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xiphiasAfter the "Researching Drink Recipes and Collecting Books" panel was over, and Lis and I chatted with the panelists for a bit, we grabbed food -- I forget where -- and then went off to our next panels. I was a little late for mine; I don't remember why. Lis went to the "How to Get Your City, Bar, Recipe, or Bartender More Media Coverage" panel, which she can write about if she wants -- but the takeaway message was, "Journalists are even lazier and farther behind in their deadlines than you are. If you can hand them most of a story all nicely packaged and tied up in a bow -- with photos -- they'll be your best friend. They NEED an extra twelve column inches by yesterday, and if you can give it to them with very little work on their part, they'll take it. Of course, you need a STORY -- and stories are about PEOPLE. People are interested in people. So write them a story about people that their readers will be interested in, and give it to them, and bingo."
There's more to it than that, of course, but that's a lot of it, and it's something all of you can use, too. I mean, is there anyone reading this who DOESN'T need occasional publicity? Oh, probably, but, let's fact it -- most of you are writers, photographers, academics, musicians, jewelers, sculptors, chefs, cartoonists, actors, jugglers, singers, clowns, dancers, brewers, essayists, religious celebrants, graphics designers, some combination of the above, all of the above, or have some other profession or hobby that would be advanced by getting some sort of press notice in some sort of press.
Me, I went to "How to Create the Right Cocktail Menu for your Bar or Restaurant." Which was also fascinating.
Like I said, I missed the beginning of this panel, so I didn't get all the introductions. Julie Reiner, who just opened the Clover Club in New York, was moderating. The rest of the panel were Tony Abou-Ganim, Willy Shine, and Eben Klemm, all of whom work as consultants developing menus for new restaurants, bars, and restaurant chains.
When I walked in, Tony was saying that an important part of making a new cocktail menu successful was to make sure that your bartenders were on board with it. He mentioned being at a restaurant bar right around shift change, and he overhears the bartender coming in asking the one on shift if he'd studied for the test. "Yeah," he said, "but it doesn't matter -- nobody's going to ever ORDER any of those."
Tony's ears perked up, because he knew what was going on. Obviously, a new cocktail menu was coming out and the bartenders had to learn how to make them. So, when it was time for his next round, he asked if they had a cocktail menu. The bartender said, "Yeah, I think we've got it around here somewhere -- hang on." He dug around for a bit, and finally pulled it out. Tony looked it over and noticed that all the cocktails featured products from one manufacturer, who'd clearly created the cocktail program to sell their product. "So," Tony asked, "Which of these would you recommend?"
"Frankly, I don't like ANY of them."
Now, is that a cocktail program that is going anywhere? Hell, no. So how do you stay out of that situation?
Well, plenty of ways. You need staff involvement. Don't let a liquor company design your drinks for you -- let your BARTENDERS design your drinks. It doesn't have to be all of them, but let THEM play around with it. Encourage all your bartenders to play, create, innovate. Some of the things will suck -- but if that bartender had had a chance to play around and get something he himself had invented on the menu? Yeah, THEN he'd be excited about it. Even if none of his made the cut, he would have involvement. And if his friends made stuff, he'd be excited for them, too.
And that doesn't just go for the bartenders. 80% of your drinks at a restaurant are sold at the tables, by the waitstaff. THEY should be excited about it, too. Even if they don't have as much direct involvement in the creation of drinks, they can still brainstorm with the bartenders, and, in any case, they'll know and be friends with the bar staff, too, so they can get excited on their behalf.
The menu should be a TOOL, not a piece of junk buried somewhere on the back bar that nobody ever looks. It should be something that the bartenders and waitstaff are proud of, something that they feel that they OWN, that they WANT to share with their customers. Nothing is more infectious than enthusiasm, nothing tastes better than pride.
He also mentioned that you don't have to go too far when you're just starting out. Start out with just a few things that you've got NAILED. Get the foundations strong, and then expand.
He then told another story, about how it's important, once you have a cocktail menu you're excited about, to use it. Be aware of it, and be aware of your customers.
He was working at a bar in Las Vegas, and a couple came up to him. The man ordered a Madras, and the woman stared at the overwhelming array of shiny bottles and flashy lights and so forth that you get in a Las Vegas bar, and totally froze with a deer-in-headlights look. And she ordered a Budweiser.
Looking at her, Tony could tell that she'd ordered out of panic. "Budweiser" was just the first thing that popped into her head. It wasn't really what she wanted, but, well, it was the first thing that she could think of. But he had just been thinking about the new menu they were doing.
He said, "Pardon me, but I was wondering if you'd like to try something a little different that we just put on our menu. If you don't like it, I won't feel bad, and I'll gladly get you your Budweiser, but I thought you might be interested to try this Bellini we're featuring this month. We make it with fresh peaches. . . " and he went on telling her a little bit about it. And her face unfroze. THIS was something that she was ACTUALLY interested in, once he explained it.
She gave an enthusiastic assent, he made it for her, she tried it, she let the gentleman have a sip, the gentleman put aside his Madras and asked for a Bellini for himself.
That was his last shift of the week. So when he came back in after two days, one of the women who'd been working their over the past couple days called him over. "You know that couple you turned on to Bellinis?"
"Yeah?"
"They were here the whole weekend just drinking Bellinis and playing our slot machines."
Knowing his menu, and reading his customers, allowed him to pair a guest with a drink, and THAT allowed the establishment to not only grab their drinking dollars, but their gambling dollars as well. In Las Vegas, an excellent cocktail menu can get people not only to spend their drinking dollars, but their restaurant dollars, gambling dollars, and hotel dollars as well. In the rest of the country, we don't have gambling, but the "restaurant" connection is big everywhere, and a well-known great hotel bar can affect where people stay.
After he finished his story, Julie reiterated his point about getting bartenders involved and invested in the menu. One thing that she had done was to have a "Guest Mixologist" section on her menu. She designed most of the cocktails on the menu, but would have one rotating spot to feature a drink designed by someone else, someone with a different style. It kept things fresh and interesting, and, when the Guest Mixologist in question worked at her bar, it gave that bartender that much more ownership and involvement.
Eben Klemm took the floor next. He talked a bit about some of the challenges that he could face in designing a great cocktail menu for a client. Some times, he'd look at the bar, and it was just plain physically not set up well for mixing great cocktails. You could pull beers, you could pour a gin and tonic -- but there's just plain not enough room to work comfortably to do anything really good.
Some restaurants have a focus on great wine. Which is a fantastic thing, in itself, but there's only so much space -- the more space you're devoting to wine, the less you're devoting to beer or cocktails. If you have four hundred beers on tap, you're not going to also have a broad and deep wine list and a first-rate cocktail setup -- you just don't have the physical space. Or the mental space to keep up with all the options. And if you have a staff that just plain doesn't drink cocktails themselves, it's going to be hard to get them "on board" -- which, as was already established, is an essential part of making a menu work -- it doesn't matter how good YOU think your menu is -- if the people who are going to be SERVING it don't think it's good, it's not going to be good.
He then put up a slide on "How to Design The Wrong Cocktail Menu", which was mostly elaborations on the basic concept of "Design In A Vacuum".
"As long as you pay no attention to the following factors, you can guarantee failure of your menu!"
Don't consider the style of food that's going to be served at the place. Don't consider the type of clientèle that you're going to be getting -- whether they're looking for the familiar, tried-and-true things that they know, historical things, creative variations of things which they're familiar with, or entirely new experiences. Don't consider the skill level of the bartenders who are going to be making the drinks.
So long as you don't consider those, you can be certain that it's going to be a flop!
As far as the "skill level" thing goes -- the panel suggested that it's a good thing to start simply, and add complexity over time. Start with simple drinks that are easy to make, and maybe one drink that is a little more complex. As your bar staff gains skill and confidence, add in more that are of that complexity level, and maybe just a bit more difficult. Over time, you can train up your staff to be excellent bartenders, able to make anything you desire.
Constant training is vital. One comment that was made was "Socratic tasting". This is part of both teaching your staff to make drinks correctly, and teaching your staff to design their own cocktails. Taste things that they make with them, then talk about it. Ask questions. "What do you think about the balance of sweetness and sour in this drink? What sorts of foods do you imagine people eating with this? How many of these do you think someone would want to drink?" Be a teacher, helping your bar staff learn how to think about drinks, to help them create drinks, and make the ones that have already been created.
Also, it is important that your menu is not static. It should always be evolving. Use seasonal rotations as a time to drop cocktails that aren't selling well off the menu, without it looking like you're calling things "failures". In most restaurants, you probably don't need more than, say, ten cocktails on your menu. You should always be designing your cocktails within a concept -- restaurants should have concepts, and your cocktails should match with that concept.
You should also consider the tradeoff of "complexity vs. volume." If you are going to be making ten cocktails an hour for diners, then you can have cocktails that need five minutes to create properly. If you're going to be making sixty, your drinks need to be much, much simpler to make. But "simpler to make" doesn't have to mean "boring" or even "less complex in flavor". You can use infusions and homemade syrups to bring in complexity, even though it doesn't add any time to the preparation behind the bar. You can use technology to create foams, powders, and gels -- molecular mixology is a way to add interest, and complexity without adding significant behind-the-bar per-drink time.
Eben also likes to use "Trojan Horse cocktails" to introduce drinkers to new ingredients. Let's say that you are a fan of, say, gin. And you suspect that, if your guests tried it, they'd like it. But they don't think of themselves as gin drinkers.
He might create a drink that involves a fresh raspberry puree and a gin with a lot of citrus notes in it. People aren't going to order the drink for the gin -- they'll order it for the raspberries. It's the raspberries that are selling it. But, when they have it, it will also bring out the things that are good in the gin, and guests may discover that they like gin. This is a non-threatening way of allowing guests to broaden their experience of things that they like.
Julie then mentioned a note on pricing: she prefers to have almost all of her drink menu at one price point. Now, that price point might be low for some of the cocktails. But, so long as some of the bigger sellers are cheaper to make, they can pay for the cost of the more expensive drinks.
Willy spoke a bit on the importance of mise en place. It's something that, as bartenders, we all, theoretically, know, but, in practice, we don't do it as well as chefs do. And part of that is that bars aren't designed as intelligently as kitchens are. ("Mise en place" is the practice of having everything that you work with in a logical, easy-to-reach, CONSISTENT place so you can make your dishes, or, in our case, drinks, quickly and efficiently. Chefs at all levels are real good at this -- the fry cooks at the local diner are every bit as careful and consistent with this as the chefs in the high-end places I've worked. We bartenders, however, are . . . less consistently good at this.)
He also suggested that, as long as we're in the kitchen watching how the chefs do this -- talk to the chefs and come up with drinks that match the meals that are going to be served. By including the same flavors. By including the same ingredients. Why not work with the chefs so that, if they are working with a particular herb or spice in a dish, take some of that same ingredient or those same ingredients, and build a cocktail around the same flavors that the dish is being built around? Use the things the kitchen has! And encourage them to use the things the bar has. Try to get a harmonious blending of flavors between the kitchen and the bar by actually harmoniously blending the flavors from the kitchen and the bar.
He, once again, reiterated the importance of including your bartenders in the creative process, and suggested holding "Iron Bar Chef" mini-competitions among your staff, with the winner getting their drinks on the menu.
I don't remember if he was suggesting this as something you'd do for fun outside of normal serving hours, before you open, or as something you'd do in front of guests as entertainment -- either would work, I suppose.
It's important to understand the ingredients you have to work with, both in the kitchen and behind your bar. He's been to places which proudly advertise that they have over 550 different bottles behind the bar -- that's great as far as it goes, but it's pointless unless someone, unless EVERYONE knows what the things in all 550 of those bottles TASTE like. Make sure that everyone is familiar with them so that they can play with them, recommend them, explain them.
When you're designing a cocktail menu for a new establishment, the best time to get involved is BEFORE construction. Sit down with the owner to understand his or her vision -- cuisine, atmosphere, decor, everything. Sit down with the chef and understand what he or she is doing. If there's a separate sommelier, make sure that the cocktail menu and the wine menu match -- including things like using similar fonts. And using the same level of formality in your descriptions. If one of you is being very formal and precise in your descriptions, and the other is being breezy and humorous, it's going to look weird. Make sure that you're both on the same page for how you're communicating -- create a consistent image.
Understand what else is going on in the neighborhood -- what are other restaurants, bars, and clubs doing, what are people enjoying there? Take those things and do them better. Is there a local farmers' market? Use it!
Wally also reiterated Eben's comment about "Trojan horse cocktails" -- if you want to open up a new product line, put other things with it that people will be attracted to. They may not know what cachaça is, they may be afraid to try gin -- but do things with fresh fruit and berries, and that will sell it, so that people will be exposed to the new ideas.
It's also important to know your markets, know who the local distributors and salespeople are. Make sure that you've got the proper glassware for the drinks you're planning on making -- how many wine glasses and how many beer glasses you need are kind of dependent on how many wines and how many beers you intend to sell -- and THAT depends on your menu, guests, and so forth.
Make sure that you have ample accessible storage for your ingredients. Make sure that you have ample workspace for your bartenders.
And don't expect everything to work out immediately -- it will probably take three to six months of tweaking before you get everything running smoothly.
Julie then asked the panel to go a little deeper into a question that had been touched on earlier: how many drinks should you have on a menu?
Eben said that you had to triage what's important: what are the guests coming for? If the cocktails are the draw, then, yes, you need more. But you have to consider the demographics of the people you're serving, the characteristics of the food and the venue, and the skill level of the bartenders. He had to develop a program for a chain of airport bars: airport bars are one of the places that will hire inexperienced bartenders (actually, that's a tip for all of you who are looking to get into the business: airport bars are a good first job -- you learn how to deal with reasonably high volume, and they're usually not that bad to get to on public transit). He developed seven or eight decent drinks that were easy and fast to make.
Wally said that, in a place like that, make sure that they've got the basics down, and add a couple trendy ones.
Wally then asked the other panelists: if you list the ingredients of a cocktail on your cocktail menu, do you list "sugar" as one of the ingredients? He said that, for him, it depended on WHERE the venue was -- in the South, yep. The Southerners like their sugar. :) Eben said that, for him, it depended on how significant sugar was in the drink -- and if the rest of the ingredients would imply that it was sweet. If you're listing fruit and berries, then you don't need to list the sugar, since they already have an idea of what they're getting.
Someone in the audience said that, in their place, they would always list things like "raw sugar" or "turbinado sugar", and the panel agreed with that -- because it's a significant flavor component besides being a sweetener.
In final thoughts, Wally pointed out that one other thing that's vitally important to do in designing your cocktail menu -- and that this was alluded to earlier by Julie, but it was important to reiterate -- cost out your drinks! If it costs more to make your drink than you get in selling it, you really can't make that up in volume.
They finished it up with one final question from the audience, about whether they'd found that using the organic liquors that are coming on the market has acted as a useful draw for them. Eben and Wally both said that "organic" is an important selling point in pretty much everything EXCEPT for the liquor -- as one guest said to Eben -- "What? So I can get an organically-grown poison I'm putting in my body?"
There was a feeling that this might change in the next couple years as people become more aware of the organic, biodynamic, and sustainable-agriculture liquors that are coming on the market, but, for right now, it's not a selling point.
There's more to it than that, of course, but that's a lot of it, and it's something all of you can use, too. I mean, is there anyone reading this who DOESN'T need occasional publicity? Oh, probably, but, let's fact it -- most of you are writers, photographers, academics, musicians, jewelers, sculptors, chefs, cartoonists, actors, jugglers, singers, clowns, dancers, brewers, essayists, religious celebrants, graphics designers, some combination of the above, all of the above, or have some other profession or hobby that would be advanced by getting some sort of press notice in some sort of press.
Me, I went to "How to Create the Right Cocktail Menu for your Bar or Restaurant." Which was also fascinating.
Like I said, I missed the beginning of this panel, so I didn't get all the introductions. Julie Reiner, who just opened the Clover Club in New York, was moderating. The rest of the panel were Tony Abou-Ganim, Willy Shine, and Eben Klemm, all of whom work as consultants developing menus for new restaurants, bars, and restaurant chains.
When I walked in, Tony was saying that an important part of making a new cocktail menu successful was to make sure that your bartenders were on board with it. He mentioned being at a restaurant bar right around shift change, and he overhears the bartender coming in asking the one on shift if he'd studied for the test. "Yeah," he said, "but it doesn't matter -- nobody's going to ever ORDER any of those."
Tony's ears perked up, because he knew what was going on. Obviously, a new cocktail menu was coming out and the bartenders had to learn how to make them. So, when it was time for his next round, he asked if they had a cocktail menu. The bartender said, "Yeah, I think we've got it around here somewhere -- hang on." He dug around for a bit, and finally pulled it out. Tony looked it over and noticed that all the cocktails featured products from one manufacturer, who'd clearly created the cocktail program to sell their product. "So," Tony asked, "Which of these would you recommend?"
"Frankly, I don't like ANY of them."
Now, is that a cocktail program that is going anywhere? Hell, no. So how do you stay out of that situation?
Well, plenty of ways. You need staff involvement. Don't let a liquor company design your drinks for you -- let your BARTENDERS design your drinks. It doesn't have to be all of them, but let THEM play around with it. Encourage all your bartenders to play, create, innovate. Some of the things will suck -- but if that bartender had had a chance to play around and get something he himself had invented on the menu? Yeah, THEN he'd be excited about it. Even if none of his made the cut, he would have involvement. And if his friends made stuff, he'd be excited for them, too.
And that doesn't just go for the bartenders. 80% of your drinks at a restaurant are sold at the tables, by the waitstaff. THEY should be excited about it, too. Even if they don't have as much direct involvement in the creation of drinks, they can still brainstorm with the bartenders, and, in any case, they'll know and be friends with the bar staff, too, so they can get excited on their behalf.
The menu should be a TOOL, not a piece of junk buried somewhere on the back bar that nobody ever looks. It should be something that the bartenders and waitstaff are proud of, something that they feel that they OWN, that they WANT to share with their customers. Nothing is more infectious than enthusiasm, nothing tastes better than pride.
He also mentioned that you don't have to go too far when you're just starting out. Start out with just a few things that you've got NAILED. Get the foundations strong, and then expand.
He then told another story, about how it's important, once you have a cocktail menu you're excited about, to use it. Be aware of it, and be aware of your customers.
He was working at a bar in Las Vegas, and a couple came up to him. The man ordered a Madras, and the woman stared at the overwhelming array of shiny bottles and flashy lights and so forth that you get in a Las Vegas bar, and totally froze with a deer-in-headlights look. And she ordered a Budweiser.
Looking at her, Tony could tell that she'd ordered out of panic. "Budweiser" was just the first thing that popped into her head. It wasn't really what she wanted, but, well, it was the first thing that she could think of. But he had just been thinking about the new menu they were doing.
He said, "Pardon me, but I was wondering if you'd like to try something a little different that we just put on our menu. If you don't like it, I won't feel bad, and I'll gladly get you your Budweiser, but I thought you might be interested to try this Bellini we're featuring this month. We make it with fresh peaches. . . " and he went on telling her a little bit about it. And her face unfroze. THIS was something that she was ACTUALLY interested in, once he explained it.
She gave an enthusiastic assent, he made it for her, she tried it, she let the gentleman have a sip, the gentleman put aside his Madras and asked for a Bellini for himself.
That was his last shift of the week. So when he came back in after two days, one of the women who'd been working their over the past couple days called him over. "You know that couple you turned on to Bellinis?"
"Yeah?"
"They were here the whole weekend just drinking Bellinis and playing our slot machines."
Knowing his menu, and reading his customers, allowed him to pair a guest with a drink, and THAT allowed the establishment to not only grab their drinking dollars, but their gambling dollars as well. In Las Vegas, an excellent cocktail menu can get people not only to spend their drinking dollars, but their restaurant dollars, gambling dollars, and hotel dollars as well. In the rest of the country, we don't have gambling, but the "restaurant" connection is big everywhere, and a well-known great hotel bar can affect where people stay.
After he finished his story, Julie reiterated his point about getting bartenders involved and invested in the menu. One thing that she had done was to have a "Guest Mixologist" section on her menu. She designed most of the cocktails on the menu, but would have one rotating spot to feature a drink designed by someone else, someone with a different style. It kept things fresh and interesting, and, when the Guest Mixologist in question worked at her bar, it gave that bartender that much more ownership and involvement.
Eben Klemm took the floor next. He talked a bit about some of the challenges that he could face in designing a great cocktail menu for a client. Some times, he'd look at the bar, and it was just plain physically not set up well for mixing great cocktails. You could pull beers, you could pour a gin and tonic -- but there's just plain not enough room to work comfortably to do anything really good.
Some restaurants have a focus on great wine. Which is a fantastic thing, in itself, but there's only so much space -- the more space you're devoting to wine, the less you're devoting to beer or cocktails. If you have four hundred beers on tap, you're not going to also have a broad and deep wine list and a first-rate cocktail setup -- you just don't have the physical space. Or the mental space to keep up with all the options. And if you have a staff that just plain doesn't drink cocktails themselves, it's going to be hard to get them "on board" -- which, as was already established, is an essential part of making a menu work -- it doesn't matter how good YOU think your menu is -- if the people who are going to be SERVING it don't think it's good, it's not going to be good.
He then put up a slide on "How to Design The Wrong Cocktail Menu", which was mostly elaborations on the basic concept of "Design In A Vacuum".
"As long as you pay no attention to the following factors, you can guarantee failure of your menu!"
Don't consider the style of food that's going to be served at the place. Don't consider the type of clientèle that you're going to be getting -- whether they're looking for the familiar, tried-and-true things that they know, historical things, creative variations of things which they're familiar with, or entirely new experiences. Don't consider the skill level of the bartenders who are going to be making the drinks.
So long as you don't consider those, you can be certain that it's going to be a flop!
As far as the "skill level" thing goes -- the panel suggested that it's a good thing to start simply, and add complexity over time. Start with simple drinks that are easy to make, and maybe one drink that is a little more complex. As your bar staff gains skill and confidence, add in more that are of that complexity level, and maybe just a bit more difficult. Over time, you can train up your staff to be excellent bartenders, able to make anything you desire.
Constant training is vital. One comment that was made was "Socratic tasting". This is part of both teaching your staff to make drinks correctly, and teaching your staff to design their own cocktails. Taste things that they make with them, then talk about it. Ask questions. "What do you think about the balance of sweetness and sour in this drink? What sorts of foods do you imagine people eating with this? How many of these do you think someone would want to drink?" Be a teacher, helping your bar staff learn how to think about drinks, to help them create drinks, and make the ones that have already been created.
Also, it is important that your menu is not static. It should always be evolving. Use seasonal rotations as a time to drop cocktails that aren't selling well off the menu, without it looking like you're calling things "failures". In most restaurants, you probably don't need more than, say, ten cocktails on your menu. You should always be designing your cocktails within a concept -- restaurants should have concepts, and your cocktails should match with that concept.
You should also consider the tradeoff of "complexity vs. volume." If you are going to be making ten cocktails an hour for diners, then you can have cocktails that need five minutes to create properly. If you're going to be making sixty, your drinks need to be much, much simpler to make. But "simpler to make" doesn't have to mean "boring" or even "less complex in flavor". You can use infusions and homemade syrups to bring in complexity, even though it doesn't add any time to the preparation behind the bar. You can use technology to create foams, powders, and gels -- molecular mixology is a way to add interest, and complexity without adding significant behind-the-bar per-drink time.
Eben also likes to use "Trojan Horse cocktails" to introduce drinkers to new ingredients. Let's say that you are a fan of, say, gin. And you suspect that, if your guests tried it, they'd like it. But they don't think of themselves as gin drinkers.
He might create a drink that involves a fresh raspberry puree and a gin with a lot of citrus notes in it. People aren't going to order the drink for the gin -- they'll order it for the raspberries. It's the raspberries that are selling it. But, when they have it, it will also bring out the things that are good in the gin, and guests may discover that they like gin. This is a non-threatening way of allowing guests to broaden their experience of things that they like.
Julie then mentioned a note on pricing: she prefers to have almost all of her drink menu at one price point. Now, that price point might be low for some of the cocktails. But, so long as some of the bigger sellers are cheaper to make, they can pay for the cost of the more expensive drinks.
Willy spoke a bit on the importance of mise en place. It's something that, as bartenders, we all, theoretically, know, but, in practice, we don't do it as well as chefs do. And part of that is that bars aren't designed as intelligently as kitchens are. ("Mise en place" is the practice of having everything that you work with in a logical, easy-to-reach, CONSISTENT place so you can make your dishes, or, in our case, drinks, quickly and efficiently. Chefs at all levels are real good at this -- the fry cooks at the local diner are every bit as careful and consistent with this as the chefs in the high-end places I've worked. We bartenders, however, are . . . less consistently good at this.)
He also suggested that, as long as we're in the kitchen watching how the chefs do this -- talk to the chefs and come up with drinks that match the meals that are going to be served. By including the same flavors. By including the same ingredients. Why not work with the chefs so that, if they are working with a particular herb or spice in a dish, take some of that same ingredient or those same ingredients, and build a cocktail around the same flavors that the dish is being built around? Use the things the kitchen has! And encourage them to use the things the bar has. Try to get a harmonious blending of flavors between the kitchen and the bar by actually harmoniously blending the flavors from the kitchen and the bar.
He, once again, reiterated the importance of including your bartenders in the creative process, and suggested holding "Iron Bar Chef" mini-competitions among your staff, with the winner getting their drinks on the menu.
I don't remember if he was suggesting this as something you'd do for fun outside of normal serving hours, before you open, or as something you'd do in front of guests as entertainment -- either would work, I suppose.
It's important to understand the ingredients you have to work with, both in the kitchen and behind your bar. He's been to places which proudly advertise that they have over 550 different bottles behind the bar -- that's great as far as it goes, but it's pointless unless someone, unless EVERYONE knows what the things in all 550 of those bottles TASTE like. Make sure that everyone is familiar with them so that they can play with them, recommend them, explain them.
When you're designing a cocktail menu for a new establishment, the best time to get involved is BEFORE construction. Sit down with the owner to understand his or her vision -- cuisine, atmosphere, decor, everything. Sit down with the chef and understand what he or she is doing. If there's a separate sommelier, make sure that the cocktail menu and the wine menu match -- including things like using similar fonts. And using the same level of formality in your descriptions. If one of you is being very formal and precise in your descriptions, and the other is being breezy and humorous, it's going to look weird. Make sure that you're both on the same page for how you're communicating -- create a consistent image.
Understand what else is going on in the neighborhood -- what are other restaurants, bars, and clubs doing, what are people enjoying there? Take those things and do them better. Is there a local farmers' market? Use it!
Wally also reiterated Eben's comment about "Trojan horse cocktails" -- if you want to open up a new product line, put other things with it that people will be attracted to. They may not know what cachaça is, they may be afraid to try gin -- but do things with fresh fruit and berries, and that will sell it, so that people will be exposed to the new ideas.
It's also important to know your markets, know who the local distributors and salespeople are. Make sure that you've got the proper glassware for the drinks you're planning on making -- how many wine glasses and how many beer glasses you need are kind of dependent on how many wines and how many beers you intend to sell -- and THAT depends on your menu, guests, and so forth.
Make sure that you have ample accessible storage for your ingredients. Make sure that you have ample workspace for your bartenders.
And don't expect everything to work out immediately -- it will probably take three to six months of tweaking before you get everything running smoothly.
Julie then asked the panel to go a little deeper into a question that had been touched on earlier: how many drinks should you have on a menu?
Eben said that you had to triage what's important: what are the guests coming for? If the cocktails are the draw, then, yes, you need more. But you have to consider the demographics of the people you're serving, the characteristics of the food and the venue, and the skill level of the bartenders. He had to develop a program for a chain of airport bars: airport bars are one of the places that will hire inexperienced bartenders (actually, that's a tip for all of you who are looking to get into the business: airport bars are a good first job -- you learn how to deal with reasonably high volume, and they're usually not that bad to get to on public transit). He developed seven or eight decent drinks that were easy and fast to make.
Wally said that, in a place like that, make sure that they've got the basics down, and add a couple trendy ones.
Wally then asked the other panelists: if you list the ingredients of a cocktail on your cocktail menu, do you list "sugar" as one of the ingredients? He said that, for him, it depended on WHERE the venue was -- in the South, yep. The Southerners like their sugar. :) Eben said that, for him, it depended on how significant sugar was in the drink -- and if the rest of the ingredients would imply that it was sweet. If you're listing fruit and berries, then you don't need to list the sugar, since they already have an idea of what they're getting.
Someone in the audience said that, in their place, they would always list things like "raw sugar" or "turbinado sugar", and the panel agreed with that -- because it's a significant flavor component besides being a sweetener.
In final thoughts, Wally pointed out that one other thing that's vitally important to do in designing your cocktail menu -- and that this was alluded to earlier by Julie, but it was important to reiterate -- cost out your drinks! If it costs more to make your drink than you get in selling it, you really can't make that up in volume.
They finished it up with one final question from the audience, about whether they'd found that using the organic liquors that are coming on the market has acted as a useful draw for them. Eben and Wally both said that "organic" is an important selling point in pretty much everything EXCEPT for the liquor -- as one guest said to Eben -- "What? So I can get an organically-grown poison I'm putting in my body?"
There was a feeling that this might change in the next couple years as people become more aware of the organic, biodynamic, and sustainable-agriculture liquors that are coming on the market, but, for right now, it's not a selling point.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-26 02:58 am (UTC)We didn't grab food -- you went up to RiverView for the official opening Toast, which is why you were late to your next panel.
I think the only day we actually ran someplace for lunch was the day we had the lousy breakfast. After that, we made sure to eat well and managed to hold out until dinnertime.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-26 04:28 am (UTC)Their drinks menu works really well with the sushi they serve. You're exactly right about matching ingredients to dinner-- the kappatini set us up for vegetarian sushi, which usually involves some kappa maki, and the plum wine and sake drinks and so on were thematically aligned with the restaurant itself-- tasty, hip, and overall clever and well-crafted. I still wouldn't say I'm exactly a cocktail drinker (whatever that might be...), but I certainly pay more attention now. We ended up staying longer, drinking lots of fairly expensive booze, eating lots of sushi (partly because we ended up staying longer, because, well, I had to drive us back to my brother's house), and generally had a great time. I think if we make it back there I'll be disappointed if we get seated quickly next time...
Also, there's a fantastic gin made in Santa Cruz that's probably not easily available elsewhere. If you can find Sarticious, it's worth a try.