Spirits on Speed Dial

Whether she’s in pointe shoes onstage or slinging shots behind the bar, REBEKAH FRAZIER is in it for the love of performance. As the recent winner of Speed Rack’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Bartending Competition, Frazier heads to New Orleans this month to compete in the national finals of the high-speed bartending competition for women.  

The Wilmington native took up ballet at the age of two, and her innate talent led her to travel for dance and to spend her high school years in intensive classical ballet training at boarding schools outside of North Carolina. Her senior year, however, a hip injury forced her to quit dance and return home.  

“Dance was literally my whole life,” she says. “I think it’s so beautiful and I was always fascinated with the discipline of it. I liked the focus it required and the wanting to be perfect. … I’m still that way.” 

Now Frazier focuses that energy behind the bar at Bespoke in downtown Wilmington – you can also find her at Commodore and The Sandspur. While she worked on-and-off in the service industry during her schooling years to get extra cash to pay for pointe shoes, Frazier started bartending more seriously after her injury brought her home long-term. She was waiting tables at Tower 7 on Wrightsville Beach when management asked if she wanted to bartend.   

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to do everything,’” she says. “The money was insane because it was the beach during summer, but I also just loved it. I always feel like – this can sound kind of cocky – but it’s like you’re in the spotlight, which is something I’ve always loved. I loved being on stage performing and weirdly there is a correlation between that and being behind the bar. Especially when you’re working alone, everyone’s eyes are on you.” 

Eventually Frazier wasn’t only bartending, but immersing herself in learning about beer, wine, and cocktails. This elevated understanding of the craft led her to join the opening team for The Starling Bar in 2022, where she “learned everything under the sun about cocktails.” After three years at Starling, Frazier joined the Bespoke team in March 2025. “I knew it was going to be a great beverage program and unlike anything we had in Wilmington or North Carolina, really,” she says.  

In March of this year, Frazier traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in Speed Rack’s Mid-Atlantic Regional’s fourteenth season. This all-female, high-speed bartending competition is, in Frazier’s words, “all about women being fast and making good drinks.”   

The prelim round starts with twenty-four competitors, eight of whom proceed to the stage round. Both rounds involve a moderator naming four cocktails that the contestants need to make as a timer ticks in the background. Contestants have three minutes to set up all of their liquor, syrup, juices, bitters, garnishes, tins, glassware – everything they need to make those four cocktails and make them faster than the woman next to them. Once everything is in place, the games begin.  

Frazier compares the prelim round to a Friday night in a busy bar. “Say you had to make sixteen drinks and there are 400 people in the bar waiting for their order,” she explains. “If you want your drink to come out quickly and you want it to be good, it might not be the best thing in the world, but it’s going to taste like an espresso martini. That’s the point of prelims.” 

The eight women who proceed to stage rounds still need to be fast but also must make near-perfect cocktails. “I would say stage rounds are what it’s like bartending here at Bespoke where I need every drink I put out to taste exactly like it’s supposed to,” she says. “I need every Old Fashioned to have the exact same amount of bitters and be the exact same quality level, while also being as fast as I can and – at Speed Rack – faster than the girls I’m competing with.” 

With judges on stage, emcees narrating the competitors every move, and DJs playing music, the whole experience can start to feel like a dance performance. “I definitely can feel my head being taken back to those (ballet) days while I’m out there,” she says. “But I think that’s just another reason that I like it.” 

The other standout element for Frazier is the camaraderie with the other competitors. “The competition is great but the opportunity to meet the other women has been the best because the female bartending community is way different,” she says. “There’s not always a lot of support or love for women in this industry, and so I love that the idea behind all of this is to empower women and put them in the spotlight.”   

Speed Rack not only brings women together, but the competition has raised over $2 million for charities supporting breast cancer research. “I’ve never felt more supported in the women bartending community until I started doing this,” Frazier says. 

She is spending the weeks leading up to the July 20 national finals practicing, which she explains as necessary to “help you walk in and hopefully feel one sliver of confidence.” In her practice rounds she does what she can to put herself in the mindset she needs at the competition – walk in, bourbon here, shaker there, now go. 

“I love it,” she says. “I know people are like, ‘Oh it’s just a job,’ but it really isn’t to me. I like testing myself, which this competition definitely does. Especially because it’s always at the most inconvenient times. Right now I’m literally working six days a week, probably sixty hours, and I’m also squeezing in practice for this. It’s not some chill, easy thing to add into the mix, but I’ve never been a coaster. I’ve always wanted to be the best at what I do.” 

To view more of photographer Daria Amato’s work, go to dariaphoto.com

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