‘Wishka’ Russell Davis has lived a life far beyond the bar. From his rise as a renowned bartender and mixology expert to his time spent working with indigenous communities, Wishka has returned to the hospitality industry with a new mission—to redefine the meaning of service, intention, and responsibility. In this exclusive interview, he shares his transformative journey, the hidden truths behind industry symbols, and why bartenders today have the power to reshape the future of hospitality.
Early Beginnings & Career in Bartending
Can you take us back to the beginning—how did you first get into bartending?
Kaynakachun. I walked into a bar at the age of 19 on the West Campus of the University of Texas and asked them if I could be a bartender. I had worked waiting tables and washing dishes in a few restaurants but had this romantic intrigue with bartending, needed to make a lot of money to pay for college expenses, and Cain & Abel’s was a Texas Longhorn tradition. They asked if I had any experience. I timidly replied no, BUT that I knew all of the tricks from the movie Cocktail, which was true.
The year before, I had purchased a fake ID from a guy who lived in my dorm, built a bar in my room with all of the worst alcohol possible, and with a bottle wrapped in duct tape that I would throw as I watched the movie, I learned all of Flanagan and Coughlan’s tricks, pouring all my attention into Tom Cruise’s moves on a slow-motion VHS. That movie inspired me. I would receive complaints from the resident advisor of the dorm for disturbing the neighbors downstairs by dropping so many bottles. But that practice was the only thing that gave me the guts to walk into a bar at the age of 19 and ask for a bartending job with zero experience.
Of course, the manager laughed at me and instead gave me a security job working the door on account of the huge balls he said I had. The security job was absolutely nuts at this crazy cowboy fraternity bar and mainly consisted of taking out trash, breaking up fights (while taking quite a few hits), and kicking out minors—even though I was also a minor—while yanking their fake IDs away as I myself had a fake ID in my back pocket. But I never stopped studying drinks or throwing a bottle when I could get my hands on one or sneaking behind the bar to talk to the bartenders.
Opportunities arose, and I worked my way up from security to barback, to day bar, then nighttime bartender, and on into management until I was running the place. And I did it fast. I was running a bar before I was 21 and was even allowed to legally drink in the USA. I was told I was the youngest bar manager in Austin at the time. That was fun—being young and behind the bar with NO IDEA what I was doing.
Jenna Bush, who was one of my daytime regulars at the time, told me I was her favorite bartender. It was probably a lie. Back then, she had many bartenders, but I still drank it in. That may have been the birth of my professional ego.
I grew up in a dry Bible Belt county in the piney woods of Deep East Texas. And if you know the bull-riding cowboy country that is called Deep East Texas, you know that it is a different world. In the southern United States, a dry county means that you couldn’t buy or sell alcohol within its borders, so there were no bars, and you had to drive at least an hour to find any alcohol—laws that have existed since just after Prohibition. So growing up there, by default, bars and bartending carried a mystique.
You wouldn’t know it now, but back then, I was a very shy and nerdy theatre kid who could not talk to girls. So much so, my father thought I was homosexual and hated me for it, even though in truth, I was just too nervous to talk to girls and was secretly memorizing romantic lines from Shakespeare just in case I ever got the chance to use them.
By the time I was 16, somehow I finally had my first real girlfriend, and she was the one who showed me Cocktail and changed my life forever.
So I guess by the time college came around, I was trying to emulate an archetype of something that I thought girls and people in general wanted—the bartender.
And when I walked behind a bar, there was something that reminded me of being onstage in my theatre studies and playing a character. This connection is what allowed me the confidence to break the barriers of my anxiety and shyness I had with people, especially women, growing up.
Because when I walked behind that bar, I was not that nervous, shy kid. I was the cool and collected bartender with the silver tongue and an answer for everything.
The bar was my stage.
Years later, I would be in talks to help produce a remake of the movie Cocktail, but that is another story. Every few months, I text Heywood Gould, trying to make it happen again.
What was it that first drew you into the hospitality industry, and what kept you in it for so long?
Hospitality is a word that is often misused, misunderstood, and mismanaged by those in an industry that claims they practice it. The oldest definition I can find of the word hospitality is that of chivalric origin, meaning “true service to mankind.” And for me, it has a duality of meaning, coming from the lessons I learned from my grandparents on both sides of my family, which is where I drew the inspiration to begin a path in the hospitality industry.
The first was watching my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, who were well-known and respected restaurateurs, Mama & Papa Molina, walk through their restaurants on a busy night. No matter how old they got, they did so with such grace and sophistication. Papa in his suit and Mama in her pearl necklaces, coming in through the front door shaking hands and smiling, going into the kitchen and waving to all the cooks, hugging servers, hosts, and managers on their way to their special table with the red rose in the center. Molina’s Tex-Mex Restaurants & Cantinas were a staple of the elite and famous of Houston, regularly feeding Presidents who would have secret meetings within their doors.
Mama & Papa founded the restaurant in 1941, Papa working his way from being a dishwasher to buying the first location after coming from Mexico as a refugee from the revolution there. Most people don’t realize I have Mexican heritage and indigenous roots, which would play a vital role in my journey and work with indigenous leaders. But watching the host-hospitality mindset of my grandparents and how people reacted to them seemed so inspirational and awe-inspiring — something I wanted to be. They were always the coolest, most popular people in the room. And they knew how to pack a room with a good time.
The second source of inspiration, which weighs more into the “true service of mankind” role that I would take on in hospitality later in life, would be from my father’s side of the family, who all had military and Freemasonry backgrounds. The Davis side were Blue & Royal 33-degree Master Masons and keepers of cryptic secrets. I grew up studying the ancient ritual books hidden in the 125-year-old house that was on the property—a house that hid family secrets and, at one point, legend has it, served as the Murival Chapter Temple—the Freemason meeting place in the former free zone of the Republic of Texas.
Years later, I would find the connections between the Templar Masters and ancient Toltec Rites of indigenous rituals of my same Mexican heritage, but that is another story as well. Growing up and watching the way my grandmother and grandfather served the world in various ways absolutely defined who I would become as a human attempting to practice hospitality in all aspects of life through truly serving mankind.
My grandfather and namesake, Captain Charles Russell Davis, was a very, very important naval captain who helped develop the Navy SEALs, served in the FBI (and CIA, most likely), became a JAG officer who helped quell the Cuban Missile Crisis, taught at the Naval War College, led very important and sensitive missions, and ended his career in the Pentagon.
I never knew this much about his career until after his death, but when we walked into the officers’ club at the military base on Sunday mornings for brunch, the way the other military officers would salute and respect him was undeniable.
It was him, a lifelong Mason, that became my first teacher in secret things — ways of thinking to help unlock codes, a skill that would become very valuable later on in my work in service to indigenous leaders, helping to recover ancient secret archaeological sites and points of knowledge.
It never hurt my bartending either.
I am not a Freemason, by the way.
It was obvious my grandfather had served a higher cause. But what wasn’t as obvious was that the highest cause he served was to the sacred feminine through his true love and support of his wife and my grandmother, Lelia “Leaky” Davis.
A Southern belle teacher and true philanthropist who wouldn’t even peek out of the blinds in her sherry parlor unless she was fully dressed, Grandmom taught me so much growing up about truly caring for and serving other humans.
Time spent with her was time spent in hospitals, retirement homes, and churches, delivering food, gifts of aid, or love and attention to the sick, poor, elderly, or anyone who needed it.
That was a truly special time in my life, riding around Corpus Christi, Texas, my birthplace, and carrying the foil-wrapped cakes she made to people who had no one else, and receiving hugs and love from the nuns of the Carmelite Sisters, who took care of the people whom my grandmother loved very much.
That was true hospitality.
What has kept me in it for so long? Partially, it’s that I have always felt like I am meant to be a beacon of light in dark places, and I believe that we, as an industry, are practicing the form, function, and execution of hospitality so wrong right now that it takes people like me to fight to protect its true meanings when we get so off-center (please see my comments on the pineapple in my answers to the question below).
And partially, I feel responsible for how far off-center I feel like the hospitality industry has become in its attempt at practicing true hospitality in recent years.
Bartenders’/Mixologists’ careers in media and their influence are taking off much like the celebrity chefs of years past. I know—I was an expert on one of the shows that helped kickstart that (Paramount’s Bar Rescue) and then helped write/develop/produce/cast the one that really publicly elevated it (Netflix’s Drink Masters).
And many of us, including myself, didn’t truly grasp what we were doing and the breadth of how our trailblazing steps would set the tone for others and the path they would take. We knew, but we really didn’t know.
We were all getting wasted. Some still are.
And as I look at what we are doing as a profession and industry now, I feel like we are a bit broken.
Few are truly serving mankind as hospitality professionals. Many are serving themselves and their own careers and happiness.
Whether it is to make the most Instagram-able cocktail for likes and follows, or to get rowdy in inexcusable ways at cocktail/industry conferences/events (I know it, I did it myself), we have lost sight of how we are supposed to be beacons of light in dark places as bar professionals, and I hold myself accountable for that—as being one of, if not the first, bartender/mixologist with a blue check mark beside his social media profiles and realizing how I was acting…
Mistreating that honor I had immensely.
Abusing my status.
Many of us did.
So now, I am returning to the industry because I need to fix that perspective and what a generation of us did to this sacred and time-honored ancestral profession.
You’ve worked at the highest levels of the industry—what were some of the most defining moments of your career?
Most people define themselves by their achievements. I do not. Not anymore. I define myself by my mistakes and failures and how I recover from them. And if you look at the world around you, that’s how it truly defines you too.
Kind of like the old bar joke about McGregor the Goat F*****, who wasn’t known for the thousands of bridges and bars he built.
But I was not always that way. I definitely used to define myself by my achievements.
For you now, I am going to list some of the things that I had in my arsenal of bragging rights—not because I believe they define me now, but because I did before. And I would rather help you understand the sweetness of my own Kool-Aid that I was drinking, that made me become an incredibly big asshole and later a bitter human once I had lost everything.
But I had to humble my entire being and be witness to the death of my own ego first before I could properly serve my purpose to the universe.
I was 2012 Nightclub & Bar Bartender of the Year, Barstaff of the 2011 Tales of the Cocktail Award for Top High Volume Cocktail Bar, Co-Inventor of the Zero Gravity Martini Glass, former Co-Founder of ShakerandSpoon.com, Mixology Expert for 16 episodes of Paramount Network, consultant/producer who helped write/**develop/**cast Netflix’s Drink Masters, winner of multiple other awards/competitions/accolades, and more.
People used to call me a legend to my face and behind my back.
“From Southern Gentleman to San Francisco Businessman, Russell Davis is the Aristocrat of the Working Class” is what the headlines said.
Headlines since deleted from history in response to allegations and my fall from grace.
Before 2018, I had made it my life’s mission to set new standards, raise the bar, and win awards—trying to fill some void in myself that was never going to be filled and certainly was not the way to heal something within I needed to heal.
I was always competing in my own personal popularity contest. It was a toxic lifestyle that I know many professionals choose to this day.
And I let the lifestyle, popularity, and my own ego get to my head.
For that, I will always be sorry, but I have learned to forgive myself and love myself for the experience.
But at the time, none of these accolades could protect my reputation, career, and livelihood after a series of events that would eventually lead to a false arrest for something I didn’t do.
I was too broken of a human being at the time to publicly defend myself, so I put my life and all of my assets and money into service to indigenous spiritual leaders of the world under the Eagle and Condor Prophecy instead—spending three years giving away everything I owned in an effort to cleanse and balance my spirit as the world was publicly destroying me.
But my grandfather taught me all truth comes out in the wash.
So I decided to wait for the wash patiently instead of fighting the tide of public perspective.
I am a battleship, not a cruise ship.
So what were my defining moments?
A major lawsuit I pressed against a huge player in the hospitality industry after incurring an injury—and the mistakes in decisions made around it that led to me becoming the target of a MAJOR hack, public doxxing with false accusations trying to defame me, gangstalking, business partners taking advantage of my situation, and attempts on my life that led to an arrest and FBI involvement to help secure and protect me.
Later, a major defining moment would be the arrest for six charges of domestic violence for things I did not do (all charges would later be dropped because they were lies, and witnesses were ready to step in).
I became the victim of a beautiful woman I fell in love with way too fast, who only wanted the money she thought I was going to make with the greenlighting of the network show that I had written and developed and was supposed to originally judge.
I knew I shouldn’t have moved into a villa. I made myself a target.
Damn ego.
At one point during the argument in question that led to the arrest (five days later, I may add), this person literally put a gardening knife in my hand as I was crying during a very harsh fight, and she told me to kill myself.
That would turn into an assault with a deadly weapon charge for me.
That’s a felony.
Horrible experience. Worst of my life.
I would lose the show I developed (and proper credit) and everything else after these charges were made—no matter what the truth was and that the charges were dropped.
My friends, my businesses, my health, my happiness, and my sanity.
It all just left.
I know what it is like to have been at the top of the game—and to have been canceled.
To have had everything, and lost it all.
Why do these things define me, you say?
Because I survived them.
And what’s more, I am getting back up again.
I did the work to heal. And I’m still healing. We’ll always take damage — sometimes to old wounds — and so we’re constantly healing, until we become enlightened. But my suffering has given me a valuable tool: empathy. It helps me serve the world around me, others, and myself to the best of my ability.
Everyone loves an underdog and a comeback.
I have been the underdog—now it is time to make a comeback.
