A Slightly Dirty Story
I took the opportunity to visit a restaurant on my way home Saturday - yes, I work weekends - and decided to sit at the bar. Host was on point and they were busy. An attractive young woman greeted me properly and did an upsell, and wasn’t even disappointed when I ordered an iced tea. Things seemed to go well until some guy comes flying in talking on the phone, and ordered a Grey Goose martini, up, dry, and slightly dirty. LOUD. Then nothing. It really took all I could not to laugh at these two bovine-looking humans. One was supposed to know how to make the drink and the other didn’t care why or how the other didn’t know, or know himself.
When a staff member or manager tells you they are going to Google how to do something, and then you trust them to do it, are you seeing how thorough they learned? And why is that part of your business strategy? That's not training. When I asked the overly chatty hostess about the bartender, I learned she’d been on the floor serving for about a month. The restaurant was short at bar and she seized an opportunity. What they did not do was teach her how to tend bar, which plenty of people all over the place already know to do. This bartender either fibbed her way there, which is always an awesome way to start a relationship you hand a box of money with every day, or someone on your management team is not very smart and needs to go away.
Let’s be direct - she is not there for her ability to pour drinks. She is probably a favorite of the bar manager or the GM. There’s a distinct possibility she’s drinking with one and sleeping with the other, or both to each. Whoever runs this bar did not ask their existing bar staff if they wanted her back there. And if the person running it doesn’t have enough bartenders, they weren’t smart enough to go steal someone else’s, or threaten to hire a bartender and eat into every else's money if they won't cover shifts.
A jigger and Google does not make for a bartender. Nobody explained to her why the bottles are arranged a certain way. She had the rocks glass out people squirt soda into that don’t know the letters on a bar gun. I can’t even imagine the grift happening: between mistakes, bad tab rings, predatory servers, “too busy” to ring, guest complaints, and all the other ways people steal from the unknowing. The time suck on the manager has to be tremendous - comping, voiding, dealing with angered guests, switching kegs, fixing drinks. If he or she was smart they would have called in a key hourly to run the floor and ran it themselves.
Turns out, the manager didn’t know how to make one either, so he bought the guest a beer after the three of them had an uneasy laugh. That single transaction went from a $8 gain to a $3 loss. Maybe you’re the jovial, friendly operator that looks at that as part of the process. I look at it as having two employees, one salaried, behind the bar that aren’t smart enough to Google how to make a dirty martini, and an $11 swing that did not go in my favor. How does that happen? The patron sipping on his free beer might be a nuclear physicist or the guy managing the towing yard - it doesn’t matter what he is or who he knows. He did not order something with a stupid trendy name. He used classic bar terminology, at a bar, and two people working for said bar, behind the bar, could not produce his drink.
You may be wondering why I just didn’t tell one of these people how to make a martini. I changed the subject, slightly. I told them they make martini’s in a can now - they might want to look into that. On my way out, I told the talkative hostess she might be amused by the reaction of the manager and the bartender if she googled ‘dry dirty up Grey Goose martini’ and showed it to them.
No manager cards were taken from the host stand on Saturday. I have a feeling it's a bad place to work and it comes from the ownership, who hired crummy managers. It was 75 degrees and beautiful that day, with a gorgeous early evening kicking off Metroplex patio season and a late UFC fight. I suppose whoever was supposed to care about that restaurant was out enjoying themselves, like I was, not giving a care in the world that both his manager and bartender would fail Day One of a corporate chain bar program.
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