Today we present you Julie Belanger-Cateysson!
Julie is thirty-seven years old and has worked in the hospitality industry for seventeen years. She grew up at Île Perrot with her younger sister, lived in Montreal and in New York City before she bought herself a house on a five acres property in Abercorn, a small town in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She has a French Bulldog called Lucky Luciano.
When Julie was little, she dreamed to be an aerospace engineer or a lawyer. Growing up, she decided to study marketing and graphic design. She is now the sales and events coordinator for the Vignoble du Ruisseau.
Julie started to make cocktails when she lived in New York. After being a cocktail waitress, she got herself a new job where her manager kind of threw her behind the bar because he thought she had enough attitude to survive. And oh boy she did! When she came back from NYC, she started working in cocktail bars in Montreal and really fell in love with the craft when she was working at Ludger, a buvette in Saint-Henri neighborhood. Julie is self-taught, she realized the amount of passion that people around her were carrying and decided to learn more about craft cocktails in order to put her own passion into this industry.
Today, her service years are behind her and what she enjoys most is the creative part of her job. She has a low waste approach to bartending and always tries to promote local ingredients.
A little bit more about Julie...
The three words that describe her best are: stubborn – enthusiastic – smiling
Her life motto: Keep your drama for your mama.
The most magical place she ever visited was the French Alps, where her cousin took her camping overnight and she woke up to hundreds of people hang-gliding in the sky.
One thing she has achieved in her life bucket list is moving to another country when she moved to New York for a few years.
One thing she has yet to achieve on her life bucket list is to visit the Galapagos Islands.
Her first job in the industry was at Dunkin Donuts, where she ate donuts and croissant sandwiches all day. They tried her at stuffing donuts, but she exploded the stuffing everywhere and made a huge mess so they kept her at the cash register.
A fun fact about her is that it took her 3 years to learn English when she lived in the States because she struggles with learning new languages, or that she only started to drink alcohol at the age of twenty-four.