Cuoco’s Cody Goodwin stumbled upon bartending after a bad break-up and has come to love the trade because he gets to make people happy, every day: “People deserve to feel special, and I can help with that.” A Pacific Northwest native, Goodwin has been at Cuoco since its opening in 2011. Recently Goodwin won Best Manhattan at Seattle's Manhattan Experience: a competition hosted by Woodford Reserve and Esquire magazine.

Here, five questions for Cody.

What’s everyone ordering at Cuoco this fall? We are definitely feeling the weather at Cuoco, so the trend is going more toward dark liquor these days. Lots of Manhattans coming from the floor, and lots of variations on Manhattans at the rail. Lately I've been rocking a little concoction with rye, allspice dram, and yellow chartreuse. As you can imagine, this also plays well with rum.

Speaking of Manhattans, can you describe the drink that won the Woodford Reserve competition? My Summer in the City Manhattan: Woodford Reserve whiskey, Amaro Nonino, Carpano Antica, Peychaud's bitters, flamed orange peel. It is great in the fall, despite the name. 

What's the best drink you make? The best drink I make is the one that suits the drinker's mood and situation at that moment. If I were on a patio in the summer, I would rather go for a drink I call the Summer Solstice: gin, St. Germaine, grapefruit, bruised mint, and prosecco. The customer's own taste is obviously paramount. To wit, if you can ask questions and figure out which attributes a person likes about a particular spirit, then you may be able to extrapolate that into a new experience for him or her.

What’s the most underrated spirit? Underrated spirit is a difficult question, as it is multifaceted. My initial answer, on a macro level, is gin, simply because so many people scrunch up their noses at the mere proposition of a gin drink until proven otherwise. Then again, I feel rum is pretty maligned in the public eye as well. On a micro level, within the bartending community, I feel there are far fewer stones left unturned, so I'll just focus on what I like and what I think people should like more—Italian apertivos and digestivos.  I love amari, campari, chinato, grappa, recioto; then again, Italian wines are my favorite, too.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen happen in a bar? I had a real Twilight Zone moment a few years back. It was a very lazy night in the offseason. Four people were in the bar: my friend, myself, a local, and a one-eyed dude whom I had never met. After the local's girlfriend came in the bar screaming at him in some sort of apoplectic rage and nudged him over with her car in the parking lot (he came back in, ordered a shot of Jaegermeister, and explained some of the grotesqueries of their relationship), my friend couldn't help himself but ask the stranger what had happened to his eye. His response was that his wife had hit him with a wine bottle. We asked if she was in jail, and he responded that they hadn't found her yet. I decided that it was better to not continue the line of questioning, but to simply take a smoke break. Bizarre, bizarre evening.