Eric Felten at the WSJ on the sad (and enraging) state of most grand hotel bars:
drinking, with barmen who were the best in the business. . .Nowadays you're lucky to find a hotel
bartender whose vocabulary extends very far beyond Vodka-Tonic. Over
the past year and a half, as I traveled around the country, I stopped
in at dozens of grand old hotels, incognito, to see if their bars lived
up to the tradition. I found a few gems in a sea of expensive
mediocrity (punctuated with the occasional fiasco).
Chief among these is this abomination:
restored Roosevelt Hotel. He happily told me that he didn't know how to
make many drinks at all. When needed, he could always just look
something up in the bar book behind the counter. But most of the time
he didn't bother to use the book: "If people ask for a drink I don't
know," he explained, "I can always kind of make something with sour mix
and vodka and they'll be happy." A more eloquent and concise expression
of the state of bartending in America you couldn't hope to find.
There's no shame in looking something up, but ignoring the request
and faking it with crappy ingredients? That's like being a chef at
a restaurant and saying "I don't know how to make Hollandaise
sauce, but here's some Velveeta mixed with gravy from a jar."
This hereby serves as advance notice to any bartender who tries to pawn
a sour-mix-vodka concoction off on me instead of the drink I've asked
for: you will receive an angry complaint from me and you'll be the
subject of a discussion with the manager.
Though that may not help; my friend Michael Palmer relates this sad tale of an afternoon almost exactly a year ago at the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel:
My wife and I got married at
the Carlyle and had a drink at the bar later that night. Four years
later we went for a classy drink at 1pm, first drink of the day. I
asked for an Old-Fashioned, and was given a tiny bit of Scotch
over ice, and lots of soda, in a tall Collins glass. No sugar, no
orange, no bourbon, no bitters. . .
I said 'I don't think this is an Old-Fashioned". . .to which he said, "Sir,
might I suggest when you order from a hotel bar, you know what's in the
drink before you order it", with the "might I suggest" remarkably
condescending. He rolled his eyes at my party and walked away. . .I ordered a Manhattan (which was soapy), we paid our $16 per drink
tab and left.
The Bemelmans! As my friend concluded, "they are definitely coasting on their reputation."
This story reminded me that I haven't been to the Bemelmans since Audrey Saunders left to start the Pegu Club. A return visit is clearly in order.
(hat tip to Anita for the WSJ link.)
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