Finding People (Alec Bales)
The Revelry of Bartending
I just finished a long week at work, and I was looking for a place to end the night. I walked through the krog street tunnel, where Atlanta’s late night artists are at work, photo shoots are taking place, and some guys on motorcycles tend to surf through it on rainy days. With every step I feel the crunch of old chips of paint under my feet and off in the distance I smell something faint, coming from the market nearby. Things seem to be shutting down around me and every restaurant is closing up, but there’s one spot that stays open to serve all the late night guests like myself. It’s called the Ticonderoga Club.
If you’ve ever been invited to be apart of this special club, you’d probably recognize one particular person, and that would be Alec Bales, your bartender. We all need a familiar face when we end our night, and your bartender is no exception. In some cases, they may even know us better than our own mothers. Alec has been working behind the bar here for the past seven years now and to find someone in this industry who’s this passionate about their craft and this loyal to a business within the restaurant industry is hard to come by. To know Alec, I decided to join him at the club, grab a yankee, their bacon egg and cheese on a kaiser roll, which they only serve after ten o’clock, and have a talk with him while he makes me a drink to finish off my week.
How long have you been bartending and what got you starter?
I think I’ve been bartending for seven years straight now. Before that there was a little bit of waiting tables and trying to learn how to bartend and all that. Got into it in a weird way, but I had my first job at a concession stand at the Georgia horse park in Conyers. Basically my friend worked there and his mom was the manager and we got to work there at the ripe old age of I think fourteen, but because we were working for his mom, we got to work nice long hours. Then from there we both waited tables at an Italian joint, and I really liked working at a restaurant. It was super busy all the time and I liked that, and it kept me busy. But when we started that restaurant, we just had beer and wine, but then that restaurant closed and rebranded as a different Italian restaurant, and we reopened with liquor, and nobody knew what to do. There was no organization or system to it, and they were just like “you seem a little interested in it, do you wanna help?” And I’m like “No, I’m like 18,” you know? But yada yada yada, we had liquor early on in the restaurant opening, this guy came in, and he was the only person in that restaurant ever that I had seen with a suit and tie on, and he asked for a Manhattan, I didn’t know how to make it, but I said “yeah of course!” Then turned around really quickly, googled it, quickly read the ingredients, scanned the bar, saw that we had this, that, and the other, and was like “okay, I can make this” and then I put all the ingredients in a mixing tin, I put ice in there and I shook it. You do not shake a Manhattan. I’m not gonna get into drink making stuff, but if a drink is just booze, you stir it, if the drink has citrus and sugar or whatever, you shake it. I didn’t know that. I googled the thing, I saw the ingredients, it didn’t tell me how to make it and so I just put them in the thing and I did what I had seen people do elsewhere before. And the look on that guys face is something that I'll never forget. He was like, mortified that I was shaking the piss out of this Manhattan. And he didn’t say anything to me, I served him the drink, I did put a cherry in it which I knew that, but I didn’t understand how anything was supposed to be done. And that guy walked away, I went home and I YouTubed that night “how to make a Manhattan,” found this pretty famous bartender from New York, and he had these videos that were really interesting where he like explained every step of the way, how to make a couple of classic cocktails. Then I said to myself, “I wanna figure out how to do that.” Little did I know that bartending has only somewhat to do with making drinks and a lot of it is like guest management, and work ethic, and so many other things, but yeah really I became a bartender by adapting to the environment I was in, because I saw that guy’s face and said “no, I have to be the bartender now, who knows what they’re doing,” and I’m still on that quest to know what I’m doing, right now.
Were there any surprises you experienced when you entered the industry?
Oh yeah, just that it was a business about food and about serving others, where you have to be mindful of serving yourself too you know. It’s really easy to not eat and work in a restaurant and not drink enough water and stuff like that. Surprises can come though, no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re at the grocery store and at a restaurant, if you keep your eyes open, somebody or something will surprise you. So I think the thing that got me most, was just having a daily interaction with humanity in all shapes and sizes and all forms and fashions. People are gonna do what people are gonna do, and it’s just so interesting to like just over and over and over again, have these repetitive interactions with different types of people. On a day off, sometimes I only talk to like three or four people, but on a work day I’ll talk to a hundred people, and have conversations where we pick up where we left off last time, whether last time was a week ago or six months ago. Some people came in the other night and they were waving at me from across the restaurant, and I was like “who are those people?” cause it took me a second, since the last time I saw them was nine months ago because they just had a baby and so didn’t come to the restaurant while she couldn’t drink because he didn’t want to drink without her. Just constantly being engaged with people, I think was the biggest surprise. I got into it, like I said, because I thought it was about making drinks. I thought you stood somewhere, you made a drink, you give someone a drink, and that was it, but it’s so much more than that.
What is your guilty pleasure cocktail?
I try not to have guilty pleasures, just pleasures, when I can. I very rarely drink cocktails these days mostly because my work days are consumed with making cocktails and my days off, I try to do things that are not cocktail related, so that I can keep both sides of the coin and keep my going in every way. But I would say if I’m having a cocktail, I’d say a Negroni. You can get it at any place that makes cocktails. You can get it at an airport bar, you can get it at the bar in a hotel, you can really just get it anywhere. It can be made in so many different ways by so many different people. So I’d say a Negroni but I probably drink beer and wine more than I drink cocktails.
What do you feel like is the most underrated aspect of bartending?
Hospitality. I think, a lot of people put the focus on the wrong things. You have to pay attention to the people that you’re serving. You can’t serve them something that you think is good and expect them to enjoy it. You have to gage their reactions and check back in and ask how things are tasting and also just be genuine. Something I feel like I teach a lot of younger bartenders, not that I’m old, but now I’m working with people who feel much younger than I am, and the thing I try and impress upon them is to like let people sit down at the bar and give them a minute. Don’t run up to them and ask them if they want anything to drink. If you’re watching them, you’ll notice, they haven’t even opened the menu yet, so like read people. That’s a part of our job that’s either underrated or undervalued, because I would rather go to a bar with an attentive bartender than a bar with a good cocktail maker. They’re two completely different things. And attentive doesn’t mean all over you, just paying attention to what you need.
What do you love to wear while on the job?
Things that are comfortable, but also look good, you know? I try to dress naturally for work, in a way like, the things I wear to work bleed into my regular life. I think when you break those walls away of like “this is my work clothes and this is my not work clothes,” then you don’t feel the same way about work, where like, I’m not getting dressed to go to work, I’m getting dressed to go my job which is a part of my day but it’s not this “uniform” thing. I’ve worked at restaurants before with uniforms and some of them were bad uniforms, and I look back on that, and maybe it wasn’t dehumanizing, but It didn’t make us feel better about ourselves. If a uniform was really cool, and we all looked good and felt good, that’s a different thing. Because there are restaurants and bars that have uniforms that look good, but one thing that’s special about the club is that we get to wear whatever we want to wear as long as it looks sharp basically. So then I can buy stuff from brands in town and tell people about it. If I’m wearing a Mashburn shirt or a Factor’s shirt, I’m proud of that because I get to tell people these are local brands, and to tell people about that is awesome because now they’ll go and check it out. But yeah just wearing to work things I’d wear all the time; functional you know? As I think about clothes, I think about clothes a lot differently than I did as a nineteen year old, where I was like “ah man, people think this is cool, I think it’s cool too,” but now that doesn’t matter. The point of putting clothes on is wearing things you feel good in, and certainly when you’re bartending, people are looking at you all the time, and you should look like yourself.
How would you describe the perfect guest?
Somebody who wants to enjoy themselves. Somebody who comes in openminded. Somebody who wants an experience and it doesn’t have to be insane. Sometimes you hear the word experience thrown around in restaurants and it’s like a sensory experience where your cocktail comes in a bubble and you pop the bubble, then it lands on a plate and you drink it up. I’m not talking about s*** like that. I’m just talking about having somebody impressed by a simple thing like getting a draft beer and a shot. There can be fun within that. Somebody who just wants to have good time.
Do you have any crazy bartending stories?
We have like a three pound steak on the menu that we call the chuck wagon. When we bring the chuck wagon out, we ring the bell and all go like “CHUCK WAGON!” you know? One time that came out and it was a really busy night and I think I was like kind of singing it, and there happened to be Eric Wareheim at the bar and he joined in and like harmonized and we like sang this chuck wagon song. It was so funny and just like this three to ten seconds of serendipity that you just cannot recreate. Sometimes I’ll be at that bar and I’ll look around and we’ll, the team, will know almost the entire room of people. It’s obviously taken a lot of time to build a group of regulars, and it’s those moments when something comes together that you can never recreate, those are the crazy stories.
Where did you learn how to mix cocktails?
When I came to the club, I was part of the opening team and I was a server for a little while, and I just kept telling them “I wanna barback.” Eventually I got a chance to barback and I did it everyday for like a year and a half. Every single day of working with the best people and learning from them the way they do everything behind the bar basically. Then I got a chance to bartend and now it’s been seven years. I learned everything I learned from Greg and from Paul (owners of the club), a lot of it from Greg though. He was back there with me every single day, and he didn’t give me an inch. He did not let me cut corners and he always had a good reason why. That really stuck with me. Now when I train people, I’m like “no, this is the way we do it,” they ask “why?” and I have to have an answer. Because when I was learning, I had a million questions and they always had an answer and it was always a good answer. One thing about that restaurant and about bartending, is that there is a reason for everything. I don’t do anything there without some kind of purpose. You move with purpose, you work with purpose, you try to speak with purpose, but that slips up some time and you start talking about b*******, but like for the most part it should all be well intentioned, it should all be moving towards a forward goal and together because you can’t do it alone.
Is the “therapist” persona of a bartender real?
Ha, no because none of us went to college to be therapists. I think to some extent you do end up getting personal views from people and sharing your own, but I think one thing important is learning how to navigate conversations. Yes there are times where that therapist persona kind of starts to happen but a big part of what I like to think I can do is get people engaged not just with us but with the people around them and get everybody wrapped to this bigger idea of like we’re all here because we all are here for revelry. We’re all here to eat and the drink and to be merry, you know? There’s not a lot of that, one person in the corner down in the dumps. I’m not gonna let that happen as best I can, because I want them to feel the energy from everybody else here and I’m gonna keep it upbeat, my teammates are gonna keep it upbeat and we’re gonna put that out towards our guests as much as we can. We can talk about stuff if we need to, but really that’s better saved for a therapist, and I will give people my advice but my advice is just that, my advice. It’s important to be there for people though, but back to orchestrating energy at the bar. We’re all here, we’re all trying to be present. It happens, but I don’t like when a bunch of people are on their phones because it means they’re not being present. Let’s be present together and let’s engage in this moment and usually whatever negativity someone’s feeling gets swept away a little bit and hopefully they can kind of just enjoy themselves in the present moment.
What’s a common misconception about bartenders?
That we’re doing it just to support other pursuits. It’s a pretty classic trope in restaurants that your server is also an actor and that your bartender might also be a musician. Those things, as true as they may be, there are plenty of people who do this with the intention of doing it at a high level, whether it’s for a short time or a long time. It’s hard to envision yourself doing the same thing for thirty years whether you’re a teacher, a barber, a bartender, or like literally any job. I think there’s just a common misconception that there’s just not a lot of people who do this very seriously, and I think it gives us a bad rep.
What’s your favorite drink to make?
Whatever somebody wants, honestly. When people want a vodka soda and a friend of theirs try to shame them because they’re at this cocktail bar, I assure them that I’m really excited to make a vodka soda and I don’t want them to feel belittled by their cocktail order. Sure I like to make a sazerac, but if that’s not what the guest wants, then what does the drink matter? The drink I like to make the most is the one the person actually wants.
Bartender! I think I’ll take one more round.