What follows is one of two prologues for my upcoming book on bars, bartending, and the narrative power of hospitality.
There comes a point in many of peoples’ lives when they look at the wreckage of their career or the ennui of their existence and think, You know what? I should just chuck it all and get a job in a bar. How hard could it be, right? Pour a few pints. Tell some stories. People give you cash money and you have no worries at all.
The short answer is, they’ll probably suck at it. Turns out, it’s not as easy as we make it look.
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The totality of our job as bartenders is difficult to define. The doing of the job though, the part you’ve experienced if you’ve ever actually spent any time in a bar, can be summed up pretty succinctly:
- Tell Me a Joke
- Tell Me a Story
- Play Me a Song
- Sell Me a Spirit
- Make Me a Cocktail
- Give Me Something Small
- Clean It All Afterwards
This seems like as good a way as any to introduce you to the job, so maybe I can use the same formula to introduce you to the narrative, as well.
Tell Me A Joke
A guy walks into a bar and the bartender says whatever he says. The joke isn’t about the bartender, it’s about the guy.
Jokes are tiny little stories, and the bartender is there to set the scene for it. That’s the whole point. The bartender might be the backdrop, but without him, the joke doesn’t make any sense.
But jokes—like cocktails—are tools we use to make a connection with people. Those are just the appetizer, though. The main course is more substantial, something that connects the bars we frequent, the bartenders who hold court there, and all those who pass through the doors: stories.
Tell Me A Story
Sure, but it’s not going to be a story in the way you think a bartender should tell stories. That’s movie stuff—a bartender posted up behind the bar, polishing glasses and doling out wisdom for the down on their luck. A bawdy tale that sets a whole bar laughing. A kind word at the right moment changing the course of a person’s evening. Or week. Or a spell of bad luck. Maybe that moment is the fulcrum on which their whole life hinges.
Those things happen, but as in most things depicted in movies, it’s not that simple. Yes, I have a lifetime of anecdotes, but anecdotes—while entertaining—aren’t really stories. They are only parts of them. So, as much as you think you’re reading about my story, what you’re actually reading is a book about yours.
That’s right, yours. You.
Actually you. Not air-quotes “you.” Not allegorical you. You personally. And the person next to you. And your third cousin. And some girl you dated in college. You’re the clientele. You’re the “guy that walks in to a bar.” You are the ones we serve, and the drama of your lives—all the ups and all the downs—might be the stories that fuel your night, but they’re are also the ones that define our careers.
Looking through that lens, bars themselves are nothing but stories—a conglomeration of the collected lives of the people who populate them. Bartenders work in those bars, so our stories are important, but we’re there in service of literally every other person who walks through the door, so our own part in those stories is more facilitative. Yeah, we’re in them, but we’re more like punctuation than sentences. Punctuation helps define a sentence, but it isn’t the sentence; certainly not the narrative itself.
And make no mistake, a night out is a narrative, one that we all get to live through while it’s happening. Every meet-cute, every hookup, every epic celebration, every tearful breakup—if it happens in a bar, we bartenders are there to collect them.
Like every good story, a night in a bar has a beginning, a middle and an end. The difference between you, the imbibing public, and those of us who work in bars is that, when that end comes, you get to go home to experience the gripping conclusion to the drama that we witnessed while it unfolded.
For the bartender, not so much.
Sure, our night ends too. We clean everything up. Count the money. Sweep the floor and maybe sit down for a beer of our own before locking up and getting the fuck out of there. But we’re steeped in everything that happened in a night. We’re covered in the viscera of people’s drama, all of your…stuff. And as much as we might go home to sleep, the next day, we do it all again. And again.
So you all get to go home. We bartenders have to live here.
Play Me A Song
Every movie has a soundtrack. So does every bar. Songs make mood and mood makes vibe. Vibes make bars, and there’s no way to define what that means in any given moment. You have to feel it, and when you’re a bartender, you have to figure out how to lasso the collective feeling of all the people in your bar and create the vibe that’s going to get people to participate.
To that end, I’ve sprinkled lyrics from songs throughout this book. They’re not so much a playlist as a mood I’m looking to evoke as you read. By all means, listen to the songs; they’re meaningful to me and their meaningful to the narrative as I’m telling it. They’ll clue you in to an emotional state that words alone have never been able to convey. And maybe, as you read, they’ll help set the vibe.
Just like in a bar.
Sell Me A Spirit
There are thousands of books written by better people than me on the ins and outs of every category of spirit created in human history. That said, spirits reflect culture, and bartenders are uniquely placed to introduce people to cultures that are worth exploring.
For my part, I’ve been an avid participant in the tasting, development and sales of spirits for almost thirty years. I have a perspective.
When it comes to talking about spirits, I’ll often fall back on one of my favorite phrases: Do you want to know stuff, or do you want to think you know stuff? There’s a ton of bad information floating around about the spirits we drink, much of it propagated by the same brands that make them.
To be clear, if you know about a spirit from a brand presentation, you don’t necessarily know about that spirit—you know about that brand. I have always worked to set the record straight when it varies from my own information, and I’ll gleefully do so here. If there’s tea somewhere, I’m happy to spill it.
Sell Me A Cocktail
You can’t write a book about bars these days without cocktail recipes, so I’ve sprinkled them liberally throughout.
Here’s the thing, though—you can have all of my recipes down to the drop. I’ll give you all of my methods, tell you all of my secrets. You can make the syrups, macerate the spirits—you can do all of it if you want to. But there’s something you need to know about that cocktail in advance:
It won’t be as good as when I make it.
Why that is true we’ll talk about later, but the short answer is that you won’t have a bartender making it for you. More than that, you won’t have me.
You also won’t have the vibes of the bar, the feeling of the counter under your elbows, the murmuring buzz of conversations, or the thousands of other little markers that exist to make your cocktail taste the best it can, which is only fully possible in its native environment. More on this later. See “We Are An Ingredient.”
Cocktails exist in a nexus of sensory inputs, all of which overlap in the brain and collude to create that elusive quality we call flavor.
A bartender can make thousands of cocktails in a month, tens of thousands in a year. All of those drinks made for all of those people means that we learn to control every input, to maximize that experience. We’re better at making cocktails because we are trained, we practice, and we do it all the time.
Also, as we’ll discuss later, we’re good at doing the one thing that can transform a cocktail from mere liquid in a glass to a transformative experience.
Which leads me to a small gift for all of you making cocktails at home.
Give Me Something Small
Don’t let the last paragraphs discourage you. Making drinks is meant to be fun, and making them at home can be gratifying in its own way. Here’s the first secret I’ll reveal, which is something to keep in mind as you’re stirring up a Manhattan or shaking a Sidecar at home: make that drink for someone else, and have them make one for you.
The act of creating something for someone else to eat or to drink is one of the most meaningful expressions of care that exists in the whole of human history. It’s significant, and your body knows it down to your DNA.
That genetic coding has an effect on our brains, which is where flavor is processed. So the act of hospitality—making a drink for someone else—changes the perception of how that drink actually tastes to them. It makes the drink actually taste better.
Knowing this isn’t the only way to make a good cocktail. But it is the only way to make a great one. That is a secret bartenders know, and now you know too.
Clean It All Afterwards
This is why hospitality is powerful. This is why bars are important, not just as places to gather, but as hubs where people share in the bonhomie of a good drink amongst good friends, all overseen by a person whose job is to make and serve the things that make the whole thing possible. Which is why bartenders are important too.
I’ll use the word “bartender” throughout as if you know what I’m talking about, but if you’re not a bartender or haven’t been, you probably don’t. After spending time with this narrative, I hope you’ll have a better idea, that you’ll walk in to a little dive bar one day with a different understanding of what bartenders are for, what we actually do, and the true services we provide the people in our communities.
So if you’re not a bartender, don’t close the book now; there are things in here for you too—most especially what I’ve found most people want when they ask about what I do; context for a night out, and some kind of code they can use to understand the mystery and the magic of that one perfect night in that one perfect bar.
I’ll lay it out for you in a way that no one else will—the ultimate peek behind the curtain—and I’ll do that by doing what bartenders do best, which is reflect your own stories back at you.
So this is a story of failure and fame. Sex, debauchery and betrayal. Forgiveness and redemption. The human condition in all of its mad, racing glory. Sadness and joy. Victory and defeat. This is happiest story ever told, and the saddest.
It’s your story, yes, but it’s also mine. Because I’m the bartender, and I have the telling of it.
