The Aging Bartender

May All Your Ups and Downs Be Between the Sheets

Everyone must have a go to toast in their back pocket…And if you’re a halfway decent bartender with any gumption at all then you’ll have at least two good ones in your repertoire ready to blast out at a moment’s notice. The above toast is my go to and there’s only one half assed other

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  • May All Your Ups and Downs Be Between the Sheets

    Everyone must have a go to toast in their back pocket…And if you’re a halfway decent bartender with any gumption at all then you’ll have at least two good ones in your repertoire ready to blast out at a moment’s notice. The above toast is my go to and there’s only one half assed other…

  • New Cocktail: Going Nuts

    Our new GM, Joey Lee, came up the other night and said, “Hey, I think we need a stirred seasonal on the menu.” Ok. Once again, however, I had a tough time thinking of a decent name that would be kosher for the menu. All the ones my sick mind conjured, were not suitable for…

  • Falling from Grace

    It was a bit of a miracle that I even got a job at Rustic in the first place. This was back in 2015 and my first couple of months in L.A. was a complete nightmare. I had so much experience but no one wanted to hire me. I also flubbed a bunch of job…

  • Thoughtful Usage Comes Down to more than just Produce

    More thoughts. I was brought up in my public schools, good ones, to be cognizant of the environment. We learned about recycling, reducing our waste, etc. and the narrative of our generation was that we were the ones to issue change in the world in regards to how we treated our planet…Yes, this was Vermont…Fast…

  • Bar Hack: Apple Sherbet

    Ah! If you want to piss off anyone not from the U S of A, there really is nothing better in this world than to use the good old red blooded American measuring system. Cups, pints, quarts, gallons…Our current pastry chef, a German fellow, shakes his head everytime I intentionally pump up the proverbial volume…

  • Bar Hack: The Fennel Salt Conundrum

    When you do a search for “flavored salts” online, a bunch of stuff comes up and most of it involves taking the said ingredient and placing in salt for a few days. Although this may work because the salt literally sucks the flavor out, I aim to think a little differently in order to really…

  • New Cocktail: Newton’s Revenge

    Dumb name but one of the best we’ve come up with. I’m starting to do this thing where I’m not totally satisfied with a cocktail until it’s tweaked and tweaked again and becomes something special. $18 is a lot for a drink, even if it does contain organic farmer’s market fruit and decent booze. Chef…

  • R.I.P. Shane MacGowan

    I first encountered The Pogues, you guessed it, in a bar. Here’s the scene and time: My early twenties, The Three Needs Taproom, Burlington, VT. It was winter, and their most famous song came on called, “Fairytale of New York.” My buddy, Donny, sang along to it…”It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank,…

  • An Ode to the Raspberry

    Sweet, acidic, owning a unique flavor, capable and easily lending it’s blood to nay cause, the common raspberry is so often overlooked because of it’s penchant for always hanging around like an unwanted houseguest. It is it’s own fault for being so reliable and steadfast, always available and I’m guessing easy to grow, that its…

  • Simmons and Cash (2.0)

    The late Richard Nixon once said, “You can relight a cigar, but it’ll never taste the same.” You’re welcome to apply that to any situation you choose but in this case I’m using it to reference great cocktails of yesteryear, attempting to do better, and how sometimes you should just maybe bring it all back…

  • My Lacto-Razzies Liveth and Overfloweth Upon the Earth

    Nothing better than sitting around on your day off and getting a video of your lacto-raspberries going absolutely nutso out of the jar. Hey! Fizzy stuff is better than a fuzzy stiff, right? Uh… Yeah, that’s active. That’s what happens when you fill the damn thing almost to the brim, put nothing underneath it, and…

  • Ninth Circle of Hell (but at least there’s a bar)

    Sunday. Century City Mall, Century City, Los Angeles, California. After a couple of hours at the Cheviot Hills kid’s park, the next step in my day off was to meet up at the Century City Mall, most notably, the shoe section at Nordstrom’s, which broke my vow last year of never, ever, going to said…