This is Danielle Pingert, from Saskatoon.
Danielle is 34 years old and is the oldest of a family of three. She’s born and raised in Saskatoon and has been working in hospitality since she was about 18 years old.
It all started at a Pizza Hut. After graduating high school, Danielle needed a job. One of her friends was working at a Pizza Hut and suggested that she comes work with him so that they could hang out together. She took him up on his offer, ended up becoming a server, then gained serving experience, and eventually left to explore the hotel world. She got a job as a server at The Hilton and that was when she actually fell in love with the trade. She realized that her job was fun, entertaining, fast-paced, and challenging, and she got hooked since.
One quiet day while she was serving in the lounge area, the bartender offered to teach her how to bartend. He asked her to make a Ceasar. She didn’t know how but followed the steps he instructed and from there decided that she wanted to learn more. As she was watching bartenders create cocktails that were based on guests preferences and that weren’t pre-existing recipes, she realized that bartending could be a rewarding outlet for her creativity. She could blow people’s minds away by creating something out of nothing and have a story behind it too. As she reminds us, “bartending allows you to create drinks with products that often have a very deep history and you can bring those stories to life in your own ways of making cocktails”. Today, after being the Manager of Six Twelve Bar in the Sheraton for many years and having many competitions under her belt, she’s bartending at Parlor and is currently working on opening a new lounge at the Alt Hotel.
Apart from her work in bars, Danielle is pretty active in our community. She has done a lot of cocktail competitions and plans to keep competing once it is possible to do so. Since the first lockdown, she has been involved with the CPBA to build a new chapter for Saskatchewan. Danielle reminds us that Saskatoon is a smaller market city that is often overlooked by big competitions and cocktail events, which leads a lot of talented bartenders to leave the city in order to progress in their careers. With her work with the CPBA, she hopes to get some acknowledgment for Saskatchewan bartenders and send the message that bartenders don’t necessarily need to leave the city to “go big”.
Overall, it’s pretty clear that Danielle genuinely cares about our community. We experienced it directly when she was very generous of her time with us and made us great recommendations for people to meet and places to visit while we were in her city. Her passion and creativity were palpable and we sincerely look forward to our paths crossing again.
A little bit more about Danielle...
The three words that describe her best: Intro/extrovert – very weird – creative
Life motto: Everything happens for a reason.
The most magical place she’s ever been to: Poland. The people are so nice and the country is so beautiful. The architecture, the history, the culture, everything was amazing.
The biggest lesson that her job taught her: Patience.
The biggest professional challenge she had to overcome: She used to be super shy so talking to strangers was very difficult. Because of her shyness, public speaking was an impossible task. She just couldn’t do it for a very long time. So bartending really pushed her to get out there, overcome her shyness, and feel confident to talk to people.