Shea Berry says she got snubbed for ordering a vodka martini at Prime Meats. (Michael Sofronski)
Shea Berry, a musician living in Brooklyn, simply wanted to grab cocktails at the bar in Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens with a friend last October, but when she ordered a martini made with “a nice vodka,” the 33-year-old got something she wasn’t thirsting for: a tall glass of attitude.
“This is a place that makes their own tinctures and brines their own onions, so we figured they would have some good vodkas,” Berry says.
Turns out, she was wrong.
“We were told that there’s only one vodka and it is very low-grade,” she recalls. The bartender’s attitude was, “ ‘We are only offering you the s - - ttiest vodka because, if you drink it, you are an [idiot].’ It was super annoying.
“In the end, we drank chilled gin, which we didn’t want,” she continues. “I was insulted.”
Berry and her friend came up against the fastest-rising beast in hospitality: the snooty mixologist. Right up there with the overbearing maitre d’, the pushy waiter and the bossy chef, these bar brats act like they know what’s best for their customers.
Ask for vodka, they’ll give you gin. Request a mainstream, top-shelf liquor, and they’ll look down on you and push an artisanal alternative of which you’ve never heard. Want anything frozen or sugary, and they’ll refuse to make it, saying they don’t want to “mask the spirit’s taste.”
Steve Weil, 54, a tri-state area businessman, had a menacing mixologist encounter of his own while visiting New York last winter. He had the nerve to go to Apothéke, a faux-secret bar in Chinatown with a 19th-century-pharmacy theme, and request his alcohol of choice, Tanqueray gin, mixed with club soda.
His basic drink order didn’t fly with the bartender, a well-built alpha-male type clad in all-black. The guy shook his head and looked amazed, as if Weil had asked for a pistachio ice-cream cone.
“We only have artisanal gin here,” he tsked — despite the fact that a bottle of Bombay Sapphire was in plain sight.
“The bartender chastised me for ordering a mainstream gin, and then he sold me something that I had never even heard of,” recalls Weil, adding, “The whole thing was a degrading experience and makes me never want to go back there again.”
Not everyone making craft cocktails is guilty of such snobbery. Jim Meehan, managing director of mixology mecca Please Don’t Tell and author of “The PDT Cocktail Book,” doesn’t condone such snootiness, and he makes a point of training his staff to dial down the attitude.
Part of the problem, Meehan says, is that some mixologists still see themselves as principled rebels going against the grain of the vodka-soda guzzling masses.
“Years ago, when mixology was a cause, it was edgy. Now it’s not,” Meehan says. “There is a revolutionary bent that stems back to when bartenders wore it on their sleeves and lobbied hard to make old-fashioned drinks,” he notes. “But the battle is over . . . If somebody orders a vodka and soda, we make it for them.”
But plenty in the industry make no apologies for snobbery.
Phil Ward, formerly the head bartender at Death + Company, a pioneering craft cocktail den, and now the man behind Mayahuel, a tequila-focused bar in the East Village, is adamant about what — and whom — he won’t serve.
“I don’t carry vodka or light beer because they teach morons to like things that have no taste,” says Ward, his voice growing louder as he goes on. “I don’t carry Coca-Cola either. It ruins palettes. People should know where they are going and what they are doing. When somebody walks into a bar and says that he wants a Long Island iced tea, what he’s basically saying is, ‘Put as much s - - t into a glass as possible, so I can get f - - ked-up.’ They are saying that they don’t care about taste.”
When Sarah Deming took her father to TriBeCa’s chic Smith & Mills bar, neither of them was trying to say anything with their drink order. They were just trying to grab a cocktail at a stylish watering hole while her dad was visiting from out of town.
Her father, who has since died, had the naiveté to order an amaretto sour. The server promptly informed them that they didn’t have any amaretto because the mixologist didn’t deign to work with the almond liqueur.
“My father felt hurt, but he tried again,” remembers Deming, an author who is now working on a family memoir about kidney donation.
Her dad then asked for a mojito, a request that was met with further unkindness.
“The look of naked contempt on the waiter’s face was unbelievable,” she recalls. “He said, ‘We don’t make those this time of year.’ I don’t even remember what my father wound up ordering, I was so angry.”
Smith & Mills owner Akiva Elstein expressed remorse when told of the incident. “That never should have happened.” His counterpart at Apothéke, co-owner Heather Tierney, declined to comment, as did Prime Meats.
If only Deming and her dad had been at a more old-school bar, like Walker’s, a few blocks away on North Moore Street, where traditional attitudes about service still prevail.
“Being snooty behind the bar defeats the whole idea of personalized service,” says partner Scott Perez. “Customers come here for a good time. The bartenders try to take care of them, not put on any airs and not put anybody down.”
Drinks that will get you dissed & bartender-approved alternatives
MAYAHUEL’S Phil Ward makes the case that mixologists have a right to be annoyed when people order uncouth cocktails.
“Ignorance is not bliss,” he says. “It’s a vodka tonic.” A more enlightened drink choice, he says, can bring about an epiphany and forever change the way you drink. Here are his suggestions:
OFFENDING DRINK: The rum and Coke is “a hideous waste of rum,” says Phil Ward. “All you taste is the Coke.”
APPROVED DRINK: “Made right, the daiquiri is delicious simplicity in a glass that lets the rum speak for itself.”
OFFENDING DRINK: The Long Island iced tea is “pure gluttony,” says Ward. Ordering one “is admitting that you want as much booze as possible, without a conception of what it is.”
APPROVED DRINK: “If you want to get bombed right away, order a zombie,” he says. “It’s boozier than a Long Island iced tea and really delicious.”