Barcode Mixer

🎙️ NEW TWO-PART EPISODE — “The Pastor Pt. 1 & 2”
Out now on Spotify & Apple Podcasts 🕊️🥃

This one runs deep. We sit down with Daniel Ortiz, longtime friend of Ray from the NYC days — once a pastor, now walking his path through the world of restaurants, healing, and self-discovery.

Over two sessions, this conversation unfolds across time and emotion:
💔 From divorce, addiction, and burnout
🙏 To faith, family, and finding himself again

In Part 1, you’ll hear Danny before the unexpected passing of his mother.
In Part 2, we return after — to a man still moving forward, deeper into his relationship with spirit, memory, and himself.

It’s raw. It’s real. It’s a testament to growth in motion.

🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast app / Link in bio

#BarcodeMixer #ThePastor #GriefAndGrowth #RestaurantLife #SpiritualJourney

🎙️ NEW EPISODE — “Get Lost, Get Found”
Now streaming on Spotify & Apple Podcasts 🌍🍸

This one’s close to the heart. We sat down with our dear friend and former coworker Kayla Walden, a bartender, storyteller, and true embodiment of going with the flow.

From packing up her car in Iowa to starting fresh in Miami — and now getting ready to backpack through Europe for three months — Kayla shares how bartending is more than a job. It’s a mirror of how she lives: intuitively, playfully, and always open to the unknown.

She also teases her upcoming book project Bar Spills — where cocktails are paired with what’s being spilled, if you catch our drift... 👀📖🍹

Hit play for some laughs, some truths, and a reminder to chase the adventure.

🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast app / Link in bio

#BarcodeMixer #BartenderLife #BarSpills #GetLostToGetFound #HospitalityStories

We took Barcode Mixer on the road for this one — straight into the heart of Shojo’s Dojo, where we sat down with the incredible duo behind it all: Haidar & Mari.

This episode is a journey through:

💘 Their love story
🧑‍🍳 Their backstories in food & beverage
🍶 How they fell in love with sake
🏮 And what it means to build a hospitality space rooted in intention, curiosity, and care.

We tasted some amazing sakes, shared laughs, and got a real look into what makes Shojo’s Dojo such a special place.

Pull up a seat. Hit play.

One thing that matters to us a lot is health. Hospitality being at the core of what we do, it is important that we keep health at the center of it. Our goal is to nurture people, and the best way to do that is to always make sure that you are nurturing yourself.

Exercise being at the top of it, we interview our cycling coach Kaylei Blackmoon-Ibarra from Rhythm and Release. We talk about her days as a bartender and how that transition as taken her into running her own studio with it's own philosophy and culture.

We may have finished this episode by teasing a couple things we have in store with R+R. Stay tuned, we have plenty more in the works with our friends here at Barcode Mixer.

For this episode, we do our first tasting episode which became a whole movie upon itself getting to know the wizard behind it all, Janet Diaz-Bonilla. We will be tasting her Cuban made rum which is produced in Panama but along the way you will hear how that came to be.

This is a story of resiliency that shows the strength and passion that one must have to become a fighter in the first place. It's a difficult time to talk about immigration and this is a legacy story that will prove the timelessness of the importance of migration in America and how it continues the rich cultures we all hold close to our heart.

Janet is a powerhouse that made a rum that can compete with any, and that is exactly why she decided to put her story right on the label of the bottle: La Marielita. We are very proud to have her behind our bar as it hits close to home for Ray and I. At the core of everything we do, we do it all for the sake of preservation and legacy.

Tap in for a little rum on a big cube. Cheers!

We have been making these episodes ahead of our release schedule so we can build the show out the same way we build our bars and let me tell you it has all been divine timing. What better time historically than to bring in our money guy for a talk about what we should be doing with our money and how it relates to all of our decisions and life choices.

Couldn't be happier to introduce our friend and Ray's real estate guy Chris Lazaro onto the show. It's very important to our code how the money works, so financial literacy is at the top of our priorities in setting the table.

There are some great tidbits here for everyone, no matter where you find yourself today. Cheers!

It would only be appropriate for Ray and Jorge to sit in and do a full-on Spanish interview with our fellow asere Victor Benitez. Victor is a traditionally trained Cuban cantinero and all-around Miami bartender. You can find him at El Vecino in Downtown Miami where you can also find his line of cigars.

Tap into the Spanish, and join us on the occult journey that Victor has gone through to bring us something as special as the hospitality that he provides. The closest thing you can get to Cuba, right here in our backyard.

Also a special shout-out to our friends at Ariete Hospitality for letting us use their space to film and thank you for understanding that we just learned what the smoke extractor does to our microphones. Slight technical difficulties with this one but we hope you love the message. It's almost like a pirate radio transmission with The Land with No Name. The metaphor is too perfect not to admire.

Name a better time in history to have a conversation with a Serb...

So we sat on the idea for this show for maybe a good year? Before it came to light at least, but a special shout out is given to TV's Nicole Muniz. While we were getting ready in our own way to get started, it did take a minute to become official.

Our friend Nicole asks Ray one night at the bar, "why haven't you gotten started already?" The rest was history.

We get down to business with bar regulars turned good friends, fellow industry mavens Frank and Kevin from FGM Wine and Spirits. They brief us how their side of the business takes shape and how it influences our experiences behind the bar. We also talk about how health consciousness and consumption trends have changed the business at large. We talk past and future and there is a lot of similarities. We see ourselves bringing the boys on more often to keep the conversation going.