Jeff Burkhart: Some bar patrons can’t see the forest for the trees
“I should write a book,” said the woman unbidden by anyone.
In fact, it was such a non sequitur that two people turned away from her and a third made a cutting motion across their throat, signaling to the bartender not so subtly that perhaps she had had enough.
The irony was that she hadn’t had any at all. A nonalcoholic beer was all that she had ordered. And she wasn’t even half done with it. Some people are unusual just the way they are without the alcohol.
Strange thing, nonalcoholic beer. Not all nonalcoholic beers are the same. There are two categories: alcohol-free beer and nonalcoholic beer. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), alcohol-free beer must contain no detectable levels of alcohol or 0.0% ABV. Nonalcoholic beers can have up to 0.5% ABV. However, even with the first category, the second digit is never shown. It can be 0.09%.
And the strange thing about people is that their perception of something might not always be accurate. Are those people really being too loud? Is that party really too boisterous? It all depends on who is looking at it. We all have a bit of myopia, but some of us have a lot.
“Maybe I should write a newspaper column?” she posited again to the general distress of those around her.
Failing as she did with her immediate company, she did an age-old maneuver: She pinned down the bartender.
“Do you think I should?” she asked.
The bartender shrugged while concentrating on the drinks he was making.
“So many people come here,” she said. “Every time, I meet someone interesting.”
I see a lot of pictures online of so-called “great” bars. Often these pictures either have no people in them, or they always feature what looks like the same three people.
Who decides this stuff?
Once I had a customer tell me that his Manhattans were better than mine. In the interest of conversation, and learning, I asked him how.
“What do you do that makes them so great?” I asked.
“Well, I use (the name of a premium sweet vermouth) and (the name of a premium whiskey) and this bitters and that cherry,” he said.
“We have all that stuff,” I said.
“I must mix it differently,” he replied.
“You tell me exactly how to make it, and I will make it that way,” I said.
“Still won’t be as good,” he countered.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I have to make it,” he said secure in his belief.
And that is what it really is about, isn’t it? These days, it’s not an empirical survey of what is true and accurate, but rather a subjective association of opinions designed to aggrandize oneself. Look at any concert footage online, it’s not about experiencing the concert anymore, it’s about associating the concert with oneself via Instagram, X or whatever. Meals aren’t about shared experiences with the actual beings in that room, but rather a glossed-over, filtered, altered reality that can be put online. And that is just the way it is. It’s not so much who we really are nowadays, but rather who we’d like to be that matters these days — all soft-focused and shot from up high.
But in bars, the rubber meets the road. There are people there, and sooner or later you are going to have to interact with them, whether you like it or not — and whether they do, too.
“I can’t believe no one else has thought of this,” my erstwhile writer said.
“Me neither,” the bartender said.
“You don’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea,” the woman said.
Three Manhattans, two mojitos and a pisco sour might have dampened his enthusiasm. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
“You might want to see if anybody else is doing something like that first,” replied the bartender, after balancing the precariously foamy head on the pisco sour for 8 feet down the bar, not spilling a drop.
One might say he stuck the landing if one were looking at things like that.
“Oh, no. I am sure I’ll be the first.”
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope,” once opined Mark Twain.
• Believing in oneself is great, if that belief is well-founded.
• Oddly, a biopic these days is now really a myopic version of an actual biography.
• Observing a phenomenon is not the same as experiencing a phenomenon — just ask any physicist, or Olympian.
• A newspaper column about things that happen in a bar? What a novel idea.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.netjeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com