The Strange Seduction of Bartending

On good nights, it’s the best job in the world.

On good nights, it’s the best job in the world. You fly around, pouring three drinks at once, doing every check before your manager asks, continuing an extended private joke in the brief seconds of pause with your co-workers. I remember once rattling off a euphoric text halfway through a shift: I am so good at this! Why don’t I just do this forever!

The truth is that anyone can become a decent bartender, in the same way anyone can become a chainsmoker if they try hard enough. It’s easy. It’s mostly just a series of well-learned habits: habitually checking tables are clear, habitually masking your indifference when regulars appear, habitually pouring drinks until you barely need to look at your hands.

Service work forces you into cycles, which is part of why it’s so soul-crushing; every day the same process, the messing up and then the cleaning down, the close and then the open. But there is another side to those cycles, which I’ve come across in bar work specifically. Cycles are comforting, and we cling to our habits. That’s why, on their days off, most bartenders go reflexively back to their bars. It’s my place, you think. Where else would I go?

I came into bar work with an aim to avoid this. I did not want to get attached. I’d seen it happen to my friends, who would work in divey bars for a month and then demand we go there all the time, standing up to the critics with alarming conviction. It didn’t make sense to me; as a waitress I’d gotten used to hating the places I worked, and deriding them with the same fierce passion my friends used to defend their bars. But then, six months in, I caught myself walking 40 minutes across town with my laptop and two bulky textbooks strapped to my back so I could do some studying at work. I told myself it was for the free Wi-Fi — but come on. There’s free Wi-Fi everywhere. When I got there I felt safe and secure, they way I hadn’t in my messy flat or in the clinical university library. It had happened: I was hooked.

It feels cheaper to drink in your own bar; but they key word is ‘feels’, not ‘is’. I worked in one place that gave staff a 50-percent-off discount, but in my experience this generally means that you either drink more, or bring your friends and pay for all their drinks too, spending the same amount you would have anyway.

When you’re on shift there are always freebies, too — misheard drink orders, out-of-date beers, an entitled regular deciding the Birra Moretti tastes different than it did yesterday. Off shift, there is no real excuse. I was paying the same jumped up prices as everyone else there, except I knew how ridiculous the markups were. Adding insult to injury, I was paying for these overpriced drinks with the wages they’d just paid to me for a week’s hard work. I worked at one bar where we were paid £6.70 ($8.53) per hour, and one glass of wine was £6. I should have just gone home, but I didn’t want to leave my bar, and so half a night’s wages went back into the register.

This is the symbiotic relationship between bartender and bar. You work for the wages they pay you, then spend them back into the bar, and then work for them again. We’re back to cycles, and the bartender is very much a part of the machinery.

Once I was locked into the mechanism of the bar, small things seemed to matter a lot more than they should. I began to care deeply about the way the bar was run, the rises and falls of the nightly draw, the habits of our regulars. There’s gossip and speculation in any job, but it is service work especially where workers spend hours hashing over the state of the business, often in a harried, obsessive tone. Of course, this makes sense — we were dependent on the bar’s success, because no business meant no shifts, meant no wages. But conversely, the bar was directly dependent on us. After all, it is the quality of service that can make or break a bar — unlike cafés and restaurants, where I’d argue quality of food is the deciding factor. This is another element of the seduction of bar work — the bartender is suddenly, bizarrely, important.

This may be the root of all of those smug “What Your Bartender Really Thinks of Your Drink” posts than seem to float around online, the ones that I imagine are all written by the same guy in his late twenties with bad tattoos and a snapback he is too old to be wearing. This guy cares a lot about how a drink should be served; he cares so much. It is very important to him that a shot is poured the right way, and that the right number of ice cubes are provided. He’ll say it’s because he’s an alcohol purist, but it’s not. It’s because he really gives a shit about his job. To him, it’s the most important job there is.

This obviously takes its toll. Bartenders aren’t stupid — beneath the superiority and pride is a firm bedrock of cynicism, and the usual existential angst that comes from menial service work. It’s depressing to commit so much emotional labour towards a cause which is ultimately meaningless. The money slowly ceases to be worth it. I spent my last few months of bar work dreaming of a boring 9 to 5 job where I could work without having to be fully present, without having to care at all. I could feel myself wanting to discuss the workings of the bar all the time, with people who had little interest. Think of Mean Girls, where Cady can’t stop obsessing over Regina, wanting to bring her up every time the conversation veers away from her.

It had to end. I was lucky to have a fixed end date — I moved to a different country, and now I’m pursuing that 9-to-5 dream that I nurtured all summer. My last shifts were strange — I wanted to spend the whole evening celebrating, but was continually drawn into the usual routine of doing my job, restocking fridges, pulling beers. My time as a bartender ended without fanfare; I spent one last scrap of my paycheck on a glass of wine, and then walked home the long way, feeling as if I had just lost a lover. I bought a bottle of much cheaper wine on the way home and drank it in bed with my girlfriend. By the next day I had already ceased to care.

Onjuli Datta is a writer and former barfly currently living in Berlin, Germany. You can find her on Twitter @jocktober_.

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