First they came for the barbacks…

First, they came for the porters, and I did not speak out

because I was not a porter.

Then they came for the dishwashers, and I did not speak out

because I was not a dishwasher.

Then they came for the bussers, and I did not speak out

because I was not a busser.

Then they came for the barbacks

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a barback.

Then they came for me, the bartender

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

According to the current inhabitant of the White House, and many of my fellow citizens, quite a few of the people I have worked alongside for the last 30 plus years have no place in America.

As far as he and his supporters are concerned, they have never belonged here and they simply don’t contribute anything to our country but crime and violence.

In his enfeebled, bigoted mind, these brutal thugs who arrive at the bar before I do, and leave well after I’ve gone home or out to have a post-shift cocktail are nothing but trouble .

They don’t pay taxes on their income, or contribute to the economy by paying rent, purchasing groceries and clothing, driving American commerce by ensuring that there is as little waste as possible at my bar by cutting the right amount of fresh fruit every day, and knowing that we need half as much lime juice on Monday than we do on a Friday or a Saturday. These adherents to the cult-like ideology called MAGA don’t believe that my barback is not just an extra set of extremities or the eyes, ears nor the vital organs of the bar, and they damn sure don’t realize that they are its soul.

That agency who shares its acronymic name with the substance my barback hauls and sometimes chips and hews down from larger pieces into the shape of precious jewels so that I can use it to dilute and chill and preserve the drinks I serve and make them more palatable and more beautiful thinks that they should be herded into internment camps and shipped off to foreign prisons and penned in like animals regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, and without any consideration of their green card or citizenship status.

Why?

Because they are brown.

As far as the insult to frozen water agency is concerned, the person who makes my syrups, stocks my glassware, and is as fast-or faster even-than me at the service bar, but will still have a narrower pathway to being a bartender than even I did because their accent is too thick, or their skin is a different shade of brown, or their hair is too black. They infiltrated this country to work 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week, clearing away people’s dirty glassware, doing double duty cooking their food, and cleaning up the human mess left in our restrooms, and they lie in collective wait, slowly biding their time until the moment comes when they can rise up, awaken from their conspiratorial slumber, and rob, rape, and kill us all.

These criminal barbacks from Ecuador, felonious bussers from Bangladesh, miscreant porters from Senegal and from Mali, and lawbreaking bartenders from Mexico to Morocco are not, in fact, committed to quality service, or to making people happy, or to making a decent living so they can provide for their families and themselves.

No, they are here to undermine our stainless steel values despite having toiled next to me and my colleagues in the trenches of service during the bloodsport that is the push on a Friday night because they hate America and all it stands for. Armed with a bottle blade, uniformed with a black t-shirt, their cunning is surely remarkable, their resolve and work ethic are incredible, yet somehow, it is all a grave deception.

To those that would believe this nonsense and irresponsibly and cynically seek to further this false narrative, I say this: The bar and restaurant industry has afforded me a lot of opportunities. And all of them I have had to fight tooth and nail for. I value those gains immensely. But there is nothing I’ve received that is more valuable to me than the quality and diversity of the people I have worked alongside that come from other countries, especially Latin countries.

These are the immigrants.

Now let me tell you about a fellow I once knew named Jose. I worked with Jose at a place called Pravda, and in many ways, Pravda was ahead of its time. The drinks program (although they weren’t called drinks programs back then) was designed by Dale Degroff, and its free-poured, high-volume approach to making cocktails set the stage for the future success of places like Employees Only, Macao Trading Company, and Sip and Guzzle.

I worked at Pravda shortly after I worked at another place called The Odeon. This made for a pretty seamless cultural transition since The Odeon was formerly owned by Keith McNally, and Pravda was then still owned by him. It was said that Keith opened Pravda while he was waiting for all of the licensing and other red tape to clear up for the opening of the behemoth that became Balthazar, and that since he had all the contractors, designers, and architects already lined up, he decided to put them to work on realizing a vision he had for a subterranean vodka bar with caviar that resembled the sort that he had seen during some of his travels in Eastern Europe.

I started at Pravda in the spring of 2001, and little did I know the impact the people I met there would have on me, how much I would learn from them, not just about drinks but about bartending, and the seismic global events that would occur during my time there which would change the course of my professional life and of history itself.  But the events I’m about to share took place before all of that, and the time and the place are just the backdrop for the story of Jose.

Jose was a busser at Pravda. He was about 5’4 with hands the size of a child. He spoke English very well and had a lot of personality. He worked super hard, but he also worked SMART. He was super clever and resourceful and was always fun to talk to.

When it was slow, he would hang out by the service bar facing the floor so he could see all of the tables really well. He was so small you could easily have missed him, but Jose missed nothing.

What I myself missed about Jose during all of our talks was that he was also very ambitious. In fact, Jose had a secret plan.

He wanted to be a bartender.

Jose wasn’t just gossiping and talking shit when he was hanging out by the service bar; he was also watching and learning. And even though we already had a very fast and highly competent barback named Roberto who also made drinks at the service bar alongside the service bartender, which meant there was no real pathway for him to even be a barback. The hill was even steeper for him because the GM thought he was simply too small to do the job. Jose didn’t agree with this though. We didn’t know it at the time, but whenever he worked, he quietly and patiently studied everything we did behind that bar.

He memorized how we marked the placement of the cocktail with a chilled and garnished martini glass, how we held the mixing glass up high at eye level when we poured so we could see the levels of each ingredient, eyeballed the pour counts for each ingredient, the slightly superfluous but theatrical way we would nose the glass before we added the ice and clanking the Boston shakers together before shaking them, straining the drink and snapping off its last drops like a matador waving his cape in the last moments of a bullfight.

We wore crisp white chef’s jackets that were inspired by a famous cocktail bar called Schumann’s in Munich. The bussers and food runners wore black t-shirts that had the image of a big tin of caviar on them. I still have a couple of the jackets and one of the t-shirts for some reason. We all wore long, white bistro aprons that looked like skirts with the strings wrapped twice around our waists. There was a sartorial hierarchy to all this, and the bartenders were at the top of it.

This was not lost on José.

As I said, José had a plan. He watched and hatched it until one night on December 30th, 2002, his opportunity came. How do I know the exact date and time? Because it was New Year’s Eve Eve, which fell on a Monday, and that year, New Year’s Eve itself fell on a Tuesday. This meant that both Sunday and Monday, when normally only one bartender worked solo and without a barback, were as busy as a weekend night when we would have two bartenders and a barback. It was so busy, in fact, that one of the managers called me in to work the night before, but I didn’t get the message until late, and by the time I got there, things were already quieting down.

That night, I prepared myself and the bar like I was going to war because the previous night had been so insanely busy.

Even though this had happened, management neglected to schedule another bartender or even a barback to help me.

At first, service appeared normal. Maybe a bit busier than a typical Monday. Still, every time I made a Cosmopolitan, I refilled the cranberry juice storm pourer, I kept the bar napkins piled high, the simple syrup backup bottles full and handy. I cut extra fruit when I prepped the bar; I was as focused as an old gunslinger.

As I said earlier, the restaurant was below ground, and in the winter, it had heavy drapes in front of the door to minimize the amount of cold air that could come in when guests entered. Because the drapes hid the door, we also had a motion detector that, as a security measure, would beep every time the door opened. Working there, one would get used to the space between the beeps as an indicator of how busy it was getting.

The night progressed, and while it was busy, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, and since I had overprepared, I began to think I might get through the night okay.

Then the motion detector started to beep more. And more.

And more.

The service bar printer began to spit out more and more dupes sounding like an old-fashioned ticker tape during the stock market crash of 1929: 2 Melon martinis, a Cosmopolitan, an Apple Martini, a Kempinsky Fizz, 4 chocolate martinis (super popular also the only batched drink thank God).

I started to get overwhelmed.

I only had two hands, and most of the menu drinks needed to be shaken. Meanwhile, Jose was bussing tables, but he was also watching the bar closely. NYC bartending legend Henry Lafargue, who has since passed into glory, was managing the floor that night, and for whatever reason, he had every faith that I could handle things.

Perhaps too much faith.

I quickly began to feel like a surfer staring at a looming tsunami. Sirens went off in my head. This was not a drill.

Jose looked at me expectantly, eagerly even, waiting for me to pull a Hackman in Hoosiers and call him off the bench.

Finally, his moment came. I asked him to come behind the bar and serve only beers and things like vodka sodas, vodka cranberries, and other drinks that we call one-and-ones.

The drink orders flooded in, the motion detector at the front door sounded like a damn smoke alarm going off, and the service bar printer rattled and hummed as the dupes spooled onto the floor.

Even though I told him not to, Jose started making Apple Martinis and other menu cocktails. He had been watching us work so closely during his downtime stationed by the service bar that he had memorized many of the recipes just by observing. It was impressive how well he pantomimed the way we made the drinks. Some of them were still not made correctly, but he came damn close on most of them.

Things descended into borderline chaos. The entire bar was 2-3 deep, the restaurant was packed, and it was just me and Jose, a busser drafted into service as a barback making the drinks for the entire restaurant. I looked at Henry, and he looked unfazed. Amused even. I was sweating profusely, and I found a moment to indulge in a common custom and a rite of passage at the bar and share it with Jose. Together, we pounded a shot of Stoli Gold vodka.

I got absolutely crushed during service that night. It seemed like the drink orders would never stop coming. But that shift would have been infinitely worse had Jose not been working. He didn’t just save my ass; he saved the entire restaurant from going down in flames.

One metric that might provide some bit of perspective on how busy it was: On even the busiest Saturday night, the most the bar would ever get tipped out by the servers for making their drinks—this is based on sales volume, mind you, since that’s how they also get tipped—was 150 bucks. So with this in mind, how much do you think the servers tipped me out that night?

They tipped me out $150.

When the mayhem was over, I stuffed a wad of cash into José’s child-sized hand, thanked him, and we did another shot of Stoli Gold. I broke down the bar and sat down for a bit after work for a shift drink while I reflected and marveled at how strategically José had been at playing the long game without any of us realizing it.

A couple of years later, and after I had moved on, I heard that José had followed the two most prominent bartenders at Pravda and future co-owners of Employees Only to another place Keith McNally opened on the LES called Schiller’s. There he became a full-time barback, and then when they left there, along with Henry and others, left to open their own place. That place?

Employees Only.

There José finally became a full-time bartender. What’s more, his regular shifts were working behind the bar with Henry. This little Mexican guy had become a kind of Mighty Mouse of the bar. Equipped with a sharp mind and an ambitious and industrious spirit, a former busser who could barely see over the bar top and who could barely get his fingers around a Boston Shaker, ended up an opening Principal Bartender at what was then the most high-volume and profitable cocktail bar in the city, maybe even the country. And you know what?

He didn’t steal a dime.

Cocktail Epilogue

The Moroccan Martini created by Abdul Tabini:

2 parts Stoli Ohranj

1/2 part fresh lime juice

1/2 part Agave nectar

Splash fresh orange juice

4 mint leaves

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass along with ice. Shake passionately to insure the breaking up of the mint leaves. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a mint leaf.