BARTENDERS: ALL THE REASONS THEY HATE YOU RIGHT NOW |
|
Your bartender hates you. This is an obvious truth and beyond argument. But WHY do they hate you? Let's be frank, they are mostly ego-driven sociopaths living in their imagined, wood-framed kingdoms, over which they have an irresistible need to assert the control so often absent from their civilian lives. Many of them are clinically sad or are addicted to street drugs. Also, it's probably something you did. What WAS it? What did you DO? What kind of monster ARE YOU? Find out with our handy guide to what you're doing wrong:
You’re waving money in their faces like you’re panic-betting on some spittle-flecked, mange-ridden cockfight in a filthy abandoned warehouse where your money’s no good, stranger, why, no-one here even knows WHO YOU ARE so put your sweaty, wilting notes away and wait your turn. Bartenders don’t want your money. What they want is your reverence. What they absolutely require is your compliance. Who do you think you're dealing with? A barista? You’re ordering a Bloody Mary in the afternoon? What are we? Homo habilis, dragging our unwieldy knuckles around the barren East African plains, clumsily grasping at vaguely familiar vegetables and plants with no intuition of propriety or the time frame within which it’s acceptable to put them into our mouths? No? Thought not. You’re asking “What’s on tap?”. Go, walk out in to the traffic and don’t look back. There’s nothing to be done. You’re not a bad person. You’re just not a good use of carbon. You’re ordering a Dirty Martini, a vodka soda, a Long Island Ice Tea or heaven forfend some vague drink-like abstraction that your puny mind can’t quite describe but that someone made in Hawaii last summer and it was SO fruity but, like, SOUR at the same time, and…minty, right? And if the bartender just waits a second you can try and pull up a photo of it on your phone. Your bartender will do prison time before putting up with any of this. Customer service is A WEAKNESS. You’re deciding what to order while stood at the bar, like some kind of ephemeral fairy, or a head-in-the-clouds adolescent aristocrat with no accountability and a head full of dangerous whimsy. A bar is no place for spontaneous decisions or feeble minds that are already confused by the sparkly, coloured bottles. Plan your drinks in detail before you leave the house, preferably with a cross-referenced timeline. You’re using weird names for drinks. You want a Cape Cod? Have you had an actual stroke? Did you go into a coma in the 1950s and just wake up and this is your first drinks order? Vodka cranberry is hateful enough without this kind of nominal atrocity. Your bartender controls the discourse, you understand? I SAID DO YOU UNDERSTAND? You’re ordering Guinness without the customary ten-minute warning. GUINNESS IS NOT ORDERED, IT IS ONLY PRE-ORDERED. If you ask for Guinness half way through an order, just leave the bar silently. If you ask for it last in your order, you may as well seppuku yourself for all the good you are to the human race. You’re worryingly unsure about the tip and are just glaring at the bill like it’s the results of some surprisingly bad blood work. Look, Stephen Gawking, working out the tip could not possibly be easier. Let’s say you’re in America ordering a Simmering Fascist Sour. It’s simply a dollar a drink, plus fifty cents because it’s a shaken drink (40 cents for stirred, obviously), a dime per sleeve garter, fifteen percent for vintage bar kit wear and tear, seven percent local condescension tax, round it up to the nearest dollar and add a dollar for the privilege of giving the bar your business. NEXT. You’re ordering vodka by brand. All bartenders know that vodka brands are a cruel inside joke played on the public. It’s all the same and furthermore they call it ‘the tofu of the spirits world’ behind your stupid back. Sure, have a Grey Goose, SUCKER. You’re thinking Lemon Drops. Bartenders will cut you if you’re even considering Lemon Drops. Don’t consider Lemon Drops. |
Related:
|
Back to GOING ANYWHERE NICE?