Frank Conrad always thought the bartender at his favorite Shore bar made a pretty good espresso martini. “But he used vanilla vodka, which I didn’t like,” Conrad says, “so I’d come in and he’d say, ‘Oh, you want it Frank’s way?’” It started as a joke among locals, but now people across South Jersey are having their espresso martinis “Frank’s way,” since they can buy them – in a can – at their local liquor store.
Espresso martinis have always been one of Conrad’s favorite drinks, but in recent years they’ve experienced a huge surge in popularity. A few years back, he started making them in batches with a Cuban coffee he’d found on a trip to Key West, Florida, and bringing them to parties in a pitcher. Conrad, 55, soon gained enough of a reputation as a mixologist that Cape May’s Barefoot Bar invited him behind the bar to make his signature martini.
“My first day being a bartender was only last year in May,” he says. “The locals picked it up, and thought it was really good. I made it consistent, so they’d come back and it would be the same flavor every single time. Word got out, and we sold a really decent amount of them. So I said to my wife, ‘Maybe we should put this in a bottle.’”
Conrad’s new cocktail company, Let’s Be Frank, isn’t his first business venture. Earlier in his career, Conrad worked for a payroll services company. The job often required him to travel, and on 9/11, he was on a business trip.
“I’m on a plane to Scottsdale, Arizona, and my kids were very young and they thought I was on one of the planes that hit the buildings,” Conrad says. “Then I was stuck in Scottsdale for a week because they wouldn’t let us leave, and the corporate mentality was, ‘You do what we tell you.’” After that I realized I didn’t want to be in that corporate world anymore.
He quit that job to start his own company manufacturing highway safety signs. Eventually, his kids took over the business and “told me to get out of the shop because they know what they’re doing,” Conrad says. “My wife said I should go get a hobby.”
Mixology quickly grew from a pastime to Conrad’s next enterprise. But bottling the martini – a drink that’s typically made to order with coffee liqueur, vodka and fresh-brewed espresso – presented some challenges.
“We wanted it to be all-natural, gluten-free, have no dairy,” Conrad says. “I’m like, ‘Can we do this and keep the flavor?’”
Conrad turned to the food scientists at MetaBrand, a beverage formulation company in Edison. “You literally hand them the bottle that you make from scratch at home, and they kind of reverse engineer it,” he says.
But getting the flavor right was only half the battle. When a bartender makes an espresso martini, they shake it hard just before pouring it, to get a thick layer of froth on the top. “That was a big part, because the visual of this drink is huge,” Conrad says. That’s where the food science really came into play.
“They came up with an ingredient that’s an organic agave fiber. We were shocked when we got the samples. It frothed right up and we were like, these guys know what they’re doing.”
Today, the Let’s Be Frank espresso martinis are available in multiple flavors, all with Conrad’s face on the can, at liquor stores across South Jersey. The company’s grown to include Conrad’s wife, daughter and daughter-in-law, as well as a team of salespeople – jokingly called the “little Franks” – who really know what they’re talking about. “They’re just bartenders who work for me part-time,” Conrad says. “They’re already busy Thursday to Saturday, but they don’t do anything on Monday and Tuesday, and that’s the best time to sell to liquor stores and bars.”
And when it comes to marketing, Conrad chose a bit of an unconventional route. “I decided to buy my own jitney,” he says. The instantly recognizable shuttle bus is plastered with Conrad’s face and the Let’s Be Frank branding.
“My daughter and my wife told me I was nuts,” he says, “but since November we’ve done over 70 rides for Christmas light tours, bachelorette parties, weddings, you name it. It’s an advertisement driving all around South Jersey.”
The company’s growth has been steady – the canned cocktails (in original and limoné flavor) are currently sold at more than 100 bars and liquor stores, and Conrad expects that his version of the shore’s signature cocktail will eventually go national. The espresso martini craze isn’t dying down, and Conrad is nothing if not determined.
“I’ll tell you, one thing that I’ve been all my life is persistent,” he says. “I’m always just coming at you, in a forceful way to a certain degree, because you have to be that way if you have a good product and you want to get it out there. It’s ironic in this industry, but a lot of people call me ‘very spirited.’”
