Can Working as a Bartender Make You Smarter?
"Making drinks is easy," Max Green told me. "I can teach anyone to make a drink."
Green is, along with Ravi DeRossi and Sother Teague, one of the partners in Coup, a pop-up bar in downtown Manhattan that sprouted up a few days ago with the goal of donating its take (whatever's left over after paying for rent, labor, and supplies) to causes that stand in opposition to the Trump administration. Those causes include Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. DeRossi invited me to step in on Tuesday evening as one of Coup's inaugural guest bartenders; he tapped Green to act as my guide and guru.
This was a wise move, because (although I'm not sure DeRossi and Green were aware of this), I had never worked as a bartender. When I was 17, I spent a summer scooping ice cream in Laguna Beach, California, and last fall I did a one-day stint as a "guest chef" (of sorts) at Batard in Tribeca. But beyond that my experience in the food and beverage industry has added up to a big blank—a rather absurd lapse, if you think about it, for someone who has written about food and beverages for years. But at 5:55 on Tuesday evening, with just five minutes before a thirsty horde flooded my station, I figured I'd do fine, because, hey, I'm known for making good cocktails at parties.
Ha. As I learned quickly—and as any seasoned bartender will warn you—making a good cocktail amounts to a mere sliver of a barkeep's responsibilities. The job, which encompasses overlapping layers of storytelling, socializing, room-reading, money-collecting, and mad-dash mathematics (the latter never my strong suit), could be defined as an extreme and concentrated experiment in multitasking. A few weeks back I dove deep into The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a 2011 book by Nicholas Carr, and since have become obsessed with synapses, habits, and neuroplasticity—you might say the brain has been on my brain. After my night at Coup, I'm guessing that the brains of professional bartenders must be fascinating, complex machines, considering all the fresh pathways that they have to carve out night after night.
At Coup I was supposed to crank out a single drink, and I intentionally chose a simple one: the Rusty Nail, structured for the evening's purposes with two parts Dewar's, one part Drambuie, an orange peel, and two dashes of Regan's orange bitters. Cocktail maestro David Wondrich once wrote in Esquire that "there's really no way to fuck this one up," which was good enough for me.
One of my instant realizations: In the past I have been stingy with the bitters. As Green showed me, "two dashes" does not mean "two drops." It's more like two generous glugs, or a liberal pour. But he made my job easier by mixing the Dewar's and the Drambuie together in advance so all I had to do was pour and stir. He also gave me a tub of ready-to-go orange peels that were begging to be misted over the ice and rubbed around the rim of each glass. "Smoke, check," he said. "Mirrors, check."
But making the drink would prove to be the easiest task, as Green had foretold. The hardest task, for me, would be remembering to charge people money for it. At Coup, each drink comes with a wooden coin, and customers are instructed to drop their collected coins into vases, arranged around the room, that represent various causes. On Tuesday night, per my choice, all of the vases were aligned with the ACLU, because I view civil liberties the way I now view bitters—we need them even more than we think. (At least one vase is always dedicated to the ACLU, no matter the night.)
For some reason, I think of the Rusty Nail as something of a "Seventies Dad" cocktail, databased in my brain alongside shag carpeting, denim skirts, and Fleetwood Mac. Perhaps it's ripe for a revival. Customers at Coup seemed taken aback by the drink's easy sugar-and-smoke deliciousness. I found their compliments gratifying. But I got the biggest rush out of what wound up feeling like the most important part of the job: Talking to people. I talked with Jenny about her role in Bull, the Mike Bartlett play that's surfacing at the New Wave Theater Collective in May. I talked with Alex about his new column; I talked with Brittany about her forthcoming book about pie. I studied the body language of couples on dates. I scanned faces. I listened. I offered counsel. I relished the lulls.
After a single night at Coup, a night that left me with sticky fingers and sore thighs, I suspect that working as a bartender must be an excellent way to prepare for the frantic, disorienting world that we occupy these days. A brain-training exercise, if you will. "Like anything in life, if you're confident about what you do, people will believe you," Green sagely told me seconds before my shift began. "Know where your things are, and be confident." I'll drink to that.
You Might Also Like