‘Create Something You Truly Believe In’: NCHS Grad Founds Spirits Company

While visiting his father last year, James Mauk was struck with inspiration for a business of his own. Son of the man who founded popular New Canaan restaurant Tequila Mockingbird, Mauk noticed a sign behind the kitchen sink at his dad’s Pound Ridge, N.Y. home that said ‘The Golden Rule’—a reference to the age-old maxim that you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. 

Mauk, who graduated from New Canaan High School in 2006—playing lacrosse for the Rams all four years—and then Colorado College, had been feeling disillusioned with the food and beverage industry after working in it for several years in Colorado and California. On seeing the sign, Mauk recalled, he began to wonder what it would mean “if all industries approached business in this way—you did something that you really believed in and thought was the right way to do something.”

From that idea, Mauk’s new venture, Golden Rule Spirits, was born. That was 18 months ago. Since then, Mauk and his business partner—cousin and New Canaan native Hunter Sprole—developed their first product, a canned margarita cocktail based on a recipe developed by his father, Paul Mauk, for Tequila Mockingbird. 

“I didn’t understand why there weren’t options for true cocktails in a can,” Mauk said.

Tequila Mockingbird on Forest Street Is Sold; Chef-Owner Paul Mauk To Leave at Summer’s End

Paul Mauk had been working as a professional artist, painter and teacher of fine arts when he left his native Colorado in 1981 for Brooklyn, N.Y.

He hated living in New York City, and after about one year Mauk heard about an opportunity some 50 miles north. “Somebody knew [former Gates owner] Billy [Auer] and these guys, and said, ‘I’ve got some friends out in New Canaan—they’ll give you a job,’ ” Mauk recalled on a recent afternoon as pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic passed by the familiar, colorful exterior of Tequila Mockingbird. Mauk jumped at the chance. Arriving, Mauk moved in upstairs at 10 Forest St. (or, as the formal tax records now variously have it, 18 Forest St.

Forest Street Businesses on Parking Plan during Construction: ‘It’s Just Nuts’

The one-way block of Forest Street—narrow, bursting with restaurants, halted during deliveries and drop-offs and home to a newly designated loading zone—will lose 10 parking spaces for a two-week stretch next month and then three separate spaces for about one year, as a widely anticipated building project at number 21 gets underway. Demolition of two buildings there—the former Forest Street Deli and Farmer’s Table (going further back, BMW Lindner Cycle Shop)—starts today (Thursday) and continues through midday Friday. It’s the first step toward what eventually will be a three-story, mixed residential-and-retail complex that will lie roughly between the New Canaan Dance Academy and brick building at the Locust Avenue corner, home to the Board of Education’s administrative offices. Saying they’re supportive of the overall project and that it ultimately will be good for New Canaan, business owners on the street expressed frustration Wednesday with what they called poor communication about the imminent parking disruption. “The stop-and-drop people who are there with the dance studio and that kind of thing have gotten to a point where Forest Street is clogged up entirely, people can’t park on the street and now we are told today—today—that there will be [10] more spaces taken out of the loop, which is insane,” Tequila Mockingbird owner Paul Mauk (speaking mostly on behalf of Gates, where he’s a partner), said during a meeting of the Police Commission, held in the New Canaan Police Department training room.