Christina Veira Is Rallying for a Better Hospitality Industry

Christina Veira’s resume is padded. In 2022, World’s 50 Best Bars bestowed her with the Roku Industry Icon. She earned Bartender of the Year from Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants in 2023. She’s the 2025 Tales of the Cocktail International Catalyst, and Drinks International has regularly listed her as one of the bar world’s most influential figures. She operates one of the most fun bars in Toronto, Bar Mordecai, with its web of karaoke rooms, bingo nights and wickedly original cocktails (including spiked soft serve and boozy banana floats).

But even with all her successes, she hasn’t gone the traditional route of opening new locations and jetting off on glitzy, globe-trotting pop-up tours. Rather, Veira’s become a strong advocate for the community. This includes locally — Mordecai hosts events for the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC community and runs winter clothing drives by rewarding donors with tiny gin Martinis. Their anniversary party raised funds for Street Health Toronto’s frontline client services.

Veira has also been a vocal advocate for the global bar community. She’s using her platform to spark conversations around equity, longevity, safety and diversity in the industry. She’s publicly asking big, important questions like, “Why don’t we have health benefits?” and “How do we tackle issues of classism, racism and sexism in the industry?”

The hospitality industry is an incredible place to work, but in current structures, it lacks basic workplace essentials. Health insurance, dental and paid time off is not the norm — it’s a rarity. Burnout is high, and careers tend to wrap up by the late 30s. Still, we romanticize late nights, overconsumption and stressful shifts.

“It’s become an untenable situation for people who want to grow up in the industry,” Veira says.

All of this was amplified by the global pandemic, when hospitality workers became frontline workers and had to deal with abuse and systematic failings. “Our industry is a lightning rod for a lot of policies,” Veira says. “You saw that with Covid and now with free trade and tariff disputes.”

When it comes to doing good in the drinks world, Veira is doing it all. She’s implementing hospitality training, including first aid and de-escalation techniques. She speaks about greater access to education so members of underrepresented communities can make their way through the industry with more ease. She creates workplaces where staff feel taken care of and safe in.

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She’s also vocal about the benefits of, well, benefits. Her staff have health and dental insurance. It’s nice for them and also bolsters retention. “We work physical jobs,” Veira says. “If someone hurts themselves at work and they can’t go to physio, they’re much more likely to stay hurt, take extra days off, then leave the industry.”

But she needs others to follow suit. The widespread lack of health coverage means hospitality workers haven’t had things like dental before, so they delay going, which in turn makes their premiums more expensive.

Despite all her efforts, Veira stiffens at the term activist. She’s not trying to single-handedly change all of the above. Instead, she’s starting conversations that are well overdue in the industry and providing resources for those who want to help her build a better situation for everyone. “How can we make our industry more professional?” she asks. “How can we mimic learning from other industries? It’s such a low profit industry, even when you’re trying your hardest.”

Next up is tackling bigger policies and working with government bodies to build better relationships. “We’re constantly being told that nightlife spaces aren’t necessary or valued by policy makers,” Veira says. “But they are — look at the loneliness epidemic. People are afraid to go out and interact with third spaces.”

She’s leading conversations on how to make the industry more sustainable, from an environmental perspective. But it’s not about closed-loop ingredients or greener drinks. “How can we work with landlords to use government subsidies for solar panels to bring the cost of electricity down?” Veira says. “How can we be more efficient — upgrade to things like insulated windows or better dishwashers to be more sustainable.”

She doesn’t hope to tackle each piece on its own — she’s just hoping to build an industry people can grow, thrive and stay in.

“I don’t think we fully allow people to grow in our industry,” Veira says. “We give lifetime achievement awards to people in their late 30s. We put people to pasture when they’re close to 40. Elder millennials are burning out now. No other industry does that. I want to create more longevity — for my own business, for my friends, for all of us. I want to work in ways that help us all.”