Bartending is the best job in the world. Hands down. You get paid to have fun. Every night you are meeting new people from all over the world. Obviously things aren’t that way right now, but hopefully they will be sooner rather than later. Anyway, like I said, it’s the best. But it isn’t easy and if you want to do it, you should know what you are getting into before you spend hundreds of dollars on classes and certifications.

First, it would probably help if you knew a little bit about me and my experience. I got into the game when I was 28, which is relatively late. Like many kids growing up in Los Angeles, I thought I wanted to be in the television industry. In fact, I wanted to be a writer. However, things weren’t working out and within a month I got rid of my apartment, furniture, sold some clothes and booked a one way ticket to Thailand. Long story short I ended up on an island in the south called Koh Tao. I got a job at Fishbowl Beach Bar, the biggest bar on the island and one of the most popular in the country. The best way to describe Fishbowl is a combination of Nikki Beach and Coyote Ugly. And if life there was a TV show it would be Vanderpump Rules meets Love Island. I started off as a promoter, and a month later started bartending. On one of my first shifts I was thrown into the lions den. It was a busy night and I had the most difficult section in the bar.

I failed miserably. I had never made a majority of the drinks before. I didn’t get another shift for about 3 weeks. It wasn’t until after a girl asked me to cover her shift did I get another chance. I was at the smallest bar in the club, where they only have beer and mixed drinks. But I wanted to do more. So I picked up every available shift at the main bar. Soon enough I was working there every night, and a month later I was training people. Almost a year after that nightmare shift, I had another one. It was the busiest night in six months. I was in the busiest section and the bar was at max capacity. About 450 people. But this time the problem wasn’t that I didn’t know
anything, it was because no one around me did. There was a moment I will never forget.
I was making seven B-52 shots, which consist of three ingredients that have to
be perfectly layered. I was training one girl that night, another girl was on her second shift and didn’t speak great English, and the other was sweet but not the brightest. In the span of about 30 seconds, one asked me what the measurements of a passionfruit Mojito Bucket were (in Thailand you can get any drink in the form of a bucket and if you are wondering the measurements are 4x), the other asked me to make a Sex on The Beach because she didn’t know how, and the third asked me to help her with the till. In a year and a half at that bar it was the only time my boss had to tell me to relax. But no matter how stressed I was, I couldn’t be mad. After all, about a year earlier I was just like them. By the time I left I probably had about 50 training shifts. I’d say about 10 of them lasted more than a month and maybe half that lasted six months.

The number one reason for people not returning was it was too intense. While it probably didn’t help that my boss was former military, the truth is it takes a certain kind of person to not only survive but thrive as a bartender. Especially at a nightclub. The bottom line is you have to be a little crazy. You live your life from 7pm-5am. You are expected to make cocktails with measurements down to the milliliter while customers (and occasionally your bosses) are feeding you drinks. At most bars if you broke a glass you throw it away. At Fishbowl, you would do a chili shot (recipe can be provided upon request). It was a lot, but no two nights were ever the same. And if you like the people you work with, then you are probably having more fun than the
people you are serving. However, every place is different. The first bar I worked at when I came back from Thailand was an upscale restaurant in the heart of Beverly Hills. It was a nightmare. It was too focused on the mixology, and not the hospitality. At least for me. Since then I have worked at a rooftop restaurant and bar, and now work at a high end hotel in Santa Monica.

That is my story. This article, however, was inspired by three different people. When I came back to LA, I went to bartending school, mainly because I had only used the metric system and had never free poured. I don’t know exactly what I expected the other students to be like, but I certainly did not expect some of what I saw. One girl had never had a sip of alcohol in her life.

That’s like going to culinary school in Italy without ever having tried pizza. One guy thought that the certification he would receive after completing the class, could get him any job he wanted.

The third wanted to start her own private bartending business. While making mixed drinks, she tried to put the ingredients in the shaker. If you have ever shaken a can of coke, you can figure out why that isn’t a good idea. I don’t bring these people up to make fun of them, it is because I feel really bad that they each spent $250 on a class for a profession they knew nothing about.

Bartenders never stop being bartenders. It’s not much different from being a chef. If you are a chef hosting a dinner party at your house, you aren’t going to let someone else cook the meal. So if you are considering being a bartender at a restaurant, become one at home first. Grab one of the simpler recipes on this website. Moscow Mule is one that I would highly recommend. Then go to the Bar Tools section, get a jigger and a shaker, and start making drinks. Taste them. Perfect them. For example, if you are making Moscow Mules try different ginger beers, experiment with bitters, or ginger syrups. So the next time you hang out with your friends, be the bartender for the night. If you like it, that’s amazing, because when you one day get the best job in the world, you won’t fail miserably on your first shift. Or put soda in the shaker