Completely burnt out from covering two film festivals simultaneously has left me on a hiatus of consumption, at least in terms of media, or media that I’d care to talk about. Adding to that, my real (bill-paying) day (night) job behind the bar has entirely supplanted my fake (supplemental income at best) job as a film critic, writer, or whatever you might call a person who puts words to Google Docs and sends them out for distribution on whatever social media platforms others of this type might find themselves on these days. Instead of mise-en-scene in the film image, I’m occupied by the mise-en-scene of the cocktail glass, thinking about the delicacies of garnish placement as fast as I can.
I try not to let the two roles—bartender and film writer—bleed together, as my attitude in one might amplify an acceptable bitterness in the other. When a customer asks me what my go-to cocktail is and I respond, “shot and a beer,” there is a playful irony to the circumstance. But if I find myself in a conversation about movies then I’m in a more uncomfortable stance where my honest answers might not make for the most customer service-friendly chatter, so I provide more of a mirror than a debate, which is really what people are there for more often than not. I could make a name for myself as the bartender that people would want to prod about film, usually with thoughts that might be disappointing (more often than not, “I haven’t seen [X,Y, Z recent film]”), but that would have to run double-duty with the educational dance I already have to play during service.
Cocktails are a mutable form. This has to do with people believing in “right” ways, whether traditionalists following classic cocktail specifications to the milliliter or the casual types that say that the best way is always to someone’s taste. But this leads to the awkward linguistic problem in that a “martini” doesn’t mean anything, yet everyone who orders one is confident it means exactly something. This leads to an interrogation on my end: gin or vodka? shaken or stirred? These are questions in my mind that have “right” answers because of my taste—shaken if dirty, stirred if any other way—yet they’re only “right” so long as a customer agrees with my ontology-of-a-martini, which almost no person seems to agree on.
That’s to say nothing of useless “dry” scale, where people often think they are asking for less vermouth and historians argue the moniker means the drink’s made with a London dry gin. Either way, it means nothing in my consideration behind the bar, as Americans don’t have much a taste for vermouth and my role is masking their assumptions in how I balance the mixture because, unless very explicitly asked for, there’s no way I’m just handing someone 3.5oz+ of cold vodka in a glass with a few olives on top.
The perception of cocktails is largely shaped by the media we consume about them, as I’d argue that, by-and-large, people find out about what drinks to order from movies, TV, and now social media, more than they do any kind of person-to-person interaction. Two years ago, I had to see one customer after another ask to swap out their drink after they took a sip of their trend-of-the-month cocktail, a sbagliato negroni (with prosecco, as they always tautologically added), only to find that the thing which was memed over to them wasn’t as sexy as they thought but instead terribly dry, rather boozy, and just bitter enough to be completely unpalatable to them.
The worst offender on this front is the “skinny” margarita, one ordered with the intention of having less sugar than a “normal” margarita. This would depend on your definition of the already mutable drink: one direction is the more modern (“Tommy’s”) style where agave syrup or another simple-like concoction is used to balance the tart zip of the lime, and another way to go is the classic, which has no directly added sugar, just an orange liqueur. “Skinny” margs as served in most places largely substitute the liqueur for orange juice. Only problem here is you’d need a couple of ounces of the stuff to balance out how tart lime juice can be, and then you’re really only cutting back on the amount of sugar by a gram or two when considering a classic marg is gonna have less than an ounce of whatever orange liqueur was supposed to be there in the first place. Not to mention, your liver is going to treat sugar and alcohol much the same, considering that sugar is the stuff which alcohol is made from.
This is the bar talk that I have to engage in carefully and succinctly, as what a person (who isn’t cursed with a kind of pretentious alcoholism) asks for isn’t always what they want—it’s how they’ve been told to ask, and more often than not there’s a better version of what they’re inquiring about that they just haven’t tried yet. Especially at the price point I’m dealing in (and where my livelihood is dependent on tips), this is ultimately what’s expected of me: not just delivering what’s asked, but what someone didn’t have the words to ask for. It is not unlike film criticism in that way, where I’m trying to translate ineffable images and their time-based experience into readable text. Through it I can maybe get someone to think of something they never thought about, try something they never knew they liked. It’s rewarding, at least when I think that I’ve done well on either front, but if there’s anything the last month has taught me is that, despite all the fun I might be perceived as having watching movies all day and being at a happening bar all night, it’s all work.