he’s shirtless with one glove on, the kind of pure sex only a twenty-something guy or Mick Jagger can pull off. “At one point, he goes into the mosh pit, he gets hit and he’s bleeding everywhere, and I’m like ‘This is so hot.’” Her “buddy” winds up getting too drunk, picking a fight with, well, just about everyone, and ditching her. She’s alone, in the middle of nowhere with a Blackberry (sans Maps, in those days) that has no service and a friend in Lena, who’s already asleep.

Her improvised plan: Get AJ wasted and crash at his place. What she wasn’t prepared for was his ability to hold his liquor. Five and a half years later, they're still together, and Denver, for the first time in a long time, is her home.
Chaser: Q&A with Celeste Rangel-Ruiz

What makes a good dive bar?
Good people.

What’s on your jukebox?
Bad Bunny and Britney Spears

Best bar game?
Is he hot, or is he just white?

Best bar snack?
Popcorn

Best thing to have on a bar TV?
I don’t like TVs in bars.

Best well shot?
Malört

Best domestic beer?
Beer?

Favorite drink to make?
Daiquiri

Favorite drinking city that’s not Denver?
Any city is a drinking city if you believe in it

Good brunch or late-night menu?
Late-night menu

Most overrated cocktail trend?
Green Tea shots. Grow up.

Best shot?
Malört

Why do you bartend?
I bartend because I love people and I like to party.