Should Bartenders Be Allowed to Drink While Working?

I spent a solid five years working behind different bars. I called the shots at a fairly decent one up to the epidemic.

Employees often, if not routinely, drank behind the bar at every single bar, with the exception of a stuffy corporate spot inside a Nordstrom.

While I understand why some people—maybe you (!!)—think that this is not appropriate, I have zero remorse about allowing people to drink behind the bar. The same applies to doing it myself.

I frequently ponder the choice, which means I must face some internal struggle, but I always decide that I did the correct thing as a bartender and bar manager.

To be clear—

I only drank and let others drink in venues where the owners or top management approved it. If the bar was dry, I didn’t drink or let others do so. When a bar that allowed employees to drink called for a period of no drinking—an important consideration that we’ll cover in a minute—I abided by or enforced that policy.

Drinking behind the bar is not to be taken lightly. It may quickly get out of hand. However, if you’re dealing with professionals who know how to have fun in a (very much) professional workplace, it may create the circumstances for the sorts of experiences I simply don’t believe are conceivable without a little alcohol coursing through bodies on both sides of the bar.

One day, at a staff meeting, when I was a bartender at the bar I ended up running, the GM showed us an invoice. It was for two cases of Fernet Branca.

Then, he produced a sales report revealing that we had really sold less than one bottle of Fernet.

Where, oh where, did all of the Fernet go?

A mix of pouring shots for your bartender friends and bartenders doing shots of Fernet with one another behind the bar, especially on Saturday nights. Both acceptable habits that went a little out of hand.

The solution: If you want to drink Fernet on Saturday nights, take turns buying your own bottle and drink from it.

A relatively innocent situation and a good way to rein things in without going overboard.

Another time, this same GM announced that there would be no drinking behind the bar for a month.

His reason: we needed a reset. Which is a great way to phrase it: something occurred; the owners spoke to me and instructed me to manage it.

Life went on. And, a month or two later, business was back to normal. We were drinking the company’s Fernet again, even calling it in and pooling money to pay for our part on occasion.

While I can’t say our performance deteriorated when we weren’t drinking, I always felt like we stepped things up a level as a team when we were, particularly on busy weekend evenings.

Bar teams are odd beasts. Especially at serious bars. There’s tons of competition.

For the greatest shifts. To get a drink you developed on the menu. To take on additional obligations beyond working behind the bar.

I can tell you directly that, when you consider the varied characters and personalities that make up most bar teams, you have a professional social setting that’s ideal for confrontation.

Therefore, one of the first things you learn as a bar manager and, I guess, bar owner is that you need to develop camaraderie among the crew. You need to get a motley group of often highly creative, skilled, and opinionated individuals on the same page and, more importantly, in support of one another.

This goes beyond competitiveness amongst bartenders. You also need to ensure that your bartenders—often the stars of the show, particularly at craft cocktail or other serious establishments—aren't butting heads with the kitchen or being unpleasant to servers because they didn’t move with enough haste.

It’s simple to argue that people should simply be kind and courteous to one another. It’s considerably more difficult to make it happen. And you can’t achieve it using standard workplace tactics.

We had an organizational psychologist come into a staff meeting at more than one pub where I worked. The team-building activities they did—designed to prove that we all have one another’s back—fell flat.

There’s scarcely a more suitably cynical, refreshingly skeptical, no-nonsense, cut-the-bullshit bunch of folks than bartenders, waiters, and kitchen personnel. Especially if they’re of the long-term or professional sort. You’re not going to push them into anything, even if they know it’s for their own good and to assist the team.

The easiest way to create rapport is to do it the way millions of people throughout the world do it every single day of the week.

To let them drink together.

Of course, this occurs after work. And it’s vital.

As I wrote in a recent essay for Rooted regarding the at-risk part of the hospitality worker population—

…there’s a drinking culture that’s different for hospitality workers than it is for the overall community of drinkers. There’s simply something different about grabbing a drink “after your shift" when you work in hospitality than there is when you enjoy a drink after work with friends and/or colleagues. Differences in the frequency, meaning, and taste of fellowship.

Sometimes this culture is harmless, even useful. It allows individuals from diverse walks of life to get to know one another and possibly become friends. These partnerships would have never developed if you hadn’t worked at the same location, battled together to get “out of the weeds” during a hectic shift, and performed a postmortem over a beer and shot of Fernet.

There are always some who will push this culture too far.

This remark, from fellow Medium writer Alice Cutler, knocks the nail on the head.

I bartended for years in NYC. I had numerous colleagues who frequently not only drank behind the bar but also did cocaine the way some of us drink coffee. I also had numerous individuals, both colleagues and customers, give me coke. Then there was the after-hours culture that develops in the bar business, when we all go out after places are officially closed, and that’s when the coke truly pours. It’s not the norm, but it is more widespread than people are aware.

The thing is this. I never witnessed this severe form of the dark side of hospitality culture sneak behind the bar with the exception of an odd occurrence or two that only involved one person at a time.

So I believe we make an erroneous jump if we suggest that an acceptability of drinking behind the bar fosters the—let's face it—toxic behaviors that occur for some bartenders and others in the profession when they’re off the clock.

In fact, it’s a tribute to the professionalism of many bartenders that, even if they visit after hours and use coke in their personal time, they don’t bring that loudness into their job.

In other words, one item doesn’t necessarily have much, if anything, to do with the other.

And this is a beneficial thing. Because the importance of drinking behind the bar is genuinely one of those if you know, you know sorts of things.

Alcohol functions as a lubricant in so many social settings. For better or worse, there’s no denying this. And I believe it’s reasonable to argue that taking alcohol sensibly and correctly as such is not always a terrible thing.

Whether you become a little (or a lot) socially nervous, don't appreciate being the center of attention (bartenders frequently simply are), or want to feel more connected to the people you’re serving, a little liquor goes a long way. As another fellow Medium blogger, Valerie, recently pointed out—

I dislike drinking, but when I was a bartender in my 20s, I had to drink to experience that adrenaline and excitement. Otherwise, it’s virtually hard to be all pleasant and sociable 7 evenings a week, every week.

And it’s not only in the Medium “bar community” that you’ll discover this sort of perspective.

One of LA’s finest craft cocktail bartenders put it out perfectly in a Liquor.com piece—

While she’s not permitted to drink at work in her post as bar director at The Spare Room in Los Angeles, Yael Vengroff says she has no issue with modest drinking on the job in other circumstances. “If you think you’re going to be more outgoing and more exciting if you’ve had a few shots and can keep it together behind the bar, I’m all for it,” she adds.

We can judge the crap out of that position, but why?

It’s reality. A raw and true one. Not from some by-the-book manual, but from folks working—or who have worked—in the trenches who understand the often muddy realities of the bar industry.

Ultimately, drinking while behind the bar comes down to the person, how they manage their stuff, and, maybe most significantly, what they’re inclined to in the first place.

The difficulty is that, in most professional contexts, drinking isn’t part of the work. Yet, you’ll see more than a few companies—big ones, feisty startups, you name it—do things like free beer Friday, when they bring a keg into the break room to kick off the weekend.

I have witnessed it with my own eyes during my days covering tech businesses.

For goodness sake, I worked on a sales floor in San Francisco where booze “discreetly” flowed. One person kept a “water” bottle full of alcohol with him at all times. Too many folks to count reeked of liquor all day long. We drank coffee to get moving; they drank their breakfast. I observed more troubled/troubling drinking among that ragged group over the course of two years than I did throughout the five-plus years I worked behind the bar.

These cases aside, it’s not the socially accepted standard to combine drinking with employment. Yet, people do it all the time. However, in America, it’s a massive no-no and, in many places, grounds for losing your job. You may be canned for enjoying a beer or glass of wine—off the clock—during lunch.

It’s our stigma surrounding drinking—which we can argue another day—that hinders many individuals who haven’t worked in the service business from getting their heads around any justification of bartenders drinking on the job.

I got it.

In the bar and restaurant sector, alcohol is an intimately related, unavoidable, and fundamental component of the job. So it’s only logical that the temptation and chance to drink at least a little while you’re working will present itself.

And it does help bring people together. It brings the group closer. You need this cohesiveness when you are pummeled. In such tough moments, the adrenaline you create to get the job done compensates for whatever high you may get from drinking a shot or two anyhow. At least, that’s how it always seemed to me and many of my colleagues.

Bartenders drinking a bit behind the bar also necessarily helps level the social playing field with visitors.

Have you ever been the lone one not drinking in a scenario when pretty much everyone else is? It feels odd. Not usually a terrible odd (I’ve done it many times), but weird nonetheless. This is a horrible relationship to have between customers sitting and standing at the bar and the bartenders serving them.

Relatedly, there’s nothing worse than a visitor asking, “Can I buy you a shot?” and the bartender having to answer no. Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. At times when I simply didn’t want the shot, I’d do the next best thing. Pour myself a non-alcoholic shot and fetch another bartender to take the free one with me and the visitor.

At day’s end, you’re creating an environment at some of the nicest and friendliest pubs and restaurants with bars.

If you remove the socially lubricating aspects of alcohol from the equation on both sides of the bar, you’re restricting your opportunity to interact with visitors and provide them the finest experience possible.

Bottom line—not all bartenders drink while bartending. Quite a few probably shouldn’t. It’s not crucial. However, if you’re intelligent and strategic, it’s a terrific weapon to have in your hospitality and team-building armory.