The Aging Bartender

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

You blink one day and look back and wonder what the hell and where it all went. I went north yesterday for a coffee and as I approached Hollywood I saw a dead rat on the sidewalk and a person on a bench bundled from head to toe in sheets like a corpse about to…

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  • The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

    You blink one day and look back and wonder what the hell and where it all went. I went north yesterday for a coffee and as I approached Hollywood I saw a dead rat on the sidewalk and a person on a bench bundled from head to toe in sheets like a corpse about to…

  • Quince, the Final Frontier

    I had an old 13″ black and white TV in my bedroom as a kid. Four channels. ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. There were two dials on the set, one for the channel and one for the…I have no idea…But every so often I could adjust both, toggle the antennae a bit and get a…

  • Vintage Cocktail of the Day: Porto Flip

    From the confines of the Gentlemen’s Companion II circa 1939 by Charles Baker comes this puppy. Back in the day these guys were putting egg in pretty much everything. Heating up some beer, adding an egg and maybe a couple three four ounces of scotch. During this era, or at least in this book, we…

  • A Standing Army of Bartenders

    A quick Google search this morning informed me there are somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 bartenders currently at work in America. I’m not sure how this is even possible, but I’m impressed. That’s around the same amount of soldiers currently employed in all the branches of the military in this country (U.S. of A). If…

  • Another Preface…

    The act of serving alcoholic beverages has changed little throughout history. A person bellies up, places one of their elbows on the bar top, and either knows exactly what they want or must be convinced in some way by the bartender to try something new in order to remedy their indecision. There’s many methods but…

  • New Cocktail: Simmons & Cash

    Worst name for a cocktail ever? Probably. After a few well placed pats on my own back with the Freedom of ’76 and the Morning Bell, a few others in recent memory…Cocktails that not only tasted good but were clever with the usage and waste of the ingredients, I’ve been scrambling to think of new…

  • New Cocktail: Daily Double

    The machine keeps on rollin’. I had this thought last night while deep in the weeds. Deeeeeep in the weeds but somehow zen, I mean, you’re only in the weeds if you care. But the thought was that cocktails (and food) were this infinite world that would never end. For good and bad, it continues…

  • The Curse of Marjie

    “The Marjie is your honeycomb,” Angel said to me the other day. What does this mean? Well, let’s get into it. When I started at Rustic, a cocktail named The Marjorita. often pronounced in a myriad of different way by guests, was on the menu. Yeah, the proverbial spicy margarita. Look above, a few of…

  • Julep Obsessed?

    And they’re not even that good. I mean, they’re ok, but not something I would ask to accompany my death row last meal. I think that would be a margarita to go alongside my non authentic tacos, the ones I ate growing up that really had not much to do with Mexican culture at all.…

  • They’re not all Bangers

    I thought about this cocktail all day yesterday. I had a version of it at Thunderbolt when I was over there on the eve of my birthday. It was described then as “Tart Cherry Thunderbolt: Overproof Jamaican & Guyanese Rums, Tart Cherries, Adapted from Charles H. Baker’s Around the World with jigger, Beaker and Flask.”…

  • A Day in the Life

    By 3:00 p.m., five days a week, I’m walking through “Sunshine Alley” between 11th and 12th and in the back door of Rustic Canyon. Upon entrance, I see the prep guys, three, sometimes four of them squeezed into the narrow back part of the kitchen where they work on one long stainless steel table. I…

  • New Cocktail: Black Hole Sun

    Yes, I know this one was reported last week as Dreaming of Lee. That was the prototype and this is the finale. I put a double bock on the menu and no one is drinking it. Here’s my passive aggressive take on that–I guess no one likes good beer. The shit is fantastic. There’s a…