In researching historical data for St. Patrick’s Day festivities, I came across a statement that got me thinking. A spirits manufacturer was saying that you could tell everything you needed to know about an Irish person by which Irish whisky they drank. First, they only drink one brand and what that brand is can clue one into the social, economic and cultural class one belonged to.
In a nutshell, those who drink Bushmills tended to belong to the upper, UK-centric class and those who drank Jameson, to the hard-working, Ireland-centric middle class. And ne’er the twain shall meet…there IS no cross-over, once ones brand has been determined. Stereotyping, to be sure, but an interesting idea.
This is the very idea of targeted marketing… making one identify with a brand to announce to the world or the other people at the bar ones place in it. And it works. Let’s play a little game to see how well…
Who do you picture when you see a Bud and a shot of Jack on the bartop? An Apple Martini? A Strawberry Daiquiri? A tidy highball with peaty single malt, no ice?
My guess is, you think…longshoreman, Uptown Manhattan-ite, a ‘Bigger the Hair, the Closer to God’ Southern chick and a Brooks Brothers-clad CEO. Now mix them up…the longshoreman drinking a Daiquiri, the Belle with the scotch, the CEO with the Appletini and the socialite with the shot and beer. OK, that just feels wrong. And no matter how deliciously fruity and nummy that daiquiri is, Spike’s co-workers would never let him get away with that fluffy libation and just might take to calling him Tinkerbelle. Not pretty.
So what do you know about me when I tell you I am a Pinot/Porter/Port kinda chick…well, one, that I like words that start with P. Two, fond of alliteration. Three, I might have a rather urbane palette, a little cash and a fondness for richness and depth. Perhaps I enjoy cashmere and purple and spas. I might be a fan of winter, artisan chocolates and interesting cheeses. Perhaps I travel.
What do I know about you, Mr/Ms Pilsener/Chardonnay/Martini? That you like things a little more predictable, are a fan of fruits and herbs, you might have an upbeat personality, you like warmer climates and salads and that you consider yourself a trendsetter and an edge-cutter and that marketing works on you….that can be the only explanation for martinis, all of which taste like hospitals.
So, play the game the next time you are bellied up in an airport lounge. See if the drink matches the expectation. What you drink just might be speaking who you are to the world.
Because We are a Goddess and thus, larger than life, what We sit on is, ipso facto, also larger than life…abundantly, gloriously huge. Enormous. Epic.
All right, all right, spare Us the bootylicious, junk in the trunk, baby-got-back dreck and listen up. What can possibly be the reasoning behind making barstools so dang small and uncomfortable? It seems to Me that you, O Purveyor of Potent Potables, should want a guest to be comfortable so that they might stick around for a while and partake of your consumables and shower upon you their net worth. Right? That is the idea?
So why the 6” wide backless spinning leather Frisbees? Or the rock hard rock solid wooden squares? Without foot rungs! And Wobbly! Or those ridiculous ones made of milk cans and tractor seats. Tree trunks! Diner-counter seats!
Really? Why? Why I say?
OK, let Me answer Me for you, since with all My Goddessy Powers, I can actually hear you yelling this to the screen…they take up less space! They are cheap! They fit the ‘theme’! They are light and moveable! They sail through the air like the Flying Willenda’s when heaved! (that’s for you bar fighters..), their form follows their function! (that’s for you Bauhausians…) ..and so on.
All valid, but lame, nevertheless, and doing nothing to keep heinies in seats. Some people (OK, Me..) choose where to go based on how comfortable the place is and have actually declined to go to a bar or restaurant because of uncomfortable chairs or booths or flow.
Get some comfortable chairs in your bars and I promise to come in and sit and drink for longer than the 10 minutes of perching uncomfortably like some erstwhile gargoyle on the cheap and cruddy little stool you call seating that I can stand before running screaming from the room. Make sure they have a comfortable wide seat, well placed footrests and a wide and sturdy back. You will keep your guests in those seats and spending money longer.
Now, go back to the first paragraph and sub the word ‘goddess’ for ‘American’ and you will see that it ain’t only the Goddess who might enjoy a little comfort for the kooloo….look around…there is no dearth of bountiful bums in these United States. Make’em happy with good quality, sturdy, comfortable seating. Namaste.
October 20, 2008
Singin’ the Blues
Boy, I hate to say I told ya so, but…actually, I don’t really hate it… I sorta love it, to be honest.
If you are like me, you may be racking your brains to remember when the last time you heard good news was. The economy is tanked, I can’t bring myself to even look at my 401k, the world is melting down around us…I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all.
Actually, it’s all that plus the trifecta of having drama in my family and at work that has me down, so I may be a little more sensitive to the bad news that you may be, what with virtually everything I care about in a state of upheaval.
Today, we shall talk about my favorite beverage in the world! OK, my second favorite, after milk…er, third, after tea…wait, pinot noir…
Today we shall talk about my fourth favorite beverage in the world! I am completely enamored of a newly fashionable liqueur, the stylish and beveled St~Germain Elderflower Liqueur!!! Holy smokes, I love me some St~Germain! Love! Love! Lu-uh-uh-ove!
Why do I love it so much? Have you tasted it? It tastes like the scent of honeysuckle on a breeze, like fresh, musky lychee fruit, like succulent peach nectar, like liquid happiness! All packaged in a beautiful beveled glass bottle bearing a remarkable resemblance to a top-heavy femme. And apparently, there is a guy in France traipsing around the Alps on a bicycle picking elderflowers just for me! Right now! As we speak!
Being a simple goddess, I prefer the signature St~Germain cocktail…a delectably large tot of the liqueur with champagne, club soda and a saucy twist of lemon. But in perusing their website, I found numerous cocktails that I will hasten to try, not least because of their clever asides embedded within their recipes. Such witty repartee reminds me of someone.. thinking ..thinking…
I discovered this elixir several years ago at one of our golf tournaments, when one of my distributors donated a case of the minis, also festively clad in the sexy bottle. (sidebar: it just tickles me that mini’s are just that.. teeny, tiny Lilliputian versions of themselves..same bottle, same labels… it cracks me up to see the teensy little Crown Royal bottle or the Dimple Pinch or the Tanqueray… but then, we have established that I am easily amused…). I had never even heard of St~Germain before. The minis were destined for the goody bags.
Sadly for some, after cracking it open, sucking it down and rejoicing in the sublime glow, I then absconded with as many minis as I could find without actually wrestling the bags out of our golfer’s hands.
Fast forward to about a month ago. We were having a farewell dinner for one of our comrades who was leaving. (another sidebar: a futile and wasteful practice, because we must have the highest percentage of boomerang employees on record…the latest was only gone for 3 weeks before she came back. “Hey, sad to see you go! Here’s an expensive party! See you in a few weeks!”). As I waited at the bar, I, being a writer of menus and also unable to sort through the myriad of options for cocktails entrenched in my brain, rendering it impossible to order in any semblance of quickly, picked up the sticky bar menu and right there at the top of the page was my old friend, The St~Germain Cocktail, singing her siren song of promises of deliciousness.
“I’ll have this”, says I. I said that about four more times through out the evening…which is awesome!! It is light enough in ABV for me to have several, which I promptly did.
Now, you may be asking yourself, why the long stretch of time betwixt discovery and enamored? Well, as I have noted in past blogs, I’m actually not much of a drinker. I am a lover of all things beverage, but not a consumer so much. So, since I hadn’t seen it around anywhere, nor had anyone presented it to me (bad reps!), I had forgotten about it.
But thanks to that sticky menu and my revolving co-worker, I was reminded and am now firmly in the cult of Germain. And now that I know there are bicycling Frenchmen risking life and limb in the mountains of France just for me to possess the heavenly nectar, I shall not ever again forget. In fact, it is the only liqueur I have actually me myself purchased in years! (I am a ‘buyer’, which means I don’t actually ever have to buy anything to have the world’s best liquor cabinet. Ironic.)
So, if you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favor and hie on down to the liquor store and pay your money. You will not be sorry!
And if I see a rash of baby goddesses named Oenoli in the future, I will know you appreciated that advise. Vive la France! Vive la St~Germain!
(All goddessy opinions are free and sincere. No recompense was paid for this or any endorsement. Though I’m open to that. I can be bought.)
If you have a question or comment for the One Most High, email her at beverage.goddess@yahoo.com
Aaah, Goddessdom.. not an easy thing to maintain, ya know? Life has been a bit rough lately and i haven’t been feeling overly goddessy…. more like road-kill than ethereal being… but I hope to be back in the oracle again soon. until then, go forth and drink!
La Goddess
Ah, Spring. Birds kinda singing, snow melting and then freezing into treacherous sheets of death, watery sun peeking out behind the clouds…ahh, Spring.
As Spring waxes into Summer, you will hear that phrase that irritates me right down to my eternal, goddessy bones. As school lets out and the teeming masses of Gen Y/Millennial/Whatever Stupid Generational Moniker That Comes After Millennials come home to roost, they will descend upon the modest, unassuming restaurant looking for jobs.
But not just ANY job… a job they can do ‘until they get a REAL job’.
Yes, folks.. those of us who have spent our lives in the food & bar business.. we apparently do not have real jobs.
Forget those slammin’ nights behind the stick, pouring and blending our little hearts out.
Not real, those days when the ‘bus lets out’ and you, your one closing server and your scruffy line cook pull off a miracle of food preparation and service.
Completely faux those long days in the office trying to find a snowball’s chance in hell of meeting your budget.
A mirage that you sleep in your office in your chair after a 16 hour run with a banquet tablecloth as a poor excuse for a blanket because you have a clopen.
No, apparently, the only ‘real’ jobs are those outside of the food & bar service industry. But don’t believe me. Just try taking any kind of poll or survey. Scan the abundant list of jobs someone considers real.
If you are lucky, and only recently, you MAY find something like ‘food service and manufacture’ or ‘hospitality’. As if those limited categories could cover the range of positions within them. But a server isn’t a cook isn’t an assembly line worker isn’t a concierge isn’t a pastry chef isn’t a front desk clerk isn’t a bar manager isn’t a sommelier.
When you check ‘accountant’, that pretty much says it all.. you account for things. Or you are a doctor, a lawyer or an indian chief. Perhaps an retail associate or a miner or a carpenter. All these jobs have their special category, as many do and are fairly obvious as to what they entail.
For us, there is the ubiquitous ‘Other’.
OK. So those are real jobs, but so are ours and, as the biggest industry in America, if not the world, you’d think that we would get the justice we deserve and not just be a bi-way where young people stop on their way to respectable industry.
You know, I believe that OUR industry is, in fact, the oldest profession. The default is, of course, of the silver boot wearing, hoochie-mama, saucy tart persuasion.
But let’s consider…before there was pay to play, there were people eating and drinking and someone making and serving all those comestibles. In fact, the very first thing we do after getting squeezed out and slapped is have us a nice long drink of mother’s milk off the proffered tap.
So, when you hear.. or rather overhear.. a young’un talking about how they are ‘only doing this until I graduate and get a real job’, ask them these questions:
§ Is there a roof over your head?
§ Are you eating?
§ Do you have money?
§ Gas in your car?
§ CD’s, clothes, an I-Phone, shoes?
That’s a real job that provides all that.
And then ask:
§ Do you really think that you are gonna pull down $1000 bucks a week, drink pretty much for free, eat like a king, party like it’s 1999, have a slew of PYT’s at your fingertips, tell the boss when YOU can work and watch a million beautiful sunrises with a posse of great friends-for-now at your entry level accounting job?
Food and Beverage work is REAL work. Important work. We feed the hungry, water the masses, provide a place to celebrate, hang out, watch the team, break up, entertain the kinder, people watch, try the latest trendy cocktail.
We remember our guests, know their stories, look forward to seeing them, run our butts off at their every bidding. We work long hours, rarely get weekends or holidays off, do double shifts, clopen, fill in, take on, bust out.
In fact, we get to do the funnest job on earth…a job that pays us well, allows us to delay maturity, provides a steady stream of new friends and lets us live large.
My little goddessy friend Andrea likes to say that, when it came time to chose what to do with her life, she ‘checked the fun box’ and picked the restaurant business.
So, go ahead, be a shopkeeper or a computer programmer or a scientist or a realtor. Find your path. But don’t for a minute think that this hospitable life isn’t a real job.
It’s real, all right… real fun, real hard, real lucrative, real exciting, real crazy, real important, real life. A real job.
Ya coulda been an accountant. But yer not. Snap. Go on, check the fun box.
All Hail Oenoli, the Goddess of Beverage, Mistress of Mixology, Siren of Suds, Whirlwind of Wine, Queen of the Arcane Reference. We welcome thee to Our Blog.
Unlike our esteemed sister, Venus, We did not rise, perfect and porcelain, from the sea foam, carried aloft by a crystalline clamshell. Rather, We sprang from the swirling viscosity of the bar mat, alighted upon a stained coaster, with a beer in one hand, a Mai Tai in the other and a bottle of fine Burgundy with a long straw wedged firmly between Our Boudiccan orbs!
Plus We have arms.
Like our FWB, Dionysus, We are enamored of All Things Liquid and shall, in days future, regale you, O Mortal, with Oracles of Wisdom on all topics Beverage, from beer styles to history to food pairings to fun, new cocktail ideas to wine bon mots to commentary on the execution by other mortals of Liquid Entertainment. And since beverage without food is like Joanie without Chachi, We will leave that portal open for exploration and dissection, as well.
We are delighted to be here, We welcome your feedback and response postings on Our opinions, which are just that, opinions, as We are NOT a journalist and thus, not bound to ‘just the facts, M’am’, but are free to emote as desired. And, boy howdy, can We emote. We have Opinions.
And We (mostly) promise not to continue to talk like this, all goddessy and such…unless we feel like it on occasion. After all, We are what We are. Namaste, Beloveds.
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