While being a bartender may sound like the perfect job, it definitely has its challenges that are more often than not left unconsidered, making for a truly rude awakening for the unsuspecting suckers that don’t do their research before jumping into a job.
To save a few from learning the hard way, here are a few misconceptions about bartending that tend to get overlooked:
1. It’s not as easy as it looks.
On average, bartenders probably do 10-12hr shifts, sometimes with no break. There are hours of prep work, hours of clean-up, and hours of catering to the demands of people who have no concept of a bartender’s actual hours.
2. Their lives are not an endless party.
The bartender is like the parent at a slumber party: they are working to make sure everybody else is having fun, while trying to keep them from getting in too much trouble. And once the kids go to bed, they’re up late cleaning the mess.
3. When you’re in an environment that’s extremely high volume, everything goes out the window.
A skilled bartender always wants to make the best drink possible, but in a busy bar there’s a balance between meticulous craftsmanship and breakneck efficiency. This is particularly true of inexperienced bartenders who don’t have their recipes memorized. If they’re slammed with Negroni, Manhattan, and Old Fashioned orders back-to-back, they’re immediately in the weeds and will be much less excited to discuss the intricacies of their tiki menu.
4. Bartending is largely about multi-tasking and quick memory recall.
Bartenders do everything at once. A home-cocktail-enthusiast might be able to make a good Manhattan, but it’s an entirely different thing to make three at once while taking a beer order, running a credit card, and being eye-pulled by 10 strangers. Most decent bartenders can multi-task like maniacs, good ones can do it while keeping their drinks to a high standard, and only the best can pull it off while maintaining a hospitable smile.
5. Some bartenders drink during their shift, but not all of them.
Some bars don’t allow it. Some bartenders don’t care about that rule. It’s not uncommon for a bartender to do a few shots during a shift to take the edge off and as hospitality lubrication. But many have a general policy of not drinking with customers, and will go so far as to pour water in their own shot glass instead of vodka to maintain the illusion that they are fun party dudes.
6. Bartenders pay taxes too.
The overwhelming majority of bartenders pay extensive Federal, State, and local taxes. Almost all bar/lounge/club/restaurant owners these days are under extreme scrutiny, and as a result, many owners will report their bartenders’ individual incomes as a percentage of sales – whether you’ve been tipped or not. That goes for every single check. Practically everyone, from the smallest pub to the largest multi-bar hotel chain, makes use of Point of Sale systems to track every single aspect of cash flow. So, yes, you’ll still have to pay up come April 15th.
7. Girls, and guys, don’t actually want to sleep with bartenders.
Ok, well, some do. But the reality is that most aren’t patient enough to wait until 4:30am for their bartender-crush to close up shop, return home, down a pair of cheap beers, and catch up on their /r/cocktails Reddit feed.
Bartending is a balancing act, which requires the ability to juggle several responsibilities while under some serious pressure. So, that’s why December’s hacks series is all about tricks of the bartending trade and we’re kicking it off with some time management tips that will make your life so much easier!
Keep a cheat sheet behind the bar
While most bartenders should have the typical recipes down pat, there are those times that the mind skips a beat and you forget. There are also those particular customers who want their esoteric, rarely-seen cocktails that can take a bartender off their game.
For this reason, have a handy cheat sheet to help you instead of taking precious minutes to ask someone else or look it up on your phone.
Whiskey, on the fly
Bartenders are responsible for a plethora of knowledge, the most basic of which is knowing their liquors. Here is a quick guide to the variations of whiskey to help you quickly explain a particular type to a customer:
USA: “Spicy-oak firmness”. Tennessee whiskies tend to have a caramel taste. Canada: “Light, new, perfect for mixing” Ireland: “smooth, spicy, fruity” Scotland: “smokey, peaty” (if Islay). “Sweet and fruity” (If Speyside). “Spicy, salty” (if Cambletown). Japan:“quality, perfected” Japanese whiskeys are detailed and carefully crafted for structure.
Acknowledge customers ASAP
As many of us know, when you’re bartending, you can’t always get to everyone as soon as they want a drink. When that’s the case, simply acknowledging your customer can go a long way. It assures them that you’re aware of them and that you’ll be right there.
It may even clue them into the fact that they are not the only customer at the bar…crazy!
This little trick will buy you some extra time, relieving some of that pressure we’re all too familiar with. Plus, it will do wonders for your customer satisfaction. And your tips!
When in the weeds, breathe
Your bar is piling up with guests, you’re in the middle of making six different drinks, trying to handle a credit card payment and need a new bottle of well vodka. Welcome to “the weeds” my friend.
All of us who work, or have worked, in the industry has experienced it at least once. So, what to do in this situation: just breathe. It’s almost counter-intuitive but absolutely effective because the best thing you can do is slow yourself down.
Taking 2-5 minutes to step away, collect yourself and regain your thoughts will help immensely. Despite leaving your responsibilities for a couple minutes, you will benefit in the long run by returning to work with a clear head.
Don’t know the drink? This Hail Mary will save you
Say someone comes in and orders a drink you’re unfamiliar with. What do you do? For some, this can cause a major brain fart and send you into a tizzy trying to figure out the ingredients and how to properly mix the drink. A quick fix for this:
“I’m sorry, we actually don’t have all the ingredients to make that here.”
While this is a cop out, it’s a handy last resort that can save you from getting backed up and spinning out of control. When taking this route, be sure to be apologetic and have a go-to suggestion to tell the customer.
Most importantly, while working behind the bar, keep your cool, keep your pace and help yourself to manage your time with these sweet and easy tricks.
Becoming a chef was, and can still be, almost as simple as moving from Point A to Point B. But, it doesn’t have to be! The life-cycle of a chef can as varied and colorful as you make it!
How can you make a little extra cash, get some broader experience and perhaps develop skills that will make you stand out in your restaurant job? Pick up a side job that complements your strengths and career goals; here are few ideas to get you started.
If you’re thinking about becoming a chef then you’re probably considering culinary school, but does it make sense? Better find out before signing the check!
The truth is that service is not really a transactional act, and therefore, it can’t be given. Service is a byproduct of consistently executing the other key processes that make a business successful—like hiring right, training well, suggestive selling and practicing servant leadership.
Hospitality or Customer Service?
Most restaurant owners and their customer-facing team members confuse service with hospitality, but they’re different: Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people. You can get service from an ATM or a vending machine, but you can’t get hospitality. Hospitality is the key deliverable that distinguishes great food service operations from average retail ones.
“Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people.”
For instance, if you buy a vacuum cleaner at a store—no matter how hard you looked for someone to help you, or how you were treated by the employees—you still have a vacuum cleaner when you get home. So even if there was no discernible service accompanying the purchase, you still have a tangible something after the transaction.
But when you patronize a restaurant, what do you have after you eat? Only memories. While menu, value, décor and cleanliness all play a part, it’s service and hospitality that makes that memory positive and drives customer loyalty and repeat business.
The Core of Great Customer Service
So what are the key drivers of customer satisfaction? Here are the three basics that every industry, not just the food industry, should follow.
1. Focus on ROC, not ROI
Repeat business is the linchpin of profitability in any successful business. Everyone is familiar with ROI, but a lesser-known and more critical metric is ROC—Return of Customer. “Will you come back?” and “Would you tell your friends to try us?” are the two most important questions relative to the customer experience. If the answer is yes to both, you’ve delivered on expectations and achieved ROC. If not, you haven’t. It’s that simple.
2. Hire Great People
Repeat business will always be dependent on the weakest people you allow on your teams. Make your customers’ experience consistently exceptional by hiring and developing great people. When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen. Compete first for talent, then customers.
When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen.
3. Consistency Is Key
Know what customers hate about patronizing your business? Inconsistency in quality, service, speed and accuracy. So when customer service problems reoccur in your business—before you blame your people—evaluate the likelihood of a short-circuit in a system or process. Bad service issues routinely arise when you hurry-hire the wrong people, cleanliness isn’t a priority, an understaffed or undertrained team messes up orders, or inefficient scheduling causes you to be short a server at peak hours. This makes customer-facing team members stressed, swamped and snippy, so they smile, serve and ultimately sell less.
Habitually consistent good service is the result of systems that:
Foster a caring culture
Make positivity and fun part of the core business practices
Educate and encourage teams daily to be better than they were yesterday
Don’t forget that excellent service begins with leadership and the notion that, “My customer is anyone who isn’t me.” The fact is that the way you treat your team members determines how they’ll treat your customers. Model the way, every day. Apply constant, gentle pressure every day to improve.
Restaurant operators are stewards of special moments in customers’ lives. The food service industry’s shared goal of giving care and sustenance to strangers and regulars alike as part of our business model is what sets us apart from retail and manufacturers. Service is our invisible product.
Skilled bartending has become an intriguing, flashy trend, inspiring a plethora of competitions all over the world. From dazzling bar flare to unique cocktail recipes and speed bartending, these events are catching people’s eye and developing a strong following. But in this world of colorful drinks and innovative mixology, the art of basic service technique and bar knowledge falls by the wayside.
Together, Monkey Shoulder and the United States Bartender’s Guild (USBG) have created an innovative international competition that refocuses the art of bartending by challenging competitors to demonstrate their knowledge and service rather than just their flare. Labeled a “no b.s.” competition by the members of the Monkey Shoulder team, the event aimed to focus on “skills that pay the bills,” a no-nonsense, practical take on being a good bartender.
Lead by Dean Callan, Brand Ambassador at Monkey Shoulder, the event has traveled to four other U.S. cities including Milwaukee, Charleston (SC), Chicago and Philadelphia and internationally, in Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Poland, France, Germany, and Singapore. Bartenders from each city took part in the same 7-round competition and the overall point leader at the end of this year’s competition will be crowned the Ultimate Bartending Champion.
On Monday, November 18th, 2015, the Ultimate Bartender Championship came to Denver. Hosted by Punch Bowl, the competition featured 12 local bartenders, competing in 7 different rounds that tested their technique, insight, speed and skill behind the bar.
The Rounds
1. Quiz:
In the quiz round, contenders were read 100 multiple choice questions ranging from an array of bartending topics. From identifying recipe ingredients to naming various countries’ national beverage, Callan rapidly quizzed the opponents to test both their knowledge of beverages and their ability to think quickly on their feet.
2. Mixiodic Table:
For the competition, Callan and the Monkey Shoulder team created an ingenious bartender version of the periodic table. The table consists of various components to cocktail recipes, featuring ‘elements’ like sugars, juices, mixers, bitters, ices, liquors, glassware and garnishes. The goal for this round was to solve ‘equations’ by naming the cocktail. For instance, if Vm=vermouth and V=vodka, Ol=olive juice, Sh=shaken, Up=martini glass then V+Vm+Ol+Sh+Up = A vodka martini. Competitors had 10 minutes to solve 20 equations.
V+Vm+Ol+Sh+Up = A vodka martini
3. Nosing:
In this round, opponents had two minutes to identify ten different spirits in a blind nosing test correctly. 1/2 a point was awarded for knowing the spirit (i.e., vodka, bourbon, scotch, Irish whiskey) and a full point for naming the brand (42 Below vodka, Glenmorangie scotch, etc.).
4. Pouring:
This task included glasses listing specific pour quantities (1/3 oz, 1 oz) and the bartenders needed to measure out the exact pour for each. The goal here was to pour the right amount into each glass and be exact on as many as possible while being as quick and efficient as possible.
5. Tray Service:
This round required competitors to take drink orders for ten people, get the drinks from the bar and, in the correct order, serve the right drinks to each corresponding person. To do this, Callan printed off ten pictures of celebrities and recognizable people to serve as the ten places at the table. By doing this, it required the bartenders to remember who ordered which drink and place each drink down in the correct order (women first, than men). Each opponent had a different arrangement of pictures and needed to adapt to the right order. Again, this pushes the importance of service technique, efficiency and drink knowledge.
6. Stock Take:
A crucial part of being a bartender is inventory. This round featured the skills of taking stock of various liquors as if they were doing inventory. Competitors needed to eyeball measure the amount of liquor in 10 different bottles and output an accurate inventory sheet.
7. Building Challenge:
The final round required the competitors to produce eight cocktails in 5 minutes. These cocktails were taste-tested by the audience. If the audience decided that a cocktail was not adequate, they could send the drink back, therefore, docking points from the bartender. This last round was in place to showcase the skills and mixing techniques of the competitors and tested how they managed their time while optimizing taste and technique.
The competition was a captivating, enjoyable experience that drew a great deal of interest due to its uncommon, practical nature. While the notion of a service knowledge and recipe knowledge-based event may seem pedestrian, Callan and Monkey Shoulder did a phenomenal job with their innovative challenges, unique creations (like the Mixiodic Table) and focused on bartending functionalism and skill. Both competitors and spectators enjoyed this new format, and all benefited from the showcasing of no-nonsense bar knowledge and service technique.
As a member of the food and beverage community, I believe that this innovative, practical-knowledge-based event is exactly what the industry needs. Yes, bar flare is fun and captivating, but the importance of service is what keeps the industry alive. Callan did an extraordinary job of incorporating functional, pragmatic bartending skills into a competitive, unique event. His focus on “skills that pay the bills,” I believe, will inspire more bartenders to pay closer attention to the importance of the basics; knowledge, efficiency, preciseness and good service. I admire Callan’s ingenuity and creativeness in bringing service into the forefront through useful yet fun skill challenges.
While this is the first year of this competition, Callan and Monkey Shoulder look to expand the event throughout the globe, creating new innovative challenges along the way and spreading the focus of service and technique. We can’t wait to see what they have in store for next year and the years to come.
TopTender303, the 4-week bartending competition to find Denver’s best bartender, kicked off with a bang last Tuesday night!
The competition was stiff, with 10 bartenders from Denver’s top watering holes throwing down their best drink-making moves in a 2-round showdown: Drink of Choice and Mystery Box,featuring the TOP SECRET spirit of the night provided by Beverage Distributers Company.
The Goal: Make the cut to Week 2 of TopTender303, and one step closer to the $500 grand prize.
Pre-competition, the tenders were relaxed and socializing.
While sharing some funny tidbits about their times behind the bar, Conner had us all laughing after revealing his most annoying request to date was some dude asking him to charge his e-cigarette at the packed Cold Crush bar.
When asked about strangest drink requests, Chad spoke up, “Chambord and Sprite, to which I asked, would you like a side of diabetes with that?” Apparently the customers were not so amused, responding with a hostile “Yes” after a few seconds of death staring.
Then it was Game Time, and Vodka was the star.
The first round, Drink of Choice, started with a mad dash to the fully stocked ingredient table, containing basically anything and everything that the bartenders could use to make their drinks, and with only 20 minutes to get it done, it was a hectic round.
The Mystery Box was an entirely different beast. Given a box filled with random ingredients, the bartenders had another 20 minutes to make their final drinks including at least three mystery box ingredients. There was some intense creativity going down. See the photo below, those are Cheetos sprinkled on top (…and it was de-lish-ous).
It was a pretty epic show, with the bartenders in the center of the room surrounded by friends and fans from the industry watching and cheering as the competitors made it happen.
It was a hard decision when it came time to make the cuts.
Both rounds of drinks were sampled by attendees, who voted for their favorites, as well as a panel of judges that helped make the final decision as to who would be moving on to Week 2. Although extremely talented, Kyle Faulhaber, Danny Hampton, and Ryan Buchanan won’t be moving on.
So, after an awesome night of intense competition and delicious beverages, we’re looking forward to Round 2 of TopTender303, going down at NATIV Hotel on Tuesday, September 8, where the remaining 7 bartenders will battle it out using yet another TOP SECRET spirit. DON’T MISS IT!
