It was an odd assignment: Go to a bar,
I’m told. Go, talk to a bartender. For a blink, I thought that
I must have looked as if I needed a stiff drink and the confidence of
a stranger, but that moment of self-consciousness was unfounded: bar-tending
is April’s Pick-an-Occupation topic.
Mixology – this isn’t a made-up
name, it’s a term for bar-tending – has as much to do with
mixing well with people as being able to mix drinks. It’s more
than just a temporary or college job, since, as a couple of local bartenders
attest, the money’s pretty good.
With a bit of bias since I love brewpubs
– I like the big metal beer-making containers and tubes and the
“made-right-here” vibe – I discovered a website, www.pubcrawler.com,
which posts customers’ reviews (as well as maps and directions)
about brewpubs all over North America. I found Big Bear Brewery in Coral
Springs, with a whopping 42 reviews and a great average score.
I wandered into Big Bear Brewery for
the first time to find my source for this article. As it turned out
I found two sources. I made the acquaintance of barkeeps Kelli Fafeita
and Lisa Cochrane at the University Drive watering hole. I was pretty
familiar with these ladies by the time I left.
That’s just what they’re
aiming at in their jobs, it turns out. “Making friends with your
customers, you never feel like you’re working,” says Fafeita,
who’s been a bartender for about three years. “I always
feel like I’m ‘sitting’ here, hanging out with my
friends. It’s not really a job – I mean it’s hard
work, but it’s not a ‘job.’ You make a lot of friends.”
A good attitude is at the top of the
list of skills for a bartender. Fafeita explains, “You have to
be a people person, like people, and want to talk to people on a daily
basis. You can’t come to work in a bad mood and want to be by
yourself – it’s not gonna happen.
“Basically, you’re on stage:
You are here to perform,” Fafeita continues, her face showing
she’s aware of the corny sound of the comment. She doesn’t
back away from it, though. “You’re here to cheer up that
person who walks in, in a bad mood. You are here to listen to everybody’s
problems, or be their psychiatrist for the day. You have to enjoy that:
That’s it, bottom line, or this isn’t the job for you.”
Cochrane, a veteran bartender, agrees.
“It’s building a rapport. It’s making friends with
everybody that you can.”
“You want to make them want to
come back,” adds Fafeita. With the regulars, “you have their
drink ready for them when they walk in. They love that.”
So what if a bartender is having a bad
day? “There’s always one person who will bring you out of
it,” Fafeita says. “Sometimes if you’re having a bad
day, you talk to that person over there” — she points into
some day from the past, and to a customer who was sitting on the other
side of the bar — “and suddenly your problems aren’t
so big anymore, you know? There’s always somebody out there having
a worse day than you.”
How does one stay current in a business
where new products are concocted all the time? There isn’t exactly
a national review board of mixology (but I have dibs on creating the
fake t-shirts), so what does a bartender do if a customer requests something
bizarre? “You just ask them what’s in it,” Cochrane
says. “If they don’t know what’s in it, they shouldn’t
be drinking it.” The three of us laugh at that.
“And, we have a cheat sheet,”
Fafeita adds.
Cochrane continues, “Most of the
time people come in with something really off-the-wall because they’ve
gone away on vacation … or some kid made up a shot somewhere,
they made it up for themselves. If you know what’s in it, you
can come up with the proportions.”
What’s the work like, the tempo
of the job? “This place is gets crazy. You get hit all at once,”
Cochrane says. “You turn around and say, ‘hello!’”
She feigns amazement as she glares around the bar, as if it’s
suddenly packed with people. “It really is: it’s insane.”
In the bar-tending business, the popular
time is, of course, happy hour. “We have an awesome happy hour,”
says Fafeita, “from the time we open, at 11:30, until 7 pm, every
single day of the week.”
Happy “hour,” is it? This
term is in the category with “rush hour.” Both seem to keep
getting longer (while the former is certainly more fun). Yet, with such
a long period for daily specials, the pair say nothing about it being
too busy to handle, aggravating, frustrating, or of any of that kind
of language. It’s all about attitude.
Bar-tending is one of those jobs a lot
of people think of as a great part-time or college job. You make friends
all day and the money – which comes mostly from tips – is
better than lots of desk jobs, I’m led to believe. What’s
to keep the part-timers from leaving, then? Some don’t leave.
“There’s a high percentage
of bartenders (who) are college students [and] … stay with
the business because it’s more money than they were gonna make
in the business they went to school for,” says Big Bear Brewery
general manager Greg Sherman.
Cochrane, the veteran barkeep of the
two, sums it up: “It’s fun! You don’t do it 26 years
for nothing.”