Well, it has happened again.
Some time ago I reflected on the all too common experience of ordering a simple martini from bar staff that should absolutely know how to make one, only to end up with a glass of vaguely cold disappointment for my troubles and hard earned cash. And I’m not talking about rocking up at your local, and schooling them in the arts of gin – I mean proper cocktail bars, the kinds of places where they’re proud of their mixing and their fancy liquors and general ‘we’re here for drinkers’ vibe.
These are places that should fucking know better.
Now, last time I politely refrained from mentioning the venue for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s a local, and generally, it’s poor form to shit where you drink and all that. And, secondly, it was a young lad who’d made the drink in question, and the guy who ran the bar looked after me in the long run, so… no harm, no foul.
But today, comrades, I say… fuck that honorable bullshit, because over the weekend I had a martini that made me want to take a dump on the bar and ask them to pay for it.
This thing was just a fucking shambles. It was weak and watery, like the mere hint of gin that had been added to the damn insipid mess had first been heated, and so melted most of the ice it was constructed with. It was unpalatably moist with an excess of vermoth, and dirty as sin; and not in that good savoury way that I can just about forgive, either. This was like a cheap vinaigrette of wasted potential, scummed over with my dashed hopes for finding a competently made drink in this wasteland of a drinking city.
Worse, it wasn’t even for me, but had been ordered – by me – for a close friend. Okay, a partner. And yes, fine, I really wanted to impress them so double-fuck-you to the person who made me look like an ignorant poltroon.
Even more aggravating and about three times as mystifying, the lass behind the bar made two martinis side by side, to near identical specifications.
Very dry. Four Pillars gin. One with a twist, one with olives. AND SHE MADE THEM AT THE SAME TIME.
It just boggles my tiny little gin-soaked mind that someone could make two drinks to such different standards.
So where did this happen?
The Opera Bar, down by the harbour. It is not Sydney’s best bar, not by a long stretch, but the bar staff have a certain machine-like competency and over many years of regular if occasional patronage, the place has never so wronged me as it had just past.
I think I can see where the mistakes were made, though, and it has to do with consistency of measurement. I’d noted earlier in the day that a couple of the staff at the Opera Kitchen’s bar (under the same management) were free-pouring, and not in the generous American way, either. You sit down at a bar in the states, order a neat bourbon, and you’ll get a good generous pour without any need for a jigger or similar measure. here, the RSA standard enforces each shot or double be strictly measured, and at least it means you always get what you pay for.
But the free-pouring on display was downright miserly, and the attention to detail damningly negligent.
As a traditionalist at heart (okay, maybe it’s the high-functioning alcoholism), when I order a beer, I always order a bourbon on the side – the venerable Boilermaker. My first such was fairly poured, and without ice – and let me tell you, the amount of times I have to explain what neat means in this backwards town is beyond the fucking pale. Worse, if I just order neat, even those who seem to get the idea will still want to add ice, so if to be clear as possible I need to order “a house bourbon, neat, no ice”.
Essentially: “Your cheapest hooch because you’ll at least know where it is in the well, with no ice, and no mixer. Also, no ice, seriously, I fucking mean it.”
But I digress.
The bourbon of my second boilermaker was… Well. My requests to the barkeep to “STAY AWAY FROM THE DAMN ICE THANKYOU” was simply ignored, and sometimes a man does not have the stamina to constantly correct those around him. It wasn’t a lot of ice, though, so you know, I could live with… And then holy shit. The dude free-pours my drink, but the catch is that he fills the glass no higher than he had previously.
The fucker actually shorted me.
I ordered my martini later in the day, and yes it was mixed by a different person at a technically different bar, but – again – that lazy free-pouring attitude came into play. And if you can believe it, it was the vermouth that was getting free-poured, and none too evenly I suspect. If she was adding the olives in a similarly devil-may-care and fuck-the-person-spending-fifty-bucks-on-two-drinks attitude, I can see where this all started to unravel.
Anthony Bourdain wrote in the foreword of the “Les Halles Cookbook” that making food with love is where it’s at. And I sincerely believe that goes for mixing a good drink as well. I’ve watched bartenders from Los Angeles to London pour and mix drinks at a bar with the same reverent intensity as I do when I’m building a cocktail for friends, no matter if I’m the only person propping the place up or if it’s jam-packed on a Saturday night. It’s why I can forgive some mistakes, because at least someone’s trying, and at least some measure of pride is taken in correcting the mistake.
I very rarely return a drink to the bar, but I did in this case. The dude behind the register wanted no part of the problem when I told him this an undrinkable martini, instead throwing the guys who made it under the bus, and when I looked for them, they were nowhere to be seen.
So triple fuck you, Opera Bar. For your poor attempt at the most basic and noble of drinks; fuck you for letting down not just me, but the person who had innocently put their trust in my ability to get them expensively hammered while watching the sun set over the City That Mostly Sleeps These Days; and then fuck you once more for not even having the fucking confidence to own the fact that you had made a drink worth less then gutter-polluted water a few yards away in the harbour.
And, in case you want to know how to make an actually good martini, well, here’s a post I prepared earlier.
For now, I just need a fucking drink.
Throwing Words at the Stars 