Right off the bat, my bar played host to a cask beer festival this weekend. If you don't know what that is, you may learn about it by clicking over to my friend Alex's website here (Warning: that link leads to some VERY heavy British-ness). Just never ever ask me to define cask beer again, as I only explained it 5,000 times over the course of three days. While I wasn't really all that begrudging of the people whose only wish was to learn more about something that I truly love, I've repeated the definition of craft beer so many times that the words have begun to sound like gibberish. Especially when one of the words you have to keep using is "firkin". Say that twenty times into a mirror in a darkened room and a deranged Brit with an impenetrable accent will appear, chop off your head, pour yeast and hops down your neck and then store you in his cellar (at an optimal 54-56 degrees) until you are ready for the drinking.
Beer geeks, both aspiring and experienced, are really hard to get mad at. Irritation does rear it's head however, when you've got forty-odd pairs of expectant eyes on you and you've been tied up for the last five minutes with someone who wants to know what the ABV is on every beer you have. These guys (and really, it's a dude-heavy scene) seem to have come by the notion that every craft beer bar in America operates on the same basic pattern as an Apple Genius Bar.
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| But how many firkins to the hogshead do you reckon? |
After many consecutive hours of beer geekery, I was feeling a bit raw which set me up to be strangely charitable to the trio of foreigners who showed up late last night and began ordering Car Bombs. This is not a drink that I particularly relish making, mostly because of the stomach contents-like residue that it leaves in my pints, but also because people who order these are usually on the short path to getting "belig". However, several days of dealing with people who want to get highly technical about their beverage made those Car Bombs orders seem mildly comforting. Besides they all seemed to be in good spirits, politely asking for round after round of Car Bombs to be put on their tab. My first warning should have been when I looked up to see they had left the bar without closing their tab. Hey, it happens to the best of us. I still get my tip at the end of the night when I close out all the tabs left open, so I wasn't annoyed by this development. About fifteen minutes later I saw two of the three walk by the front windows, so I ran out and informed them that their friend had forgotten his card. They thanked me and went off to fetch him back. So far, so good. Sure enough they returned, but instead of closing the tab, they ordered two more rounds of Car Bombs.
Now I'm beginning to suspect things will go badly for someone. Sure enough, they call for the check and, upon delivery, I am told that they are unsatisfied with my service. When I inquire through now-gritted teeth whatever seems to be the trouble, I am informed that the service of this bar was not what they are used to back in Turkey. And what had so greatly offended the Ottoman Empire?
No table service.
Yes, these travelers, who insisted through their drunken bitching that they loved New York City and blah blah blah, had expected me, the ONLY person working a bar that had multiple stools open AT the bar, to be their personal barmaid. To cut a long and testy story short, I got elevated and threatened to invoke the Treaty of Ouchy (I believe the exact phrase was "I will drop some Ouchy all over your ass"), they paid and retreated while also pulling all military personnel from Libya.
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| "No, we don't have fucking table service." |
Thusly we come to the trademark-pending Daily Main Point of My Rambling Diatribe: If all you want from life is the familiar comforts of home, stay fucking home. I think I speak for all New Yorkers, both native and adoptive, when I tell any prospective visitors or transplants that this city is and has been for quite a while now, it's own thing. It's a loud, dirty, rude place where people move very quickly and have learned to sacrifice a few creature comforts for the privilege of living in one of the capitals of the modern world. If you are seriously ruffled by brusque counter service? Don't come here. Do you blanch at the thought of being crammed into a rickety metal tube and hurled blindly underground while surrounded by people with varying levels of hygiene? Don't come here. Do you wish to revel in the coolness of living in a loft apartment above a faux-dive bar but need absolute silence from the hours of 10pm till 8am? Stay in fucking Des Moines.
I'm not a monster. I can understand a tourist, especially one from another country, might experience a fair amount of culture shock upon arriving here. Hell, I experienced culture shock when I first got here and I'm from this country. New York is a beast of a place to wrap your head around, but when you start burning the locals because you can't hack the thinly controlled dance with chaos that we call daily life, don't expect us to coddle you with a warm blanket and extraneous table service. No one here cares how you get it back in the Motherland. When we show up in Ankara, please feel free to put the skids on us.
And if you plan on moving here? Please do not delude yourself by thinking that this city is in any way about to bow down to your expectations of what reasonable is. Sure, the huge influx of delicate out-of-towners have already done away things like late night patios at bars and a whole generation of rock clubs. Fine. Damage done. However, if you move into a neighborhood that was, until recently, an industrial area, you should realize that the pastrami factory across the street is going to be firing up the forklifts and banging shipping containers around at 5am, just as they've done for the the last four decades. You can call 311 and drop noise complaints every 45 minutes of every day you live across from that factory and the only thing you're going to achieve is pissing off some underpaid city employee.
And them's the facts. The walls here are thin, the rats are huge, the bars are open till four, the trains never stop running, and crack-head-hollerin' time is always right now. Sound awful? Yeah, well, we're not all that stoked on the suburban shit hole you're from, either.
That's why you never see us there. Please reciprocate.
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