An Excuse to Commit Violence

Last Friday night was a rough one at the bar. It started off ugly, with a walk-in group of 12 British tourists, one of whom may have been one of the most spectacularly ugly-on-the-inside human beings I have ever encountered, the assimilation of whom into our seating availability presaged a busy, chaotic, full-moon-feeling kind of night, one I was glad to see the end of when my ten-hour stint was done. We had just locked up, the other bartender and I, and were chatting about the trials and tribulations as we stood outside the bookstore two doors down when a couple of guys came down the street walking bicycles. One of them wore dark clothes and a ballcap, the other an untucked tuxedo shirt and black pants. The second one’s face was covered in blood.

“You wanna give me money for bandaids?” he demanded, in such a way I was pretty sure that whatever had happened to his face, he’d done something to deserve it.

We both declined, and turned away, closing our conversational circle, but he just got more obnoxious, while his friend stood off to the side looking helpless and embarrassed. I put on my 86ing face and told him to fk off and he did.

But then he decided to come back. Continue reading “An Excuse to Commit Violence” →

Making Craft Cocktails Happen Fast: an Example

So, the other day I did some writing about the tension between the care and time involved in making craft cocktails and the realities of putting a drink in front of everyone in the room that wants one. I did a lot of talking about how you need to figure out beforehand how you’re going to do that, and I figured an example might be helpful. So let’s talk about the Southside.

The Southside is a classic summer cocktail with gin, mint, lemon, orange, simple syrup and soda. It’s delicious and refreshing, the kind of thing you could kick back quite a few of on a warm afternoon and find yourself in a very convivial headspace. It’s also a tremendous pain in the ass to make. Here, I’ll run you through it:

Pour a half-ounce of simple syrup into a mixing glass. Add eight leaves of mint and press them with the muddler. Add one slice orange and one slice lemon and press again. Pour one and a half ounces of gin and cover with ice. Shake and (micro)strain over fresh ice. Top it with soda and garnish with a fresh mint sprig.

A few months ago, when the place I work redid the house cocktail list for spring and summer, the Beverage Manager for the company put the Southside on it.

Continue reading “Making Craft Cocktails Happen Fast: an Example” →

An Open Letter to our European Visitors, From the Service Industry Professionals of the United States

We know you know you’re supposed to tip, and how much. We hear you joking about it at your table sometimes (more of us are bi- and multilingual than you think). So come on, guys. Cut the crap and do the right thing. This is how we earn our living.

Sincerely,

the Service Industry Professionals of the United States

Underpants Gnomes: The Craft Cocktail Thing vs Production

My daily internet meanderings led me to this today, which got me to thinking some things I’ve thought a long time, being as I am intimately acquainted with the particular tension that can occur between the time it takes to make a craft cocktail and the number of people a room can accommodate (we’ll leave out, for the present, the x-factor of how thirsty those people are). I was expecting the usual snark at the expense of the stereotypical craft bar hauteur (was in fact amazed at the subtlety involved), until I came across this:

I was at a hot new spot and the artisan cocktail I eventually ordered was worth every penny. Unfortunately, while the drinks lived up to the hype the poor service staff could only do so much. The place was packed, the cocktails on their menu are labor intensive, and it was really hot out so people were sucking them down faster than they could wash a shaker. Had there been a reservation policy in place, the three guys and one girl on bar would have been in a much better position to be accommodating, and creative.

Most people don’t get this. Many simply don’t care. They want what they want and they want it in a timely fashion, and if the staff is too overwhelmed to give them the service and attention they’re here for they’ll yelp your ass in a heartbeat. So it’s nice to see someone recognize our heartbreak as we soldier on in service to their good time. Much of the time it’s not our fault when we’re overwhelmed. The people in charge just didn’t think it through. I’ll give you a couple of examples: Continue reading “Underpants Gnomes: The Craft Cocktail Thing vs Production” →

The System Worked

“He has always feared for his safety.”

-Robert Zimmerman

I resisted writing about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL when it happened seventeen months ago, though I had plenty to say about it. I grew up in Altamonte Springs, which is a couple towns over, closer to Orlando, and though I never spent much time in Sanford (there was rarely any reason to), I knew where it was, knew people from there, knew enough to know it was another one of those redneck towns that litter Florida’s sweltering interior, with gun-racks and Dixie flags on every pickup truck and a black folks’ part of town, where they stayed if they knew what was good for them. The notion that a lighter-skinned man could gun down a darker-skinned man without being arrested there was not surprising to me, given the racism embedded in Florida’s political and social culture (and, it now appears, legal precedent, but we’ll get to that later).

I used to joke, growing up, about Florida being the last state in the Confederacy to surrender. It was funny because, while technically true, the rest of the southern states do not consider Florida to be a part of the South, and neither do most Floridians. And, panhandle aside, there are plenty of cultural distinctions. Florida, as I think most people have figured out by now, has its own distinct brand of the crazy (click here for examples). But there are plenty of similarities between Florida and the South, and institutional racism is one of them. The main difference, as I remember it, was that in the South they were open, hell, even friendly about it sometimes, but in Florida we weren’t the South, and so no one talked about segregation or the rampant poverty and crime in black neighborhoods, because the consensus was that their problems were their problems and also their fault. We didn’t have to do anything about it as long as they kept to their part of town. Hell, they had to bus black kids in from across town so my lily-white high school could make diversity quotas and field a football team. We also had the requisite posse of skinheads, like every other high school in O-town.

The middle school I went to was a different story. Continue reading “The System Worked” →