Ask A Bartender: Do I Get A Free Drink?

Friday, May 15, 2015

Kai Soderberg, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Asking for a free drink, whether it’s your birthday, your friend is working behind the bar, a friend of a friend is working behind the bar, etc. is about the most uncouth thing you can ever do at a bar. You can go to the same bar every day for five years and not expect a free drink. You can never expect a free drink because there is no such thing as a free drink (TINSTAAFD). Somebody is always paying for it. I don’t mean just your self-respect (damaged by merely asking) and your liver, I mean the proprietor of the bar. While some bar owners will give things away for free, it’s at their discretion and you generally don’t tilt the scale in your favor by asking.

If you are a close friend of mine, if we’ve been through the thick together, if you’ve held my hand and ushered me out of hell, chances are I still care about my job more than I do you. That’s not true outside of work but in work, I care about nothing more than my job. Absolutely nothing. One of the benefits about working with the public is you’re always forced to seem put together. You’re asked to shave your face (in proper bars, anyway), not dress dumpily, and generally act like you give a damn about yourself and the people you work for. That means all personal problems are dropped at the door. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when you are going through something horrible outside of work. I’ve worked 90 hours a week before to avoid thinking about things I didn’t want to think about- and it worked. But with that dropping of baggage at the door, comes a dropping of all association with life outside of work. People often get confused and think that a good bartender has a lot of personality. A good bartender has absolutely no personality. A good bartender is a medium, channeling various personalities. A good bartender is always at odds with himself. A good bartender has trouble falling asleep at night and wakes up screaming every morning. Okay, so that might be a little extreme. But, a good bartender values his job. And that doesn’t entail giving away drinks to people that expect them.

I’m not saying I’ll never give a drink away. I actually make it a point to reward people for good behavior. If I have a pleasant person at the bar, I’ll see it as a good opportunity to create something new and test it on somebody who seems reasonable. Or, sometimes mistakes are made; the wrong beer will get poured, I’ll make an old-fashioned with bourbon instead of rye. I’m not just going to dump it down the sink. I’ll give it away. But I’m not going to give it to the guy that came in asking for something free. That guy gets nothing, and he never will get anything- at least nothing worthwhile, you can always go to Denny’s on your birthday- just by virtue of the kind of person he is; the kind of person who asks for things without doing anything to deserve them except for simply being born. (Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer that merely being alive grants one certain inalienable rights – I just don’t think that a free drink is one of them). I’ll give it to the guest who is polite, the guest who carries his or herself well, the guest that doesn’t waste time, the guest that carries a quiet classiness. If I look around and don’t see that guest at my bar, then I’ll dump the drink.

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