Cocktail Snob - quality matters!

1.
We don't like televisions in our bars.
Watching television is a passive activity that tends to prevent people from communicating with each other. Television is a distraction from life. If you want to watch television, stay home. Come out in public and strike up a conversation with the person who has planted their pants on the bar stool next to yours. Exercise your brain a bit before killing it off with a tasty Monkey Gland or a Poor Liza. Pay attention to your drink, and to your surroundings, not to the glowing box of lies. Discover someone else’s point of view. Participate in life.

2.
Rose's lime juice and any brand of sour mix are the work of Beelzebub.
This stuff is too sweet, does not taste at all like anything that ever resembled an actual piece of fruit, and is full of high-fructose corn syrup, which as far as I am concerned is cancer in a bottle.
Use fresh juices in all of your drinks. Squeeze those limes and lemons.
Yes, it takes longer. Yes, it costs more.
Are you going to do this properly or aren't you?

3.
You know those nasty-ass squirt guns that soda pop and fake fruit juice comes out of in a lot of bars?
Fine for the McCocktails, but those squirty things are disgusting, as are virtually all of the products that come out of them.
It is no coincidence that the big metal containers that are hooked to the other end of that hose all look like nuclear waste disposal units.
Do you really want to drink that stuff?

4.
If you change the drink, change the name.
It's cool to make up your own things, but don't pass 'em off as the classics if they're not.
Anyway, then you can say you invented it, and you'd more or less be right.

5.
Both an exception and a reinforcement of #4: The Martini.
A Martini is either a Gin or Vodka, and some Vermouth.
That is all.
The former is called a Martini.
The latter is called a Vodka Martini.
Two drinks, two names.
Garnish choices: olive or twist.
That gives a total of four variants.
That is all, there are no more.
Get your stinking hands off of that bottle of Creme de Cacao, you damned dirty ape!

6.
Music played too loudly is just noise.

7.
I know that your doorman has a hard job. He has to deal with throwing out the jackasses, keeping the riffraff out to begin with, carding the youngins so that you don't get shut down, and managing a line outside. But he is also the first employee that your regular customers encounter. If he is snooty and self-important, or is nothing but a stinky big gorilla, that reflects really badly on your establishment. Think it over.

"Sir Rhosis of the Liver"
by Lisa Pangborn

'Flair Bartending' isn't going to impress anyone worth impressing.

If your bartenders want to flip a shaker over their shoulder, that's all well and good, but there had better be a damned good drink in that shaker.

And come to think of it, in every bar I have ever been to that were making truly excellent drinks, the bartenders were waaaay to busy squeezing lemons and measuring bitters with an eye dropper to worry about excess prestidigitation.

Conversely, in every bar I have ever been to that featured bartenders who were more influenced by Tom Cruise than Dale Degroff, the cocktials seemed to consist of four randomly selected DeKuyper products mixed with well Vodka.

Need I say more?
First and foremost: good drinks.

9.
What we DO love in bartenders are people who are passionate about their craft: making great drinks.
If they like to chat about it on slow nights, and maybe get us hip to something new and interesting hiding out in one of those unexplored bottles, that's very cool too.
See our Manifesto for more details.

10.
Still reading?
Good, I'll have another Bebbo please.

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Last updated on October 23, 2007

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