The Psyche of a Good (Nay, a Great) Bartender

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a bartender. And a damn good one.

People ask me all the time if I went to bartending school. While it is through no fault of their own that they assume this is the normal path that leads to the glory of The Power Behind The Bar, I can’t help but scoff at the ridiculousness of this notion. Bartending school takes a few hundred dollars of your hard-earned money, and teaches the technicalities of beginner’s mixology. This, in all honesty, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH BARTENDING.

The booze, booze knowledge and booze recipes are the least important aspects of being a bartender. Can you learn how to count? Great, well then you can make a cosmopolitan. Can you pull a lever? Fantastic, you can pour a beer. Unscrew a cork? You’ve just mastered the artistry of wine service, my friend.

Am I oversimplifying? Yes, of course. An understanding of how each lovely variety of alcohol is distilled/brewed/fermented is absolutely an asset; likewise, a healthy dose of creativity when it comes to how flavors mix and complement each other will get you far with your customers (and their wallets) as you develop new and exciting (or simply high-quality) drinks that they never knew they would love. True mixologists are absolutely to be revered and learned from, like any good chef. But the simple fact remains that none of this matters without one, overriding, decidedly critical element in the bartender’s arsenal:

You have to know people.

You have to wholly and truly be able to read, understand, and relate to every single person that walks through that door. Before they sit down, you have to size them up in a split second and decide which version of your “bartender persona” they will respond to the most. Bartending is all about giving people what they want, before they even know what that is. It’s about anticipation, awareness, and attitude.

True veterans (who give a shit about how much money they’re making and creating regulars, rather than just being a beer dispenser) can look at a person, a couple or a group and make a snap judgment in approximately 3 seconds. Yes, this is stereotyping, but it is also how we make our money. And 95% of the time, we’re exactly right.

Be it tourists, a first date, a boss with employees, a group of fratties who want to be abused and emasculated by the cute bartender, foreigners, members of the infamous ethnicities who choose not to acknowledge that tipping is TO INSURE PROPER SERVICE (TIPS? Get it?) and then wonder why I am not nearly as helpful the second time around… these are all very simple to pick up on. When a bartender is really talented, they will go beyond these categories to notice, just by the way a man takes his chair, or by the way a woman orders her drink, that they’ve worked in a restaurant before. When they can tell, just from the clothes someone is wearing, that he drinks whiskey, not scotch, and it better be Irish; or that she likes her margarita with more orange juice than sour and a float of Gran Marnier. When all they need to see is the expression on a 9 to 5er’s face to know that the COLDEST Miller Lite bottle needs to be dug out of the bottom of the beer cooler, immediately.

Reading people is not just about what they need, of course. Our motives are admittedly mostly selfish, as the reason we are there, after all, is to line our pockets with your lovely dollar bills. (Or preferably, twenties.) The difference between a good bartender and a bad bartender, however, is that the customer of a good bartender will part with it gladly and gratefully, and come back to do it again the next day. Yes, you pay us, but it most certainly is for a service.

I’ve played the cute flirty girl, the southern belle, the tough-exterior New Englander with a heart of gold, the dominatrix, the temptress, the one-of-the-boys sports fan, the girly girl sorostitute, the pseudo girlfriend, and most frequently (and importantly), the therapist. Reading this, an outsider might think this sounds deceptive, or that we are all actors. In reality, all of these are simply different facets of my personality that I choose to emphasize when presented with a person or group who will respond to that particular persona. If you think about it, we all do this in our everyday lives, in order to relate to the many and varied people who cross our paths. We just do it more consciously. And better. For money.

Bartending, REAL bartending, is the art of being able to be whoever the person on the other side needs you to be.