We don't HAVE that here.

Recently it has come to my attention that I am now a part of the elite few. NO i'm not a scientist, or a lawyer or a proffesor. I am a bartender. 

There are two bartenders everyone has known in their life. The first, is the kind of person that ultimately gets you what you want. This can be everything from the run down pub where you go to get a beer but you know you won't strike up a conversation- to that "craft cocktail" bar you heard of that talks to you about different kinds of gin and you end up getting a (gasp!) egg drink. 

The second is much much worse. Somewhere along the way people thought that if you became a bartender it was free game to look down on other people. "Ummm, no we don't HAVE that liquor" to "I refuse to make that because it's against my own palette."

This second bartender is awful. We have all been in a situation where we knew less than the other person, and really hoped for a little bit of kindness and some mercy. Aside from the handful of us that can tell you that the Sazerac was originally made with cognac (look it up- I'm a nerd but I'm right) and that potable bitters are not the same thing as non-potable bitters, most people just want to go to a bar that provides these three things:

1. A friendly face. Look, Cheers wasn't all wrong, in our own way we are all looking for a place that knows our name, that knows we take ice in our water, or lemon, or no ice, just something to make us feel like someone remembers us. 
-When I lived in Portland Maine, me and two friends would have breakfast 3 times a week at Marci's diner. Biker memorabilia littered the wall but you know what was waiting for us every morning we arrived? Three coffee's, super hot, and two oj's. THAT my friends is service. Even if it is served up by a man who could crush you with one hand covered in jail tattoos. 

2. Something interesting. Be it decor, food, personality, cocktails or a combination, no one ever says: "hey we can go to that bar I hear serves mediocre food and drink and the people there don't really seem interested you are around but they can't leave so they speak to you"

3. And this is the most important one ladies and gentleman.......comfort. 
No one is comforted by pretention. No one is comforted by ego. No one likes being looked down on and they certainly don't don't like walking into a place and thinking "Will these people be nice to me" 

So I have landed myself in a realm of individuals that can just as easily be known as "assholes" as we can be defined as "bartenders". I will let everyone know this, right here and now, I don't care if you come in and order a gin and tonic. I don't care if you come in and ask for a "fruity drink" (many of which I can make well and know even men will be jealous of them if they only had the balls to order them) , I don't care if you ask for a Corpse Reviver #2, I will put as much effort in the first as the last. Pretension has nothing to do with it. My JOB is to make the best drinks I can, and to make people a little a. happy, b. interested, and c. comfortable.

Fuck pretention, I've got cocktails to make.

If You're Not Qualified, Don't Act Like You Are

A few days back Eva and I were fumbling around the vast world of the internet and checking out some of our favorite restaurants on Yelp.  I think everyone can agree that these sites provide not only a bit of entertainment but also a bit of value to the general public about what services a business provides and let's you in on a few inside secrets that you may otherwise not know about.  Fair enough.  A bit of extra information can't hurt, right?  Not so fast.  These sites provide the average Joe with the ability to vent their opinion on every single unsuspecting company that they see fit whether they are qualified to input their opinion or not.

As much as talking on your cell phone while at the check-out register is now officially known by the entire culture to be in extremely poor taste - so should we deem this ability to tear into a restaurant because you weren't satisfied with the crispiness of their fries.  I know I'm not the only one who feels this way but we all need to take a giant step back and realize that none of us are qualified to be reporting our opinions on a business that we know nothing about and we should all respectfully shut our mouth.  Remember what your mom told you when you were a kid?  "If you don't have anything good to say don't say anything at all".  That holds true now more than ever.

Just because you have the means to rip into a business does not mean you should.  Your opinion and your thoughts and your words can cause serious damage to a company.  And the truth is you very well may not have the whole story.  Yes, the service may have been terrible, or the food shitty or the music was too loud but there may very well have been other extenuating circumstances that caused this unfortunate series of events and tomorrow night it might be totally different for the restaurant.  But people stopped caring about giving other people the benefit of the doubt as soon as we were given a a bull-mic and a soap box to stand on.  This has enabled us to shout our two cents to anyone who will listen.  The fact that you do not get paid to give reviews and do not do it for a living means you should not do it at all.  Unless it's good.  If you have something nice to say about a business, please by all means, let the world know.

I implore you however, fellow readers, bloggers, eaters and restaurant goers...stop this cycle of uniformed reporting.  Your opinion is only worth something to you.  I don't care if you are "pretty sure" you got really sick at this restaurant.  Chances are you didn't.  Unless you go get tested at a hospital and can confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that a specific establishment actually contracted you with a food borne illness DO NOT TRASH THEM ON THE INTERNET!!!  It's that simple.  Because let's face it, you're food sanitation knowledge is probably not all that up-to-snuff and you're probably still using a nasty four-week-old sponge at your house that is filled with bacteria and is being dragged across every eating utensil and plate you own.  But when you get sick, for some reason, we immediately think back to the last restaurant we ate at, go through the meal item by item until we come across some ingredient we recognize as having been on the news in the past couple years for having gotten some people sick and then that's it.  Accusation, trial, jury and conviction.  All done in a matter of minutes.

And then what?  Then it's, "Hey Gary!!! Have you been to the new Italian pizza shop on Broadway?  Don't go there, I just got sick from eating there last night!  Swear to god!".  Followed closely by an in depth, degrading, unfounded report posted for all to read on Yelp.  And what happens a few days later when you realize that maybe it wasn't the restaurant after all that got you sick?  Does the post come down?  No way.  You can't have everyone out in the internet world knowing you're a fraud so that review stays up for all to read.  Not even the restaurant can remove it without paying huge money.  Oh yeah guys, that's also true.  Yelp is a pay-to-play website.  How much honor is in that?!?!  The profitable restaurants can pay to have all the bad reviews removed while the little guys out there struggling along have to sit with it and watch as it eats away at their bottom line.  Not cool.

But don't take my word for it.  Here's some reviews given on yelp for some of Boston's best restaurants...

"The menu is pretentious; bring a dictionary or keep your phone handy."
OK, what do you mean by pretentious exactly?  Is it that you didn't recognize most of the ingredients on the menu because the chef has put years of training and vast amounts of knowledge into this menu and the food's execution thus creating a menu that you feel is intimidating?  Then yes, by all means bring The Food Lovers Companion for a reference.  But don't knock it because you are not educated enough to know the ingredients.  You should be thanking him for expanding your culinary boundaries not feeling inadequate because you're uneducated.  This is how you learn.  Shut up. Be Grateful.

"We decided to order the 5 course $65 dollar per person tasting menu, but wanted to split it between two people.  At first, the waitress said that it couldn't be done because of the way the food was plated. WTF? What kind of bullshit answer is that? After insisting on this request five times and threatening to write a bad revie if they didn't allow it, she finally consulted the "manager" who agreed to ALLOW us to share the 5 course meal between two people. If I want to sample some dishes and eat less, who is "the manager to deny me what I want?!
YOU CANNOT SPLIT A TASTING MENU!!! GOD DAMN!!! You know what?  Stop going out to eat.  Just stop.  A tasting menu is for one person.  That's the idea.  If you ask to split it you appear cheap and do not belong in any restaurant that offers a tasting menu.  And then to top it off, you threaten the restaurant with a bad review?!?!?!  If this doesn't completely reinforce my entire rant tonight, nothing will.  These types of people should be personally escorted out of the restaurant by the chef.  No, the customer is not always right.  Sorry, but this just proved it.  In fact, they are rarely right.  And what's worse?  They are given their way and then proceed to leave a one star review anyway!   

"We continued with the roasted littleneck clams, in this case the grease of the sausage or the one used to cook the dish killed the flavor of the clams. The mix of flavors made no sense at all and the grease made the plate disgusting for moments."
You are clearly not a chef, have no idea what the chef was thinking when he/she created this dish and these facts alone should disqualify you from being allowed to degrade a restaurant online.  Who cares that you didn't like a dish?!?!  No one.  Except you.  Stop being so self absorbed that you think your voice should count.  You want it to count?  Go apply for a food critics job.  But you need qualifications to do that and you clearly do not have any.  Don't like the dish?  Don't get it next time.  

"Meh.  It was restaurant week so I assume that the regular calendar meal is better.  I assume almost any restaurant's restaurant week review loses one star..."
Then stop reviewing a restaurant during restaurant week.  That's not difficult.  You know who is getting a phenomenal deal during restaurant week?  You.  The customer.  Not the restaurant.  They lose money every year during this week.  And every year restaurants have to tolerate dbags such as yourself that feel as though you should be able to have any three courses from the standard menu with all the fixings for $20.12. Really?  If this is seriously your thought process you should never operate a business and please just stop reviewing them online.  Every restaurant does the best they can during this week but mostly it is designed to get people in the door and feed you on the cheap.  Please stop complaining.  

Carpe Somnus

Usually I am a night-owl. I've been doing this off to sleep around 3 am thing for so many years now that 9:30 on a thursday is nowhere near bedtime. But as I write this I also realize just how damn tired I am. The problem with working in a restaurant is that your whole timeline is different. People say "aren't you excited for x-mas?" "What are you doing for the holidays?" The answer is : "working." 4th of july, Valentines Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, New Years, you work every one. And yes it's good money and yes you have a blast, but you also run your damn ass off for a whole lot of people who usually aren't your friends. That's because all your friends are working in other restaurants. And they are thinking the same damn thing, "I can't WAIT until the holidays are over."

So they are now. And another calendar year starts despite all those apocalypse rumors. And here I am at 9:30 on a thursday night pushing myself to write this cause I am still recovering from the "holidays" everyone asked me about this week. It's funny sometimes being on a  different schedule than the 9-5 crowd. You NEVER make plans for the weekend; because you'll be sleeping, working or getting from to the other for those 3 days. You can't wait for your monday night free or tuesday day where you finally catch up on the mountains of laundry to do since here in Boston they haven't figured out the system of having industry Laundromats open next to big restaurants 24 hours a day where you could drop off your clothes after work and pick them up the next day when you also got out of work at 2 am. 

I do love the fact that unlike most people who can count the times they've done this on one hand, I frequently watch both the sun rise and hear the first birds chirp in the morning. One of my favorite memories with Eric was having him pick me up from work at 3 am, we rushed in the car and drove to the beach just in time to watch the sunrise and share a bottle of wine. We felt like the only people in the world at that moment, and at 4 am on a beach you can almost wonder what it would be like to be stranded on a deserted island.

It's also fantastic to spend so much of your time in the hours most people have the best stories of. In restaurants we end up being the background to moments that are so important to other people and yet we never really know them. First dates, big fights, confessions of affection, nights that lead to drinking, to dancing, to kissing, to making love, to making babies, to making mistakes, to learning from them, to not learning from them, and all of us that work in these places are part of the background. 

Living my life in the hours where others could be sleeping or fighting or telling others they love them is wonderful.

Living my life in the hours where parents are sleeping, and office workers have long laid to rest is just another thing I've come to see from a different perspective after working in restaurants. Which is not to say I don't still get tired at 10 pm on a thursday night. I'm exhausted, and I am SO glad we've made it through another holiday season.