The Aging Bartender

Farmer’s Market Loot: 12/13/2023 -Guava Time!

Oh lordy lordy hallelujah. Guava is finally here. The SoCal seasons have been a little off this year…Climate is changing…Everything seemed a little pushed back and simultaneously squished together…Bah, no matter…When it comes, it comes…And there’s almost nothing that comes harder than a guava. The scent of it on the cool, crisp salt wind in…

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  • Farmer’s Market Loot: 12/13/2023 -Guava Time!

    Oh lordy lordy hallelujah. Guava is finally here. The SoCal seasons have been a little off this year…Climate is changing…Everything seemed a little pushed back and simultaneously squished together…Bah, no matter…When it comes, it comes…And there’s almost nothing that comes harder than a guava. The scent of it on the cool, crisp salt wind in…

  • Bar Hack: Pecan Beer Nuts!

    Ho ho! What else strikes such mindless craving in your regulars and ignites within their troubled souls a fiendish lust for sugar, fat, and salt? Beer nuts! Say it again! This time with gusto! Raise a toast to all that is holy and unholy and kneel to the king of bar snacks. Are you a…

  • New Cocktail: Incantation

    Incantation: A series of words said as a magic spell or charm. Sometimes you hit the bullseye with only one shot. You sweep the playoffs, you pitch a shut out. In bartending terms it’s when you nail a somewhat difficult cocktail on the first try. Yeah, believe it or not, sometimes the feces touch is…

  • New Cocktail: Bishop’s Blood

    If you can’t name a cocktail after the venerable Lance Hendrickson character from Aliens you’re simply not doing it right. Also, if you’re unaware of the reference you should probably go watch both Alien and Aliens back to back and then skip over the…Let’s see…One, two, three, four, five, six? Sequels? Well, prequels too. Jesus,…

  • 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,…