My wife, Joana, will occasionally call upstairs to me (where I work), ‘GAAaaaaaabe! They’re doing something on bartending down here!’. ‘Down here’ means downstairs, and more specifically, on Food Network, morning talk shows, or some other food-related piece. Often, this is a very good thing (see: Good Eats’ episode ‘Raising the Bar’ – though that Mint Julep piece leaves a lot to be desired, Alton made a smash more than anything) or it’s a very very awful and heart-wrenching thing. In this particular case upon bounding down the steps I found myself confronted with… ‘Extreme Bartending’.

Now, long before I began my journey into cocktail appreciation I had a distrust of ‘bartending flair’. I found out pretty well into a relationship with a good friend of mine that he is a graduate of the local (and only) bartending school. This piqued my interest and I asked him what they covered. He mentioned spirits, their history, drink-making techniques, and flair. Well, when I asked him how they taught making a Mojito he plaintively asked, ‘What’s that?’. After my impulse to scream and rend my clothing passed, I made him a proper Mojito (it was delicious) and then immediately decided that the school must definitely have emphasized the ‘flair’ bit and that I won’t ever be going. Since then I’ve been highly suspicious of and annoyed by anything approaching ‘extreme bartending’, and with my foray into true cocktail appreciation, my disdain has only grown.

So, it was with growing horror I saw this downstairs:

Extreme Bartending on Rachel Ray

And you missed the part where they showed their bottle flair juggling stunts. Now, I am a pretty easy-going fellow, but I have a few pet peeves:

• air quotes
• ‘According to Jim’
• wasting my bloody time when I need food service or my drink order taken/refilled

[rant]
You know those restaurants/abominations that intermittently have the servers stop everything they’re doing in the name of pleasing and serving the customer to dance to ‘Y.M.C.A.’, do a line dance, or clap loudly and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to some poor sap wearing a travesty of a hat whose office peers thought it’d be a lot of fun to ‘get one over on ol’ Dan!’. I can tell by your expression that you do. Same thing with asshat flair bartending. You’ve succeeding in making only three things by doing this:

• a mess
• a shitty drink
• a potential fire hazard
• a waste of my time
• me pissed off because I’m sitting here sucking on melted ice for the past 4 damned minutes

Ok, so maybe it’s a ‘Pick 3′ sort of thing, but you get my point. Besides looking ridiculous I’m not paying you $8-10 for the pleasure of having half my drink in the bar mat, with the alcohol burned off, and my time wasted. “Hey you… yeah, you, about to flip that bottle around your neck… Sit down, shut up, and make my damned drink, assclown… and put that sour mix away while you’re at it.”
[/rant]

Jeffrey Morgenthaler has a great post covering some of these same issues and more here (and he’s right on the ice thing, I do some food service consulting and I go ballistic when I see glass meeting ice, it’s dangerous and pointless) and I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it already. As for me, I’ll take good mise en place and professionalism in my bartending everytime. And honestly, so should you. The world will be a better place for it.