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I’ve always found it ironic that our business is to sell people alcohol, but we also have to make sure they don’t get too drunk. We want them to buy more so we make more money, but we can’t sell them too much because it causes problems—The worst being that they will kill themselves or someone else. The drunker they get, the more childish they become, and have you ever tried to tell a child they can’t have more of something they want? It doesn’t go well. At least children are tiny and tire easily. Drunk adults have a much greater capacity for bullshit and it falls on us bartenders to deal with it.
Cutting off guests who’ve had too much is one of the most common challenges bartenders have to face on a daily basis. It’s never fun, it’s never exactly the same, but if you are prepared and you approach the situation as an opportunity for good hospitality, cutting someone off doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
My guest this week, Andrew Meltzer, has had a lot of experience cutting people off and he had some great advice to share. Andrew was the 2016 World Class bartender of the year, president of the San Francisco USBG chapter and he is currently the beverage director at the brand new Noosh restaurant, where we recorded this interview. Before Noosh, Andrew managed 15 Romolo, an amazing Spanish focused bar in the North Beach neighborhood. 15 Romolo is a nice place, but it’s literally surrounded by strip clubs and dive bars with loud music. Not that there’s anything wrong with those places, it’s just that the neighborhood tends to facilitate over doing it and that spills up the alleyway through the doors of the bar.
Check out my interview with Andrew in the player below, on this page or wherever podcasts are found. Make sure to hit subscribe to stay up to date with all of our great conversations about the biggest challenges in bartending. Read on after the break for some more in depth advice about cutting off drunk customers.
We bartenders are responsible for the safety of our guests and we have an obligation to make sure nothing bad happens as a result of us serving alcohol. “Say that person goes out and causes damage or drives their car drunk and kills somebody,” Andrew said, “There are laws that make you liable for even the death or damage.” These laws are called Dram Shop Laws, and they are slightly different in different states or countries, but they generally place some level of legal liability on either the staff, the establishment or both for the actions of guests who are over served and cause damage.
The idea behind pretty much every bar is essentially the same: Create an enjoyable environment for people to come have drinks or food. This is our business. Maybe some bars don’t play the music you like, some bars don’t serve the food you like, some bars don’t play the sports games you like, it’s impossible to please everyone all the time, of course, but the idea is still pretty much the same.
Unfortunately, sometimes guests have a different idea of what the bar is supposed to be. Some people go to bars to start fights and act out their aggression, some people go to bars to coerce women and men into having sex with them and some people use our bars as a platform to push their political agenda. This is an unfortunate reality that bartenders sometimes have to deal with, and in certain certain markets like Uptown Oakland, Calif., violence is commonplace.
My guest today is Nate Olson. He’s worked behind the bar for two decades all across the country: in Minneapolis, Miami, New Orleans and the San Francisco Bay Area. Nate currently manages a lovely Italian restaurant in Oakland called Lungomare. Nate has seen some shit during his tenure, he’s had to deal with violence towards himself, his coworkers and between customers. He was managing Oakland’s Make Westing bar during the incident last July that involved death threats, Proud Boys, riot police and protesters. We will dive more into this incident and other violent situations after the break.
It is unfortunate and sad that acts of violence sometimes happen at our bars, and it’s extremely hard to know what to do. Every situation is different, but hopefully if we hear more about what others have done in the past, we will be able to handle these situations better in the future. Nate had a lot of great advice about what worked for him and what he would do differently. Check out my interview with Nate in the player below, on this page or wherever podcasts are found.
Honestly, I’m not an expert on violent situations and I’ve been fortunate myself to not be involved in very many. Every situation is totally different, which makes it so hard to know what to do. Experience helps, of course, but if the situation turns violent, it could be your last experience. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 138 fatalities in our industry in 2017. Many of those were the result of violence. Just a few weeks ago, four people were shot inside of the Halftime Sports Bar in downtown Oakland. My hope is that by learning from the experience of others we can better handle these situations ourselves, or even prevent them from happening altogether. Nate shared his experiences with some pretty traumatic violence. I want to get into these specific events a little bit more here.
Bars can be dangerous places, especially for those of us who work behind them. Cuts, scrapes, burns, slips and falls are all quite common injuries, and sometimes bartenders suffer even weirder injuries like bar spoon puncture wounds. I’ve experienced many of these myself and I don’t know anyone in the industry who hasn’t. It’s common for injuries to not be treated correctly or quickly enough and often, bartenders will continue working with an injury even if they probably shouldn’t. All too often, I hear about bartenders taping themselves back together and finishing out a busy shift. My guest this week, Julie Kunz, even tells a story about a time she sustained a concussion and continued working the rest of the night. She didn’t go to the hospital until days later.
Julie has worked at many amazing bars in the Bay Area, including: Cafe du Nord(with Bon Vivants), Hard Water and the Michelin star Nico Restaurant. Julie has suffered many of the most common and uncommon bar injuries and is currently recovering from a foot injury at the time of recording. Because of this, we actually recorded this interview at her home in Oakland, Calif. (apologies in advance for the garbage truck noises in the background). It’s always morbidly fun to hear about gross injuries, and Julie had many great stories to share.
We were joined by registered nurse Andrew Campbell for this episode. Andrew began working in hospitals in 2004 and has recently transitioned to a career in personal training and holistic health coaching. He currently runs a personal training program called &Kettlebell. Andrew had a ton of knowledge to share about how the body works, how to treat injuries, when you should go to the hospital and some great tips on how to avoid fatigue and better take care of ourselves behind the bar.
Listen to my interview with Julie and Andrew in the player below or wherever podcasts are found, and read on after the break for a more in depth look at common bar related injuries and how to treat them.
Some important facts about bar injuries
Injuries are common at bars and restaurants where knives, peelers, ranges and ovens, torches, boiling hot liquids, slippery floors, hard surfaces and broken glass are all just tools of the trade. When you put it that way, a bar sounds more like a house of horrors or a teen slasher movie than a fun place to imbibe. Combine all of those dangers with fast paced, high volume service and alcohol use and you’ve got plenty of accidents waiting to happen. And that’s just the acute injuries—there’s a whole world of repetitive stress injuries, alcohol related conditions and long-term health problems that bartenders suffer from.
It’s hard to say exactly how often bartenders sustain injuries at work, as the research isn’t very specific or conclusive. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that three per every 100 industry employees sustained work related injury or illness, more than one per 100 cases resulted in lost time, transfer or restriction. Those numbers are based on the more than three million strong combined workforce of hospitality workers in any role. Those are only the reported cases though.
There are few phrases I want to hear less than, “I want to speak to the manager!” In this episode, I got to sit down with my long-time friend and colleague James Butler, and talk with him about the challenges he has faced as a manager in the bar and restaurant industry here in San Francisco. James has been in the industry since 2007. He has worked and managed many different bars and restaurants, everything from sweet and small neighborhood haunts to hopping Mission cocktail bars. He currently runs a wine consultancy called Cluster and Cane for wine program development and high-touch wine tourism in Northern California.
Managers face a unique set of challenges on top of the challenges we all face in this industry. Managers not only have to deal with the same customer issues, work life balance, emergency situations and everything else that goes along with day to day bar and restaurant service, they also have to handle relations among staff, putting together a solid team, managing the whole operation of the bar and much, much more. It’s a difficult job, and managers are not always compensated for all the extra work they have to do. James has some great advice on how to face these challenges and thrive as a bar or restaurant manager.
Listen my conversation with James in the player below or wherever podcasts are found, and make sure to subscribe with the links in the player, on this page or in your favorite podcast app to stay up to date with our weekly conversations with bartenders about all sorts of challenging situations. Read on after the break for more on our conversation about management problems.
Common management challenges and what to do about them
Upset Customers
“I want to speak to the manager,” has become such a cliche in our industry. It’s a phrase nobody wants to hear, and interactions that begin with that phrase often don’t end well. But James believes that they don’t have to end badly, and they can even be amazing opportunities to create an even more positive experience.
“People like your restaurant they may tell a couple friends, people don’t like your restaurant they’ll tell a bunch of friends,” James said, “people have a weird experience or a bad experience, and you fix it, and they’ll want to tell everybody.”
James shares and example of a time he helped a bad customer experience turn into a positive one by completely resetting the table and basically starting over. James pulled all the food from the table and reset it, opened some wine and started the group off on a completely new course.
“They needed a sea change,” James said, “and that meant seeing the table completely get rebuilt, deal with someone else for the evening… I can’t remember if those people ever did come back to the restaurant, but I really feel everyone in the restaurant did everything possible to really just make sure they had the experience they wanted to have.”
Hey, Episode 0 is finally here! Thanks so much for tuning in and checking us out! Normally I will interview a different bartender every week, but in this episode I’m just at home hanging out with my dog (see photo), and I wanted to briefly introduced myself and the show, and share a story about how I poorly handled a situation with counterfeit currency. You can find Episode 0 in the player below or you can subscribe to the You’re 86 Podcast on this page or wherever podcasts are found.
Since I already introduced the show in the previous welcome post, I’ll just dive right into the intricacies of counterfeit currency in this post. What do you do about counterfeit money? Definitely not what I did, listen and read on to find out more.
Counterfeit currency is an unfortunate issue that we sometimes have to deal with in our industry. The United States Secret Service, which was originally formed to combat counterfeiting, reported that more than 73 million counterfeit US dollars were prevented from circulation in 2017 alone. Although maybe not the most common situation to arise at our bars, it’s important to know what we should do if it does. I certainly didn’t know what to do when I found myself in a counterfeit money situation when I was working at a bar called The Interval in San Francisco. I’ll tell you what I did, then what was wrong about it and what to do better next time.
Here’s what happened to me
It was around 5:30 pm on a summer Thursday night. I was in our little prep room in the back of the bar washing glassware or something when my coworker came in and told me there was a customer making her very uncomfortable and asked if I could handle it. Of course I was happy to help her, but wasn’t sure what I was about to get into.
I went out to the front and found an extremely nervous looking, balding, middle-aged man in a fleece vest standing near the POS. I cheerfully asked him how he was doing and what I could get for him. He was so nervous and awkward that he could barely respond, but he managed to order a cup of tea(which cost $4, the second cheapest drink on the menu).