Jeff Burkhart: Being right isn’t always important

“Do you know what this is?” asked my co-bartender, holding up a drink ticket.

The little partially rolled-up piece of paper had a “server’s note” manually typed in to read “Prince Alphonso.”

When you have bartended for as long as I have, you see things come and you see things go. Only a neophyte believes in only their own experience, especially since much of the sum of human knowledge is accessible through that little electronic device in your pocket.

The joke has always been “once around the bowl and it’s all new again,” and for many that fishbowl is quite literally a 3-foot-wide plank 42 inches off of the floor.

Alphonso sounded familiar, but something else seemed wrong.

The drink I remembered was just a layered Kahlúa and Cream with crème de cacao instead. And that is what I said to my co-worker. I probably should have been more specific because not five minutes later a man in his 80s stood at the bar holding the drink. One look at it and I knew why. My co-worker had put it over ice.

“This isn’t a Prince Alphonse,” said the man, proving that one generation removed can change the meaning of anything, be it crème de cacao, or Alphonso.

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“A Prince Alphonse is Kahlúa and whipping cream layered in a cordial glass,” he said. “Garnished with a cherry.”

I just nodded my head.

When a service person makes a mistake, there is sometimes an urge to explain. But trust me, no explanation ever suffices. What will suffice is fixing the problem immediately. There is also sometimes an urge to correct, and that can be even worse.

The King Alphonse cocktail was invented in that period between world wars when peace and Prohibition ruled many lands. Named after the last king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, who was deposed by the Second Spanish Republic and replaced by the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco through the Spanish Civil War. It was the same war reported on by fledgling reporter Ernest Hemingway and immortalized by him in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” his 1940 novel.

Alfonso XIII would never regain his throne and died on the eve of World War II, but the cocktail named for him would live on — just in a different form. In the 1980s, Kahlúa, a Mexican coffee liqueur — made of rum, sugar and coffee — really began to come into its own. Invented in Mexico in 1936, Kahlúa — a Nahuatl word meaning “house of the Acolhua people” — came packaged in a “tiki”-looking bottle, and, coupled with its vaguely tiki-sounding name, sought to take advantage of the last legs of tiki culture, which certainly manifested itself in the late 1980s.

Soon drinks featuring Kahlúa dotted cocktail menus everywhere: the Kahlúa and Cream, the Smith and Kerns (a Kahlúa and Cream with soda water), the Colorado Bulldog (a Smith and Kerns with cola instead of soda water), the Mind Eraser (Kahlúa, vodka and soda water) before progressing to the Black Russian (Kahlúa and vodka) and then to the White Russian (Kahlúa, vodka and cream).

And it is there, in the White Russian, that the King Alphonse comes back into focus. Some of those Kahlúa drinks were really just versions of the classic Brandy Alexander, a drink invented in the 1920s and ’30s and named after Czar Alexander III, the penultimate Russian czar. The Brandy Alexander wasn’t originally made with Kahlúa, it was made with crème de cacao liqueur, brandy (probably Armenian cognac) and cream. The original White Russian probably came with crème de cacao too. Monarchical nostalgia certainly colored that era, coming so soon after the collapses of the Hapsburg dynasty, the Second German Reich and Hapsburg/Bourbon Spain. So, it shouldn’t be such a surprise that the King Alphonse cocktail reigned sometime after.

None of which did I share with the man standing at the bar. Instead, I made the drink as instructed: Kahlúa and whipping cream layered in a cordial glass and topped off with a cherry.

“Here’s your Prince Alphonse,” I said.

Later on, he stopped by the bar and slipped me a five-dollar bill.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Being right isn’t always the most important thing.

• Psychologist Carl Jung once said, “Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.”

• In the 1980s, I could have purchased two King Alphonse cocktails for $5.

• Jung was both a psychiatrist and a psychologist but started out wanting to be a minister. Boy, Freud would have had a field day with that.

• Prince Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, 50, is the current head of the House of Bourbon, brother to the king of Spain and heir to the defunct throne of France.

• Coffee and cream, whodathunk?

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