A glass apart

Behind every move on the bar, from the way the glasses and bottles are arranged to how a drink is made, there is sound logic. I pick a glass first because I want to make sure that it’s there when I finish making my cocktail, ready and waiting. I think that’s better than looking for the glass after I’m done and not finding it. Or setting aside a group of glasses to remind me of the various orders I have on my slip. I fill a martini glass with ice before making it so that it is nice and cold, allowing the drink to stay icy longer while being imbibed. It’s a stemmed glass for exactly the same reason too — so the palm doesn’t start warming up the drink faster than I can finish it. I shake the drink because I want all the ingredients to come together into a nice, smooth blend. Not because someone said so. I arrange my bar in a way that aligns with the way I work. So that everything I need to work effectively and efficiently is within an arm’s reach. It makes sense to do that. It’s logical.

Ever so often while teaching a class I stare back at the kids in wonder. I’m in awe that they take every word that comes out of my mouth as gospel. That the internet knows it all and is always right. They look at me all surprised when I tell them that it’s fine to question both me and the internet. They will never be able to correct the wrong unless they understand what they are doing and how that affects the outcome.

The principle works reasonably well outside the bar too. Question everything. See the relevance. Make changes if they feel right, irrespective of how long someone’s been doing it. Logic is a powerful tool. It always works. Think about this strange breed called ‘vaastu’ experts, numerologists and astrologists. They promise you the sun, the moon, the stars and more if you change your doors, windows… or turn yourself into Shobhaaa, Rahuule, or worse. They feed on your insecurity to assure you of stuff that’s almost never happening. If it does, it’s always because you worked your butt off to make it happen. Pure logic.

A few years ago I was working on a small bar project where the vaastu chap made us relocate the bar from a nice long open space to a tiny, cramped location under a mezzanine. This was so that the bar and the cashier could be together in the perfectly aligned position. That’s how all the money would come tumbling into the cash registers and the cup would overflow. I tried every reasonable explanation on how that would not work. That finding bartenders who were all 5’2” so they’d actually be able to stand and work was a nightmare. I even asked the client if his ‘pandit’ had a money-back policy in case it didn’t work out. It bombed in less than six months. The gods couldn’t have been pleased.

I chose to break with tradition with my take on Bloody Mary. The traditional choice for the drink was the roly-poly glass, a stubby, cup-like receptacle. There was a reason. It was created in Paris by bartender Fernand Petiot — meant to reflect the ‘cup’ of blood (‘Bloody’ Mary?!) — after Queen Marie Antoinette, the one who asked why her starving subjects wouldn’t eat cake if there was no bread, was put to the guillotine. Or Mary Queen of Scots who was called Bloody Mary as she caused the massacre of so many Protestants in her quest to re-establish the Catholic church. There are still more stories where these come from. After the demise of the roly-poly, the cocktail was served in the old-fashioned whisky tumbler or rocks glass. I mulled over this and decided that it just had to be an elegant glass with a bit of a waist. Whether French or English, the queens deserved it. It is a Bloody Mary dammit, not a Bloody John!

My peers in the industry were horrified. They decided that I had gone mad. But it worked. The customers loved the new avatar and our technique. They didn’t care that we were using long green chillies, carrot and radish sticks instead of the staid celery. On some occasions we use barbecued shrimp or even parmesan. What matters in the end is appreciation from the audience. Guess who complained? A bar manager who wrote “great drink, wrong garnish and glass”. Loved that even more.

Shatbhi Basu is a mixologist, author, television host and head of Stira bartending academy in Mumbai