ROME. THE ETERNAL CITY. It has stood on seven hills and the banks of the Tiber for thousands of years. Monuments in stone, brick and ancient mortar grace every cobblestoned street. At night the city is bathed in amber light and takes on an Elysian glow, only comparable to late night New York after a hard summer rain, streets shiny with a rainbow…

Winter, 2012. Richard Boccato, the owner of Dutch Kills in New York City, and I are flown to Stockholm, Sweden, to bartend on behalf of Auchentoshan whisky and Havana Club rum. For the past three years, a restaurant in Copenhagen had been named number one in the world, and this was as close as I had gotten to that city. I talked Richie into going…

Lately, the thing to talk about on the operations side of bars has been ecological responsibility and sustainability. We worry about ice, water, vegetable and fruit waste, the carbon footprint of shipping both fresh and bottled ingredients from near and far, and the health and wellness of our staff (do some yoga). As far as our impact on the world around us goes, the use…

I’ve been travelling a lot for work lately. This year I’ve been as far south as Santiago in Chile and as far north as Stockholm. I’ve seen some beautiful natural sights and, of course, visited a ton of bars on the way. My latest trip took me to Germany and I was particularly struck by three of the bars I visited in Frankfurt. Walking through…

Once upon a time, some brave soul in the Caribbean decided that his industrial waste could be turned into a cash crop. Maybe the sun had gotten to him. Maybe the heat had cooked his brain, but he was convinced that the foul smelling muck left over after boiling cane juice to make crystallised sugar could be fermented, and the resulting liquid distilled into a…

There has been a lot of talk lately on the internet, about Missy Elliot’s great song Work It. Finally, her lyrics have been deciphered and the strange backwards sounding line shown to be just “Put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” REVERSED! Amazing. Simultaneously I’ve seen some talk about a technique called the ‘reverse dry shake’. I’m wondering if this has something with…

> MIXOLOGISTS. PROFESSIONAL STARTENDERS. Cocktailogists. Cocktailians. It’s 2017. Attitude has jumped the shark. Give it a rest. My girlfriend got home from a night out with a friend and had a sad story to tell. She went to a bar, that I personally know to be excellent, owned by one of the luminaries in my small but respectable local cocktail scene. My girlfriend and…

One of the first rules I learned as a young bartender was: “No politics, no religion.” It is also our duty to talk about current events and the fears and worries of our guests. Sometimes these two responsibilities can seem contradictory. For instance, there isn’t an American who isn’t talking about politics right now. In my liberal, New York City bubble, the pervading sentiment is…

This is sort of a continuation of last month’s column, and is another question that is very challenging for most service staff to answer. I talked a little last month about simplicity of menu to streamline the process of ordering, and the simplest menu is no menu at all. In fact, one of my favourite things to do when presented with a customer’s indecision is…

Is this drink good? it is a question I hear about five times per shift and one that has never made sense to me. If we didn’t believe it was good, why would we put it on the menu? After all, a menu is a primary interaction with the customer, one of the most important points of service. Why would a bar put something on…