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Why Can't I Get a McDonald's Hamburger at Chez Panisse?

In response to my recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle on high-end bars becoming more accommodating to patrons' requests, many people wrote into the comments about how snooty bartenders are who won't give you the drinks that you want.

The Chronicle's commenters are a notoriously (and often hilariously) opinionated bunch, so I don't take offense to anything they say. By and large, they were all terribly upset with Erick Castro of Rickhouse's quote:

"Three years ago it was OK to be rude. It used to be 'I'm not making a cosmo and you're a horrible person.' Now we say, 'I'm not making a cosmo, but I'm making you something better than a cosmo.' And if they like (the drink) they trust you for the whole night."

Commenters were offended that a bartender is so arrogant as to think he knows better than the customer, and offended that a bartender wouldn't make the customer what he wants.

I know that in the case of Rickhouse they don't carry cranberry juice, so they actually can't make a Cosmo. I believe all of the other drinks cited by commenters cannot be made at Rickhouse either- drinks with Midori, 7UP, Malibu, etc. They do not carry these products on principle, and thus cannot make drinks with them.

So Rickhouse can't/won't make a Cosmo, and that makes people mad. But does it also infuriate them that Chez Panisse (probably) can't make a McDonald's hamburger?

Would you be surprised at Chez Panisse if you asked your waiter for a McDonald's hamburger and they steered your toward something similar and better, like a grass-fed, free-range beef burger on a fresh-baked bread roll with organic ketchup? Would you consider them arrogant? Call for the waiter to lose their job?

Only if you can't see the difference between McDonald's and Chez Panisse; between fast food and fine dining. And that is the image problem that cocktail bars have. Many people still think every bar is a McDonalds, when most bars that make the news are evolving toward something better. 

The better cocktail bars are not actually suffering from this lack of understanding- there's a huge demand for them, in fact, and in my experience the places selling $10 cocktails are affected less in this recession than places selling $6 ones. So despite complaints, better cocktail bars are safe, for now.

The funny thing is that speakeasy bars were originally a theme concept, but evolved into a practical concept: hiding the bars from people who don't yet know that not every bar serves Bud and has sports on TV.

Some people worry that the perceived arrogance of the bartenders in these places will make this better-drinking era a trend rather than an ongoing movement. I think that's a valid concern, as fine cocktails are very trendy right now. I'd hate to see this movement lose momentum as there is so, so much further to go with it.

As was the point in my original article, bartenders are learning how to talk to patrons in a nicer way to steer them away from lesser-quality or marketing-driven drink choices and into better ones. But is there more that can be done- in the media or by bartenders/bar owners- to make a clearer break between the fast food version of bars and the ones more like fine dining?

Passing the B.A.R.

This past fall I took the B.A.R., Beverage Alcohol Resource, five-day course in New York. The course has two levels- "Ready" and "Certified", with the only difference in the number of drinks one has to make within a certain time on the practical bartending exam. The course ran for about 12 hours each day for the first four days, with nearly a full day of testing on the last day. It was a real butt-kicker.

People seemed to come away with different impressions of the course, but what stuck out most to me was what you need to know not just to pass the class, but to say that you're at an expert level in the industry. It's a lot. You need to know:

1. The science and history of fermentation and distillation from the dawn of time
2. The history, ingredients, geography, and practical and legal production rules for every major category of spirits
3. The entire history of bartending and individual history and timelines of dozens of important cocktails
4. How to blind taste and identify spirits, quality of distillation, barrel type and age, and other production parameters, down to individual brands and bottlings
5. How to balance drinks, mix drinks, make them fast and of the highest quality possible while providing top quality customer service
6. How to create new drinks and tweak existing ones based on different mixological strategies
7. How to blind taste and critique cocktails

I took 76 pages of notes in those four days, after having read and studied the textbook, attended dozens on lectures by the instructors, read zillions of books, and passed the BAR Smarts course before the course. We sampled a few hundred spirits blind, I practiced bartending until my shoulder ached from shaking, and still tried to find time to study each night before passing out.

I decided to attempt the BAR Ready certification, thinking that I knew so much about the history and production rules of spirits that I wouldn't have to even study for that part of the test. (Boy was I wrong about that.) Luckily if you don't make all your drinks in time to be BAR Ready you can still pass BAR Certified. And I did, which is awesome.

My takeaway from the course is not just the new information and skill set gained during the week, but knowing what it takes to stay on top of things going forward: A great and constant amount of work tasting, testing, practicing, learning, and reviewing what you think you already know.

Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary Book Review

I recently received a review copy of Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary by Paul Dickson. It is both a book and a Guinness World Record holder for the largest collection of synonyms for any term in the English language. Does anyone need a book with 2,231 synonyms for "drunk"?

Absolutely not, but it's fun reading.

I made note of the terms that made me laugh out loud but had to stop as there were too many. Between "A" and "D" I noted: above par, all in, badgered, baptised, beyond salvage, bricked, chateaued, colored, debacled, discumfuddled, dog-sucking drunk, dribbly, and drunkulent. Ha!

If I ever write a book about a heavy drinker, I'll use this one as my thesaurus.

To go along with the book there is a blog accessed here. On the blog you can submit your own synonyms for "drunk" on this post for possible inclusion in the next edition of the book.

I came up with a few terms that are probably only relevant to me. Some of you may be able to recall these instances. I'm sorry if you were there.

• Calling 911 from Vail
• Spending time in the VIP lounge at Rickhouse
• Swimming in Josephine's Bathtub
• Riding the luge with Julio

Book Week on Alcademics

All this week I'll be posting book reviews here on Alcademics, and at the end of the week I'll do a giveaway on the Alcademics A-Plus email list for one of five copies of either Kara Newman's Spice & Ice, Mr. Boston's Holiday Cocktails, or Whiskey and Philosophy.

I pretty much read every cocktail, spirit, and drink book I can get my hands on.  My just-drinks bookshelf is long overfull and I find myself trying to cram more stuff onto it all the time. I've now taken to decorating with cocktail books, putting them beneath plant pots, stacking them under furniture, and lining the corners of the apartment with more stacks of them. Chances are in the next San Francisco earthquake they'll find me trapped beneath the books-about-ice section of my imbibrary. 

Lately it seems the cocktail books hitting the market are more and more specific: holiday cocktails, spicy cocktails, champagne cocktails (I think there are three books on that released in the last year), plus books on specific spirits- two on gin in the past few months, and one or more each on every other spirit category. Then we've got all the reprints of pre-Prohibition books thanks to people like Cocktail Kingdom. I am finding some of the newer books on the spirits industry pretty fascinating, as well as some of the more esoteric drinking subject books I'll be reviewing later this week.

Still, more books come out every week and the to-read space on the bookshelf indicates a backlog of about 20 or so more texts I need to review. A book reader's work is never done, and that's a-okay with me.

Smoke Gets in your Ice

Over the history of cocktails, certain flavors have become trendy during particular years. First the cocktail was invented, then the "fancy" cocktail, then the "improved" cocktail. These variations added liqueurs like curacao, maraschino, and absinthe to the regular formula. In the early 1900's, grenadine was all the rage and suddenly you'd find a splash of it in all the drinks.

A hundred years later, the same thing happens and I run around and try to document it. In 2007 and 2008, what cocktail menu didn't suddenly have three drinks with St. Germain on it?  We're currently seeing a revival in ginger flavored cocktails. And I believe that 2008 and 2009 will be known as the years of smoke.

Bartenders have taken different approaches to putting smoke into drinks. Sometimes, they light stuff on fire to make smoked Coke (Eben Freeman of Tailor), smoked ice (Daniel Shoemaker of Teardrop in Portland), and smoked syrup (Cody Robertson of San Francisco), and in a drink I just learned about, smoked strawberry shrub(!!!) with scotch and bitters at Absinthe. 

Other bartenders add liquid smoke to drinks. An early version of this was in the (awful) Smoky Martini, a Martini with a rinse of scotch, and a (less awful) Martini with a smoke-brined olive inside. In the past couple of years though, it's been all about the rinse. Folks use a rinse of Islay scotch like Laphroaig or Ardbeg, and within the last year they've gone nuts for rinses of mezcal- especially in San Francisco. At Clock Bar they have a drink with Qi black tea liqueur for similar effect. 

As bartenders and consumers get more fetishistic about smoke, it seems they're putting more of it into cocktails. It used to be bartenders would mix half mezcal or Islay scotch in a drink with half tequila or blended scotch so as not to overwhelm the drinker, as in the Carter Beats the Devil cocktail. Now you're more likely to get a full dose of smoke but tempered with robust mixers like pineapple gum syrup in the Single Village Fix. 

Luckily I have a very trendy palate, and have been sucking down smoky cocktails like they're going out of style. And they will, of course, but hopefully not until sometime in mid-2010.

Overheard at Clock Bar

"Is it a Chai-Piranha or a Tri-Piranha?"

(It was a caipirinha.)

Eye Contact Sports

Within the spirits industry, there is a lot of toasting, often at the beginning and end of dinner, while thanking the hosts and chefs, when greeting visitors, before taking shots, before moving to another bar or restaurant and then after arriving there, when saying goodbye, between courses, etc.

It can be a bit much, but worse than that is this the notion that you have to clink glasses with everyone in the room and look your fellow toasters in the eye. Sure, it's polite, but it's not always practical, especially when you're doing it 20 times in an evening with a crowd of 30 people.

Some people are chill about it, but there's always one dramatic chipmunk in the crowd, keeping track of everyone in the room, ensuring complete eye contact with every toast, and bugging out their eyes like a maniac so instead of a friendly "how do you do?" it's like a prison visit with Charles Manson. Stop the insanity!

I call new rule: Sticky Eyes. Toasting over and over is fine, but one eye contact per person is good for a whole  evening. After that you get immunity. At least that's my rule. You can walk around looking creepy all you want.

Let's Not Call it a Nightmare

But I did wake up out of a sound sleep with the sudden realization that my freezer was low on ice.