Wasn’t this post supposed to be about my first bartending job? Fear not, dear reader. It’s a long winded two parter and I’ll get to the point eventually.

One of the best things about working at Sfoglia, aside from the money of course, was being closed on Sundays. It really helped moral. We were a small, tight front of house crew and on our collective day off we often went out to dinners or ballgames, visited bowling alleys, batting cages, driving ranges or some other activity. It made work and New York fun. When it was discovered our boy Pedro, a nighttime bartender with a secret cocaine habit, had been voiding cash transactions and pocketing the money, it was an actual surprise to all of us. The till at night was off more and more in the shifts leading to his shitcanning and like I said, it seemed impossible that Pedro was the culprit. This was a good guy, a tall, scruffy, gangly dude always quick to smile or tell jokes. One of the gang. But after we all spoke of it together, he did seem to go to the bathroom an awful lot as well as own permanent case of the sniffles.

Sfoglia was a difficult place to work, not only because of the sheer amount of business we did, but also because the ownership mismanaged the place. Things always seemed in flux. The only way I was able to slide into eventual night shifts was due to desperation and nothing else. The owners had been clear about not wanting me there for the real bread and butter. I was green and unpolished. I didn’t conform or put shit in my hair. I wasn’t pretty. At the time, all I cared about was eating, getting an appalling amount of daily calories in, due to my powerlifting goals and reading, because I wanted to be a writer (although I hardly wrote). I was nearly 200 pounds and strong like an ox but chubby, (perpetually bulking) still smooth faced. My one saving grace was the glimmer of boyish charm still clinging to me. I was the type to not give a shit about my appearance but in my defense the skinny low rise jeans popular in that era looked goofy on my huge ass and quads, made my gut bulge out, and my crotch uncomfortable. Ditto for the skin tight blue oxford shirts from Express the other waifish guys wore which on me looked ridiculous, like a trained, shaved chimp. Nope, I still threw on loose boot cuts accompanied by even baggier shirts with the sleeves rolled up rockabilly style. My footwear? Old steel toed Redwing boots I clomped around in.

After too much bullshit, the majority investors of the restaurant bought out the owners and tossed them to the curb. A coup designed by a part time hostess with no restaurant experience who ended up becoming our GM and torturing us all. A lot of chips fell into place for me with Pedro’s canning and the old owners being drop kicked out of their own joint. We also opened on Sundays. Well, well, well, they needed a bartender to fill all the slots. I stepped up.

Now, we had a full liquor license, but zero drinks on the menu along with zero clue as to anything related to even an elementary bar program. The cocktail renaissance had just begun but damned if I or anyone else there knew it. I had been to Death & Co. in 2005 with a friend and found the whole song and dance ridiculous. I remember being there, quite drunk, in the pitch black, sitting at a booth with a bunch of people from school and my friend telling me all about how cool she thought the whole thing was. “These are cocktails,” she said. “But not like you think. It’s so cool, they use a big block of ice and take chips out of it.” I was a shot and beer man at the time. Usually a bourbon like Maker’s Mark, and a strong IPA. Anyway, at Death & Co. that night I put down a bunch of cocktails, each in one go, in a sort of heroic mockery slash douchey machismo. I do remember drinking a Last Word and noting how odd it was. Looking back through the haze of my own idiocy and thick layers of regret, I realize I should have been paying attention.

At Sfoglia the majority of drinks (sadly similar to today) were either gin or vodka martinis. We hand juiced lemons and limes to order for the occasional Cosmopolitan. Everything was free pour, meaning no measuring, no consistency. I acted like I knew what I was doing well enough to fool people (which is more than half of bartending, maybe I’ll do a post on that). Confidence is the balm to stupidity. We had a whole wall of various amari and weird bottles like Tuaca and even green chartreuse which one of the servers always put in her hot chocolate (I buried that one away somewhere in the memory banks). Remember, this is the same year the first touch screen iPhone came onto the scene and most of us still didn’t use our phones to access the internet, so if someone ordered a weird drink I would simply flub the shit out of it. Sidecar? “Uh, remind me what’s in that again?”

Still, it felt good to be behind the bar. I always loathed waiting tables, possibly because my hatred for servers, innate within all cooks, (even those who had sold out) remained intact. But, being behind the bar had a few details I hadn’t anticipated, namely the fact that you can’t escape from an annoying person. Yeah, every so often you get one of those goons who wants to bludgeon you to death with their words. Maybe their husbands or wives have grown bored with them, maybe they’re just lost souls with no one else. Whatever the case, they come in because they need someone to talk to. Humans are social creatures and places like New York, where you’re literally surrounded by people on a daily basis, can sometimes be the most solitary because you realize you’re nothing in the mess of civilization. Sitting down at a bar and having a drink, even a shitty one, is one of the great pieces of this amazing puzzle we call life. A universal activity we share as a species. From New York to Rio, Guam to Greenland, (any bars in Greenland?) it’s all pretty much the same. You’ve been walking around and you see a place, a person behind a counter with the bottles all lit and ready to go, just for you. Countless good times as well as bad, gut busting laughter and endless rivers of tears contained within the precious, gleaming liquids. Maybe there’s another solo schmuck just like you sitting, gazing at the glimmering glass and you realize you’re not so alone and that we’re all quite similar. All it takes is a drink or two or three to smooth it all out.