Shift Drinks: Ni Tuyo's Samira Ardaly Talks About Code-Switching and Chaos at EastFax Tap

It's June 26, and the Colorado Avalanche have just won the Stanley Cup, something bar and restaurant pro Samira Ardaly and I are only vaguely aware of, considering everyone at East FaxTap is already as drunk as they can get. When you’re the passenger in a car going 120 miles per hour, you don’t notice when you hit 130. “Sportsball!” she half-heartedly exclaims before we start guessing how much our respective Ubers are going to cost.

After all, she has a bar to open in a week or so: She's the floor manager at Ni Tuyo, the new molcajetes-focused restaurant from the family behind Adelitas (which did end up successfully making its debut at 703 South University Avenue on July 7).  

Like Avs goalie Darcy Kuemper, Ardaly barely seems fazed by shot after shot. Four hours earlier, we met on the patio of the indoor/outdoor dive on what feels like the edge of America’s longest street. “When you’re industry, you go places and they pour you half a glass [of liquor] and you’re fucked up in a second,” Ardaly explained three hours earlier. “People always make fun of me, ‘You’re only drinking half a shot.’ I’m like, ‘I’m going to drink as much as you by the end of the night, but I’m going to be throwing you in a car, and I’m gonna be chillin’.'”

She was right — that's how my night ended.

Ardaly is usually right, which gives the 32-year-old as much confidence as it does consternation. The only daughter of her Ethiopian mother and West African father, she was a force of nature from a young age. “They knew they couldn’t tell me what to do,” she says with a laugh. When mom would give her cookies, she’d flip them to other kids for favors instead of, you know, eating them, like most of us did. “When I was young, I was an opportunist,” she adds.
The typical “do it all” high-schooler, Ardaly balanced student council and prom committee with multiple sports before blowing it all up with one credit left to go. The reason? She couldn’t leave campus for lunch. “I was young and I was a brat,” she says. As someone who is several hard seltzers in — and dropped out my senior year to move to Italy — I’m nodding furiously and imagining the corrupt administration she fought against at Smoky Hill.

Ardaly set off to Los Angeles for film school and crashed with an uncle while she got on her feet, securing her first gig at a Red Lobster in Santa Clarita (service-industry origin stories are rarely filled with glory). She didn’t plan on slinging Cheddar Bay Biscuits, but her general manager at the time saw that her talents were wasted at the host stand. “I said, ‘I don’t want to serve; I’m clumsy as fuck’ and [my manager] said, ‘I don’t care,'” recalls Ardaly. “And next week, I was on the serving schedule.”

Working across the street from Magic Mountain; bartending poolside at the Hilton next to Universal Studios; the Hard Rock Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard: Ardaly's early résumé reads like the foodie blog of your high school acquaintance with all of the kids, but her return to Colorado was centered where all of my college friends wanted to party: downtown. Like many of her industry peers, she has a love/hate relationship with the area: Come for the volume, leave for your own sanity. That’s how Ardaly found EastFax Tap.

“One of my friends that I used to work with at Ghost Donkey, she lives down the street,” Ardaly recalls. “Certain days she’d say, ‘Let’s not go downtown,’ and we’d come here.” If the Instagram-ability of RiNo bars with faux-ivy and neon slogan signs had a polar opposite, it’s the shabby, not-so-chic EastFax Tap. The patio looks like the beneficiary of Denver’s large trash amnesty days, with the decor of your buddy firmly in his thirties whom you roast mercilessly for bringing home a couch he found in an alley that’s ‘still good.’
“I like that no one’s really in your face,” she says, which is a sentiment echoed by the neighborhood after the space's former occupant, the Hangar Bar, was 86’d by the city. To be declared a public nuisance is a dive bar badge of honor. EastFax Tap took over in 2019, keeping some of the aesthetic. “Every once in a while, there’s creepy dudes that will sit here and say weird things,” Ardaly says.

On our visit, we're taken care of by Jeff, whose long salt-and-pepper locks and general Mr. Peanutbutter affability give him big “Mom’s new boyfriend” energy. He’s the psychedelic mushroom growing out of the dankness, and neither of us can bear to ask him what that smell is. “They’re out of everything, so I went with Estrella,” Ardaly confides, away from the bar. “It’s actually my favorite Spanish beer.”

A lapsed Spanish speaker (her main languages are English and her native Amharic), Ardaly has found a calling with south-of-the-border spirits. To date, she’s sampled over 580 tequilas and 150 mezcals, firing off obscure brand names and tasting notes at me with an authority that has intimidated past bosses. “I’m always undermined,” Ardaly says. “I’m a Black woman in America that works in a bar: everyone always thinks I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.” She’s tired of being pigeonholed as the angry Black woman instead of the confident savant she shows up as day in and day out.

“It’s so awkward to be, like, a white dude right now, but it’s not hard,” I say with the bumbling ineptitude of a white guy on tequila shot number four.

“It’s not awkward,” she corrects me. “Certain white people overdo it. People will bring up the fact that they went to a protest the other day out of nowhere. That’s one thing I’ve learned as a Black woman, is that people will say certain things for me to like them.” As central Denver’s wave of gentrification makes it increasingly white, the stories she shares about people divulging their Biden vote or giving a “Hey, girl!” are as common as they are cringey.

“As a Black person, you have to code-switch,” she says. “Like, you have to, in any atmosphere. When I’m going out and drinking, sometimes I’ll get a little saucy and be like “Oh, look at this n—-a,’ and I’ll joke around. But when I’m working, I don’t fucking talk like that, because people think a certain way.”

At Ni Tuyo, which has a tequila- and mezcal-focused bar program, she’s happy — or as happy as one can be right before a restaurant launches. As messy as restaurant culture or race in Denver can be, she has control within those walls. In her job as floor manager, she’s molding a young staff, too. “The worst thing that’s going to happen is you're going to have a nightmare that you forgot to drop off ranch at table 31,” Ardaly says of her advice to rookies. It’s a nightmare I still have, a decade removed from the industry. “It’s everything I’ve taken from every bar I’ve worked at,” she says of her fifth opening.

I can’t help but wonder, if left to her own devices, what her bar would look like?

“I want it to be a little inconspicuous hole-in-the-wall, but when you come in there, it’s just fun from the moment you walk in,” Ardaly says. “Who knows? You might sit down, and someone throws a little hat on top of your head, and then they walk away, and you don’t know who it is.”

Too often, we’re given consistency over chaos. Bars want to comfort us instead of creating moments where the hemispheres of our brains are lit on fire by subverted expectations. When you live and die by Yelp, you cater to your most vocal, least ambitious guests.

Ardaly isn’t afraid to tease your sensibilities or create a little chaos. Wherever she goes, I’ll be there. Perhaps with someone else’s hat on.
Chaser: Q&A with Samira Ardaly

What makes a good dive bar?
Patrons and deals.

What’s on your jukebox?
Heartbreak music, one or two songs that put you in the feels, hype-me-up music, and then one or two gangster songs.

What’s the best bar game?
I like to play “Let’s try to read what they’re talking about.”

What’s the best bar snack?
Chips and salsa. Fuck peanuts.

Best thing to have on a bar TV?
I like weird things like Dr. Phil or Snapped.

Best well shot?
Milagro. If they don’t have Milagro, Jim Beam.

Best domestic beer?
Miller.

Favorite drink to make?
Naked and Famous.

Favorite drinking city that’s not Denver?
Austin.

Good brunch or a good late-night menu?
Late-night menu.

Most overrated cocktail trend?
Tito's and soda with three limes.

What’s the best shot?
Tequila Raspberry Kamikaze

Why do you bartend?
People keep it interesting.

Know someone who should go get shift drinks with Jake Browne? Email [email protected].