Jeff Burkhart: Hostility has no place in the hospitality industry

There we were, three food editors for three different publications and me. Our companies might be at odds, but we ourselves were not. We were incognito, as incognito as people in a small market can be. We weren’t there for any official reason. We were there for the same reason everyone else was — because we were thirsty.

Cocktail menus were provided.

“Hey, Jeff,” said one of the editors. “You are a bartender; would this drink be OK with vodka instead of gin?”

I scanned the ingredients briefly. Essentially it was a gin lemon drop with elderflower liqueur, some sort of flowery garnish and a specialty sugar rim. In the cocktail world, nothing there is all that dissimilar from something else.

“You don’t like gin?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Then yeah, sure, it should be fine,” I said.

We placed our order: a beer, two glasses of wine and that cocktail. Five minutes later, the server returned.

“The bartender says that he doesn’t recommend changing that ingredient. He says that all our drinks have been specially curated.”

The editor looked at me. I looked at her, and then at the server.

“Please tell your bartender that we are willing to take the chance,” I said.

Two minutes later, she returned again.

“He recommends that you get something else.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked.

We often hear the food and beverage industry called the “hospitality industry,” but in some cases, it actually seems more like the “hostility industry.” In fact, there are some people in our industry who actually seem to dislike people intensely. They say things like:

• “These people don’t know anything.”

• “We need to educate them.”

• “They’re stupid.”

Recently, I sat at a counter in another city, in another county, and I heard the cook/server tell the busser: “I don’t want you ever playing any of that ‘fake’ blues here. We are only ‘true’ blues here,” in response to that busser playing a very successful blues guitarist’s song.

And that sort of sums up the problem. Who was he to say that? What gave him the special right to deem it so? He had managed to move from an opinion — based on what, exactly? — all the way to making absolute proclamations — all because of his position. You see this same thing in the spirits industry, the beer industry, the wine industry and the food industry.

There is a saying: “Want to make someone an expert? Make them a bartender.” And it is true, partly. Once I did a show with Christopher Kimball of “America’s Test Kitchen,” and, while we were off air, he told me a story about ordering an old fashioned, getting something he didn’t recognize and sending it back, only to have the bartender come over and tell him that he didn’t know what an old fashioned was.

Customer service at its best. Whatever that bartender thought he was doing wasn’t actually what he was doing. He didn’t come off as an expert, he came off as a jerk. And we must all be conscious of that. We aren’t trying to be right. We are trying to be hospitable. And if you don’t know the difference between those two things already, no amount of me explaining it is going to make a difference.

If there was only one “right” thing, there would only be one item on the menu. And no one would complain — ever. But the fact is that we all like different things. I don’t care that Anthony Bourdain didn’t like filet mignon; I do. Is Hemingway drinking my daiquiri? No, I don’t think that he is. And I really don’t care what Robert Parker says, what I do care about when I wait on people is what they say. But that is the difference between being an expert and a professional.

We eventually got the vodka version of that drink and weirdly enough, it was terrific. The editor who didn’t like gin was pleased, so much so that she ordered another. The server who delivered it was happy. It was a win-win — except for that bartender. He glared at us all through our happy hour.

Not long after that gin/vodka experience that bar/restaurant closed down. In total, it had a four-month run — not exactly what one would call a success. And sometime after that, that very same bartender applied at my place of business.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• We put that vodka version on our menu, and now it is one of our most popular drinks.

• “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his “Meditations.”

• Once we elevate our opinions to fact, we become the problem, not the solution.

• Good bartenders have solutions for every problem, not-so-good bartenders have it the other way around.

• That “fake” bluesman has sold 9 million mostly “blues” records. One wonders how many records that cook/server has sold.

• We weren’t hiring, certainly not right then.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com