Dec. 5 doesn’t ring a bell for most people, but for cocktail aficionados, it holds certain significance.

Prohibition was lifted on Dec. 5, 1933, forever marking the date as an important one for American libation. And on Wednesday, the anniversary, university alumna Gina Chersevani received a liquor license for her latest venture, Union Market soda shop Buffalo & Bergen.

“Now tell me that’s not the coolest thing for a liquor license date,” Chersevani said. “The Bacchuses of the world were with me.”

Chersevani is a mixologist, a term used to describe bartenders who create innovative drinks, which seems to sum up her concoctions. She’s created cocktails such as the “Landlubber,” which includes spiced rum, smoked banana peels and allspice dram.

Although Chersevani is best known for her bartending prowess — she runs The Eddy, a bar inside Hank’s On The Hill, one of chef Jamie Leeds’ three Hank’s Oyster Bars — Buffalo & Bergen is an entirely different animal. The soda shop, which officially opened this month, offers 14 different kinds of syrups and all manner of liquors to mix with. In addition to sodas and knishes (baked Jewish dumplings), Buffalo & Bergen serves egg creams, malts and steamers, which Chersevani described as “the ultimate hot chocolate.”

These drinks are made possible by a restored 1930s-era soda counter, which used to reside in a Woolworth’s in Chicago.

“This machine cost more than a Mercedes,” Chersevani said. “I never spent so much money in my entire life on one piece of equipment. I went to Chicago four times to get this to work. They rebuilt the entire back, the engine and everything.”

Buffalo & Bergen is named after Buffalo Avenue and Bergen Street in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Chersevani’s mother grew up. Chersevani would get egg creams from Norma’s, a soda shop her mother loved in particular.

So when it came time to open her own shop, Chersevani looked to channel the nostalgia factor that plays into many soda shops — and threw in some Brooklyn culture to set hers apart.

The shop itself is at once retro and modern. Light bulbs hang encased in glass globes around the curving dark wood counter. And at the center of it all is the soda fountain.

Behind it all is a large mirrored panel, on which the day’s menu is inscribed in a colorful scrawl. Buffalo & Bergen is located in the new Union Market, a light-filled, airy warehouse teeming with small shops that offer gourmet fare, including fresh local produce, a Korean taco place and an oyster bar.

Union Market is located in what could be the middle of nowhere in terms of culinary offerings. It’s surrounded by rundown wholesale establishments and shabby gift shops, near the NoMa/Galludet area. Union Market follows a trend of new businesses sprouting up in Northeast Washington, a pattern pioneered by the increasingly trendy H Street.

As a resident of Capitol Hill and someone who has “always had a little bit of ghetto in [her] heart,” Chersevani thinks Union Market will be good for the area.

“It’s really going to revitalize this neighborhood,” she said.

But before she was experimenting with flavors and liquors, Chersevani was a fine arts and psychology major just looking to make some extra money. She got a job bartending at the now-defunct Terrapin Station — maybe not ideal, but it helped her get her start — which occupied the space that today houses The Barking Dog on Route 1.

“I would not call it bartending,” Chersevani joked. “I would call it opening beers out of a bucket. For money.”

Chersevani then waited tables in Washington restaurants and gained her first “real” bartending job at Penang, where she eventually went on to revamp the restaurant’s cocktail menu.

“Her creativity is just amazing,” said chef Nathan Anda, who runs area charcuterie Red Apron Butchery. “Me being a chef, being able to bounce ideas off each other is a lot of fun. … If I ever have a question about what kind of whiskey I should buy or what vermouth, [Gina’s] the one I ask.”

Many of her drinks contain inventive ingredients such as cucumber water, lavender syrup or egg whites, said Jake Bakst, who met Chersevani at this university and later bartended with her at Penang.

“I think Gina has an ability to place two unusual things together and make it taste not quite what you would expect,” Bakst said.

No matter where she was, each step of her eventual rise presented her with unique challenges. At the much-lauded upscale Indian restaurant Rasika, for example, Chersevani learned to be humble.

“I worked for an Indian owner and chefs, all men,” she said. “I wanted the job, and what I really wanted was the experience learning from an Indian chef. In general, they were not kind to me, and it’s OK.”

Although Chersevani enjoys a position as one of Washington’s mixology elites, life has not gotten any easier. She’s opened two concepts in three months, an almost unimaginable feat. She’s now working on opening another Eddy bar at the Hank’s location in Old Town Alexandria, Va., which she said will open sometime in spring 2013.

“It takes every single thing that you have and then some to do this business,” she said. “To get up in the morning every morning, to close your restaurant at 2 and get up at 6 and make knishes and open another place.”

While Chersevani today is a successful businesswoman, she didn’t quite know what she wanted to do while she was in college — and she certainly wasn’t studying business. She still, however, finds ways to use the skills from her art and psychology studies every day, especially as a bartender.

“[Consider] the guy who stares at you because he’s just had the worst day of his life,” she said. “How do you help them? Get them totally s—faced or talk to them? You talk to them.”

In the midst of all the bartending gigs, Chersevani wondered what it would be like to work in psychology. She applied for a lab position at the National Institutes of Health, but she still ended up deciding to pursue the craft of cocktails — much to her parents’ dismay, she remembers. After years of hard work, though, Chersevani is one of the premier mixologists in the area. She was recently inducted to the Women Chefs & Restaurateurs board — a feat she doesn’t take lightly.

And amid the current global foodie boom, world-renowned female chefs and restaurateurs are few and far between.

“It sucks to be a woman in this business,” Chersevani said. “Do you know how many times people ask me where the owner is? They don’t think it’s me. I’m not saying I’m some kind of feminist; I’m not. I want people to open my door. But I also just want the respect of having earned it.”