As promised, here’s the next exciting installment of Bisque in Anger; or Jonathan’s Amazing Adventures in the Service Industry. For those of you who are just tuning in, in the first installment I covered the basic reasons I left the service industry (short answer: it was slowly sucking my soul; long answer:..well, it’s complicated, but suffice it to say that it was slowly sucking my soul.). In this installment, I want to talk about my favorite part of the service industry experience: bartending.
I became a bartender unexpectedly; I was in the process of ‘quitting’ my job as a fine dining waiter at the end of a long, profitable Santa Fe summer because I was going back to school and didn’t want to work the minimum required three shifts a week. I happened to be talking to the bar manager one day near the end of (what I thought would be) my tenure there at the hotel, and she mentioned that she needed a Sunday daytime bartender. I agreed to take that one shift for the semester, and fill in on others as needed, and thus my bartending career was born.
Embedded in this little piece of history is the first lesson being a bartender: you don’t need to go to ‘bartending school’ or get a certificate from some expensive program to become one. In fact, I’ve only known one bartender who actually took one of those programs and though she wasn’t bad, she didn’t stay a bartender long. The basic skills needed by a bartender are the same as basic waiting skills: multitasking, customer service, and grace under fire. All the rest is basically window dressing.
“But Jonathan,” you shout. “What about the most critical bartending skill of all? What about the one thing that separates a bartender from a mere cocktail waiter? What about mixology?!”
And to that I answer: meh, it takes some practice, but really—not that hard. Takes more time to learn how to keep you bar consistently wiped down and your glassware stocked than to learn the basics of “mixology.” Since most cocktails have the same basic proportions, once you learn how to pour by feel you can make them quickly and consistently—and that just takes practice; ‘shaking’ a cocktail is really about as easy as the word itself implies; and despite all the ludicrous and intimidating Buttery-Sex-On-The-Purple-Hooter-type names that fill bartending manuals, there are really only about a dozen cocktails that anybody ever orders, and half of those only have two ingredients (or less: newsflash—few bartenders put vermouth in a martini anymore, unless you specifically request it, so your Grey Goose Martini is really just a double shot of vodka, very cold and slightly diluted. The bottom line on this is that almost nobody in America likes the way vermouth tastes—I mean have you ever actually tried to drink the stuff. Ugh.)
Mixing drinks is easy. You learn it as you go. And if you’re just starting out and are worried that people will send back a poorly made drink, remember this: 1) most people don’t know what goes into their favorite cocktail anyway, 2) even bartending guides can’t agree on a ‘standard’ recipe for many cocktails, and 3) most cocktails contain so much sugar and/or booze that it’s not easy to taste whether the bartender forgot the Triple Sec or mixed the wrong proportion of cranberry juice to lime. Still afraid that some irate guest will spit out your first attempt at an Old Fashioned and fling it contemptuously in your abashed face? When in doubt, ere on the side of more booze. Most people won’t send back a drink that’s too strong. There is, of course, a major caveat to this, though: if you’re going to cover your mixological inadequacies with an extra float of rum, keep in mind that if you give people more booze than they should expect in a standard drink, you’re responsible for the results. Pour responsibly. And remember, it still has to be drinkable.
Most bartenders start out like I did, on a slow day shift, or as a bar back, and then move up in the rotation after they’ve paid their dues. No classes necessary, no certificates or certifications, besides what the state makes you take. And you’re off!
I always enjoyed bartending much more than waiting. Indeed, I actually entertain the fantasy that some day, when I’m older and settled into a satisfying and modestly lucrative career, I’ll pick up a shift or two a week at the local bar wherever I am, just for variety, for kicks, for the very real satisfaction of being a bartender. Oh, and did I mention the easy money?
Bartenders working prime shifts at lively bars make bank. On par with Fine Dining Waiters—we’re talking $300-$500 a night, sometimes more for the good ones. Now, the establishments at which I whiled away my bartending days (a luxury hotel and a members-only club) were not what you would call the most happening of nightspots, but even I had plenty of $200 to $300 shifts. I had blockbuster nights waiting tables, sure, but I always finished those nights feeling worn out, beat up, and fragile. After a good night as a bartender you feel good—tired, sore, and more than a little sticky, but good.
And this distinction cuts to the heart of the matter—what, for me, was the critical difference between bartending and waiting. People treat bartenders with more respect than waiters. The same customer will sidle up to your bar and treat you like gold and then sit down at a table and treat the waiter like crap for the rest of the night. After seeing this phenomenon play out first hand, from both sides, for a long time it finally dawned on my why this was the case. Simply put, when you’re a waiter, you go to them; when you’re the bartender, they come to you.
This one little change turns the server-customer dynamic on its head. People can berate a waiter, they can make a waiter run, fetch, sit up and beg—he’s waiting on their table, after all, so he exists to serve them. The waiter does not own the table or the dining room, the guest does. From the guest’s perspective, the waiter is just part of a larger mechanism that exists to feed him dinner. However, the bartender, in some sense, owns the bar. Guests and waiters alike come to him to request something that only he can provide. They sit at his bar, where he works, and wait for his attention.
This is perhaps overstating my point—plenty of customers have been rude, and demanding, and condescending, and all things obnoxious to me as a bartender—but you see where I’m going. A bartender is in a position of power—symbolically (because you go to him), and also in fact, since he is a repository of esoteric knowing (making cocktails is easy, but the customer doesn’t have to know that). Most importantly of all, he’s the guy who decides when (and if) you get a drink. I’ve only cut someone off three times during my brief bartending career, but I always knew (and, I admit, kind of got off on the fact that) it was ultimately my legal right and responsibility to do so.
And here I’ll wrap up Part 1 of my Paean to Bartending, and the second volume in my series on Waiting. Next time, we’ll cover common bartending misconceptions, parlor tricks, and why bartenders are just so damn cool.
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