How Mara Bartender Pip Hanson Learned to Make Precision Feel Effortless

By Eric Barton | Dec. 17, 2025

Mara

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The first time Pip Hanson learned that beverages are a kind of choreography, he was three years old, standing close enough to a kettle to feel the heat and watching his mother insist on doing tea the right way.

Not “tea as a hot drink,” but tea as a small ceremony: temperature, timing, precision, the quiet satisfaction of getting it exactly correct. “I credit her with instilling in me, at an early age, a zeal for making a proper cup of tea, which I think of as my origin story, so to speak,” he tells me, describing an English mother in the Midwest who had strong opinions about water that should be “extremely hot and poured over the tea leaves,” not dragged out tableside in a lukewarm mug like an apology.

Hanson joined Four Seasons Hotel Minneapolis in May 2025 as bar manager at chef Gavin Kaysen’s restaurant, Mara. Hanson arrives with more than 20 years behind bars and a résumé that reads like a passport with better lighting. His goal is neither to show off nor to disappear exactly, but to make the work feel natural, so the guest gets the credit for having a great night.

“Over the years, my motto has become ‘we care so you don’t have to.’”

Pip Hanson

Hanson grew up “a typical midwestern kid in the 80s and 90s,” but with a brain that refused to cooperate with neat rows and checklists. “I struggled in school, and generally with anything that looked like a to-do list or schedule,” he says. Years later, he recognized it as ADHD and reframed the narrative. “I now think I was not lazy, per se, but, uh, ‘differently motivated.’” His attention could not be forced, but it could be captured, and once it was captured it turned obsessive in the useful way. He could not clean his room, but he could spend weeks making a 10-second claymation video.

That same wiring helped when he started barbacking with Johnny Michaels, a Twin Cities lifer who moved from Gluek’s and a few dives into more elevated rooms, including La Belle Vie. Hanson describes a moment when cocktails still meant anything ending in “tini,” and he watched Michaels treat the bar like an overlooked art studio.

“This was long before anyone had imagined there could be something like a—forgive me for uttering these words—rock star bartender.” Michaels also gave him at least one lesson that belongs in every bartender’s handbook: “When you cut someone off, take their ashtray away, because they’ll throw it at your head when your back is turned.”

Bartender Pip Hanson Bar Mara Minneapolis

In 2007, Hanson moved to Tokyo with plans to leave the industry. The city rejected that plan almost immediately. “Tokyo was a life-changing, and not always pleasant, experience,” he says, and it humbled him fast. “I learned very quickly when I started bartending there that I had no idea how to make even a martini – especially a martini. I didn’t even know how to stir.”

He trained his hands, learned Japanese technique, and absorbed a philosophy that still runs through his work. “I learned that you can’t separate process from product; the product is simply the inevitable final step of the process.”

Bartender Pip Hanson Mara Minneapolis Minnesota

When he returned to Minneapolis in 2009, the ideas came home with him, and they eventually became Marvel Bar, which he opened in 2011. He built a program that treated Japanese barware and hand-chipped ice as tools, not costumes, and he learned what it means to have a platform and a team and the freedom to evolve in public.

Bartender Pip Hanson Mara Minneapolis Minn

London came next, and it changed him in a quieter way. It taught him to stop policing other people’s standards and to respect different routes to excellence. It also showed him a future he did not want: the international celebrity bartender circuit, where the room becomes a mirror and the work becomes a brand.

Back in Minneapolis in 2019, he became beverage director and head of mixology at O’Shaughnessy Distilling Co., shaping cocktails across three bars around Keeper’s Heart Irish and American whiskey and designing the ready-to-drink Keeper’s Heart Old Fashioned. Now he is at Mara trying to “thread the needle,” as he says, between opinionated and welcoming, luxurious and comfortable, with the bartender’s ego parked somewhere far away from the guest.

Off duty, he codes, plays drums, cooks, and reads, and he treats those hobbies the way he treats spirits: as systems worth understanding from the inside. “Every passion has always influenced the next,” he says. “I’ve always felt like everything is connected on some level, even if it’s subtle or far below the surface.” It all circles back to that first lesson at the kettle: precision is only impressive when it makes everyone else feel at ease.