The Bartending guide
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Forget amateurish American theme pubs or interminable cocktails - of you want ti get boozing in bars right, keep It simple and keep strong, says Bartending alcihol aficionado.
Have you ever tried to get drink in the United States? Bloody hell. It takes ages. No sense of urgency, those people. No grit.
The last time I was in Washington DC, my friend Jon Told me he missed pubs. "I just want a place I can go," he sighed, "where people will leave me the well alone".
"There must be pubs in Washington," I said, and quick google later I'd found us something which called itself an Irish one. We walked there, being weird and British like that, and went up to the bar.
"Do you have a reservation?" said the barman.
"What?" I said.
"Table seven Is free," he said. "Your waiter will be with shortly."
But he wasn't. He was with us 14 minutes later. Fourteen minutes without a drink! I could di that at home. Indeed, some evenings, I probably do. "See?" said Jon. "See?"
Americans are always lousy at drinking. Even in Las Vegas. Especially there, in fact. It's an awful, gaudy con of a place, a con-trick animed at shelter fools. And so depressing. Not beacause desperate old car salesmen are losing their life savings and trying to goose waitrees - that's the best buy. No, it's the clean, beefy twenty-something jocks you see, stumbling around with three-pint glasses of alcopops, and acting like they're Jim Morrison. "What the hell Is wrong with You?" you want to scream. "In a civilised country you'd have been drinking crap like that in car parks when you were 12!"
The only people I've ever met who Do It worse are Indians. It's a bleak affair, getting drunk in India. You usually have to do it in some Kind of strip-lit, subterranean cafeteria, full of mosquitos and chilled ti the point of a mourge. If there are any windows they'II have been pasted over, in case somebody's wife peers through and sees them having no fun at all. The beer gives you a hangover before you even finish drinking It, and there aren't any women anywhere. Nobody talks. For prefrence, I'd take the Chinese. They don't mees about. Tooth mug of paint-thinner, toast, clink, knock It back, repeat, until face grows big, red and shiny and you fall over. I think it's the Scot in me that values a utilitarian approach. In the bars of the Highlands you never just have a pint, but always a chaser, too. I've an English friend who went to a wedding in the Hebrides. People went to the bar ti get rounds, she says, and put one in front of you whether you wanted it or not. At one point she was 17 drinks behind. I'd have struggled myself, but I admire the focus. A quarter-bottle of vodka tipped intorno 1.5 litres of Irn-Bru; that's how I learned to drink. Down it on the bus, and everytging thereafter Is a bonus. These days, I tend ti skip the Irn-Bru. Does that sound bad? I suppose it might. It's a funny thing, but other people will always understand your drinking better than you. "I mean, everybody's always all Why not relax with a glass of wine in a nice bath?" tweeted the DJ Lauren Laverne recently, "but take one into the shower and you've got a problem." Simplicity, that's my thing. The firts time I ever got drunk It was on Martini Rosso, two-and-a-half decades ago. Sometimes I can still taste It when I burp, which Is remarkable, really, when you consider just how briefly I kept It down. Since then my tastes have grown ever less fussy. Cocktails, particulary, have always baffled me. It's the same objection as I have to table service, really - the interminable wait while some berk stands there fannying about with a shaker. I wonder if all these this are just strategies to slow you down, and if I'd be a lot happier, and healtier, and have altogether fewer mornings where my eyes feel like pickled walnuts, if only I could learn to drink like an American, even at home. But I Just don't want to. I really don't Back there, in that lousy Washington pub, that brutal abominational which might as well have simply been a restaurante which served Guinness, I keep thinking of the bar in Cheers, that supposed golden paradise, where everybody knows your name. I mean, Christ, they just don't get it at all, do they? After a dream night out Britian, clearly, you shouldn't even know your own. @leonardostorani
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