From the instructions he sends out to you just in case he decides to attend your party: Gin, chilled glass, small pour size. Check, check, check. That last item is especially well put (read the New York Post’s article).
So far so good. He sounds like a reasonable man here. Why am I getting so hot under the collar?

Shake for 45 seconds…!
Muddled cucumber…?
“No vermouth necessary.”?!?!

Tangential. At. Best.

Yes, I’m talkin’ to you, Bob. It might be a fine drink, whatever it is, but show some respect in the future. I don’t want to hear you taking the name of the Gospel of Gin in vain again.
(Thanks to @Teekeemon for his alertly twigging me to this cultural travesty.)

A pill to instantly sober you up is getting closer to reality. If it weren’t Tiki Month, I’d have a long post on how and in what ways this would be both great and terrible.

A well stocked home bar is useful for more than just entertaining and mixing delicious social lubricants. Many of the bottles and jars you have in there contain substances with significant health benefits… beyond the increasingly well-documented benefits of simple moderate alcohol consumption, I mean. The saying goes, “A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.” To this, I can only say, “whose inventory is limited Kemo Sahbee? Does your Walgreens have Four Roses Small Batch or Old Raj gin behind the counter?” I didn’t think so.

(Somewhat) more seriously, many of the really cool additives and ingredients that are the hallmarks of great drinks came to us first from pharmacists or their historical antecedents, herbalists or even shamans. And just because they are currently nestled on a shelf next to that bottle of Jåger you don’t admit you own, doesn’t mean they have lost any of the health benefits they possessed before becoming a part of our toolkit.

This post is about three of those ingredients, and is prompted by the convergence of some recent symptoms of my own and some chance reading I did recently.
(more…)

The Sad Demise of the Three Martini Lunch. Aside from just being a more pleasant way to go, a little booze really does make people more creative. Also, Instapundit notes that if the Pointy-Haired Boss is tanked, he’ll leave you alone to get some useful work done.

Your Turn, Ladies

Let’s face it, speaking from experience, I can say it’s good to be a Man.
One of the great things about being a guy is in the field of indulging yourself in Badassery. Our popular culture is awash in badass guys, and our country is equally awash in businesses who want to let regular guys get in on the fun.
Whether it is flying a Russian MiG fighter, attending baseball fantasy camps, manning the rigging in a Tall Ship, or these friggin’ idiots, the world is filled with opportunities for men to indulge their self-image.
Even real life superstars give it a shot, as with the program where the Navy SEALs drag off our top Olympic swimmers and give them a look at what REAL training in the water is like. (Actually, they don’t. The Olympians can’t take what the SEALs dish out to real trainees.)

But when women want to lay out money for recreational escape, what is mostly on offer? Culinary camp? The spa? Pottery weekends?

In case you haven’t noticed, popular culture is increasingly embracing the concept of the female badass.

Miss Romanoff doesn’t do cupcake class.

Enter Femme Fatale Finishing School in Central Ohio. Femme Fatale is your one-stop shop for a taste of all the best aspects of being an International Woman of Mystery. What’s great about being Jane Bond? Shooting guns for a start. They have that covered. Hand to hand combat. Check. Skilled gambling, car chases, and the art of seduction? Check, check, and check. And of course, neither self-image nor public persona is complete without knowing to the core how to drink a cocktail better than everyone around you.

Femme Fatale Finishing School is owned Peg McCort, a mother, businesswoman, and fitness enthusiast, and Jason Holt, a personal trainer and Krav Maga instructor. Together, they had an idea for a series of experiences for women looking for ways to be more adventurous, exciting, and assertive without sacrificing any femininity. Over the year they spent developing the concept, it grew into the metaphor they now use. The name really says it all.

FFFS doesn’t do “classes”, they offer “Missions”. The names of these Missions, such as Loaded Guns, tell as much about the attitude as they do the subject matter.

Combat Ready, for instance, embodies in its name the difference from more prosaic offerings such as How Not to be a Victim, or simply Self-Defense. The kind of training Combat Ready introduces participants to has a more assertive mind-set than, “just kick him in the knee and run away classes,” as Peg describes them. Combat Ready is more about the concept of taking the gun or knife away as a means of ending the conversation.

Not that a session of Combat Ready is going to give a woman the ability to safely do that. The point is to show participants that it is possible, that learning to actually do it can be fun, and give them the contacts to pursue these skills in the future. Most of FFFS’s missions are like this. The Missions are about having fun and expanding the horizons of what you can do. The advantage over things like Fantasy Baseball Camp is that the activities Femme Fatale introduces are one that real people can actually participate in and use when the adventure is done.

Their two biggest mission specialties so far are Loaded Guns and Seduce.

Loaded Guns 1 and 2 are firearms experiences. Loaded Guns 1 is an introduction to guns, primarily aimed at women who either have never touched a gun or otherwise feel uncomfortable around them. It starts with range and safety instruction at Black Wing Shooting Center (they are negotiating adding other venues in the area), then an extended period out in the range, shooting with handguns. They start with .22s and eventually work all participants up to 9mms and .45s. They finish up with more discussion and a light party.

Personally, I’m a big believer that adults, and even most older kids, should at least be familiar with firearms, know their real safety issues, and simply have some experience with what happens when a gun goes off nearby. Peg talks eloquently about the therapeutic and empowering value shooting a firearm for the first time can have for women. For some women, just doing it once will be enough to scratch the itch, others may find it to be a great pastime and go on to try recreational shooting, or even take a concealed carry class. (I intend to take a concealed carry class myself for the legal, safety, and skills training. I doubt I’ll actually carry.)
For many, it is simply a fear to eradicate forever. Jason told me, “we have lots of women come in who are scared to death when they walk out on the range and we put a gun in their hands for the first time. I had one lady who was literally in tears at being expected to fire a little .22. but by the end of the session, we practically had to pry the .45 out of her hand. She wouldn’t even swap back to the .22.”

This brings up something important about what they are doing with FFFS. When men do an adventure experience, we have ways of psyching each other up to get on that animal, or jump off that thing… ways that are neither pleasant nor particularly effective with normal women. These folks work very hard and very carefully to recognize the different motivational techniques you need to not only succeed and but make it fun for female clients to take that leap. Whatever the leap may be.

Loaded Guns 2 is more pure adventure for women who have already experienced the introduction. It gives them the chance to experience firing serious weapons such as assault rifles, carbines and a machine gun or two, I believe.

At the other end of the spectrum, but just as Bondian a skill if you think about it, is FFFS’s other most popular series of missions, Seduce. Seduce is about learning to control and enhance your sensuality through movement and dance. They start out with just how to walk and move on to a variety of dance ideas. Yes, they include an introduction to dancing with a pole, but Peg goes to pains to explain that they are not teaching stripping, or the kind of dancing strippers do. It’s about asserting your femininity. To me, it’s about a perfectly acceptable way to keep one’s rightful share of power in a relationship. And it certainly fits with the spy movie-esque theme of the business. If 007 didn’t know how to Seduce a variety of women, he’d have been in an unmarked grave a long time ago!

While most Femme Fatal Finishing School Missions are just a couple of hours, they are beginning to do some longer, more involved events as well. A great example is the upcoming Ride the Edge special mission. Held at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, one of those tracks where the Indy cars get to turn right every so often, this full day mission will involve training the women on spin-outs, evasive driving, pursuit driving, and a high-speed run. Oh, and there also will be the opportunity to drive around the track at speed, shooting pistols out the window of the moving cars at targets by the side of the track….

Tom Cruise not included.

Will someone tell me why the hell this company only allows female customers?

At least for right now, the mixology missions are mostly piggy-backed on other missions, after the activity is over for obvious reasons. They make a pleasant and enjoyable wind-down from the excitement and a great way to enjoy the more relaxed elements of being an international mystery woman.

All missions have different pricing, but a few examples are: Loaded Guns 1 at $100 and Loaded Guns 2 at $150; Seduce 1 at $75; and Ride the Edge is obviously pricier at $650. While larger groups can reserve an entire mission to themselves, most missions are made up of individual women and groups of a couple of friends each. The company’s website is here, and this is their Facebook page. The fabulous broad that is the PeguWife will be trying a mission or two, but I’d love to hear from any of you out there who give being a badass a whirl!

Andrew Stuttaford at National Review noted this weekend the passing of one of the classic bars in Manhattan, the former speakeasy Bill’s Gay Nineties Restaurant and Piano Bar. (That’s Speakeasy as in, Large Men Will Break Your Legs If You Work For The Cops, not Speakeasy as in, Dude, You Get To Go All Maxwell Smart On The Phonebooth In Back Of The Hotdog Shop!) In so doing, he makes mention of a great essay by George Orwell in which he describes what is, for Orwell, the perfect English Pub. George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, kiddies. They are two books you used to have to read, but usually don’t any more because, well, they don’t want you to read them anymore.

The Moon Under Water, the pub Orwell describes, is a fantasy, simply Orwell’s description of what a Pub should be, or ought to have been in wartime England. It is a lovely piece of writing, and while it would likely not be (as Andrew suggests) the perfect American bar, there is much here to chew on. I’m going to highlight a few of the elements that Orwell imagined in his perfect pub that I think ought to be universal, and a few that perhaps don’t work across time or ocean.
Also, it’s a chance to quote Orwell and generally class up the writing around here a bit.

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

He opens by noting that the Moon is easy to get to, but is neither hip nor happening. Assholes need not apply. I think you can certainly agree that a great bar should be generally free of rowdy assholes. Unless you are a rowdy asshole, of course. In such case we can take comfort in the likelihood that you don’t read this blog, and the near certainty you don’t read Orwell….

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

Mega-Dittos, Rush, er, George. Nightclubs should have loud music. Pickup joints in general should have deafening music. There is no reason in places like that to risk your personality taking away from whatever attractiveness alcohol has bequeathed you. There will be time enough in the morning to discover what a crashing bore you’ve hooked up with, right? But a good bar should make socialization easy. Either with friends, or with complete strangers. If you cannot solve the Problems of the World with a drinking companion known five years or five minutes in a bar, it is simply not a great bar.
In America today, by the way, this means no TV… anywhere in the bar. Nothing sucks the life out of conversation faster than the flickering idiot box. Sports bars need TVs, but beyond that, keep one in the back and wheel it out for people to listen to in the event we declare war, or Elvis returns.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

First, I did not know this about china and beer. I intend to try it and see. Anyone else in America use china? Any bars?
This and other comments in the piece show that an English pub, at least of Orwell’s day, was about beer. Here, cocktails are much more the focus, whether you mean the extravagant concoctions of the discerning booze nerd, or the sea of Jack and Cokes and Kangaroo Cocktails in more mainstream joints. And even for customers who don’t actively notice it, drinking vessels matter. The size, heft, and quality of glasses lend more to the quality of the drinking experience than most customers, or bar owners for that matter, realize.
And care of those vessels matters too, though Orwell neglects to mention it. A dirty, water-spotted glass puts me off almost instantly. And you best have built up a veritable sea of good times with me in the past if you want me to ever darken your door again should my glass, or those of any of my party, sports even a trace of lipstick.

Orwell speaks of the Moon’s garden, a family friendly environment.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

He is more open to the presence of children, at least on the periphery, than I am, or think Americans in general are with our bars. But his main thrust here is that wives drink with their husbands in his mythical perfect pub. I also think this is a huge deal. A bar whose customer base is too much one sex or the other is dreary for every day drinking. Yes, a boys’ or girls’ club is refreshing from time to time, and frankly, we need more of them in these politically correct times. But a really good general purpose bar ought to mirror one’s community and civilization. Further, a great bar should have a solid leavening of couples in its crowd at all times. And not just dates and hookups in progress, but husbands and wives out meeting other husbands and wives. Such atmosphere is healthy and robust, and offers all involved a richer, fuller evening out.

Not all of his suggestions, though are that great, at least to me.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Some of this is awesome. Regulars expect and deserve to be known and recognized as such, and newcomers likewise deserve to be taken interest in. But I am not a fan of the motherly or fatherly aura in my bartenders or servers. Likewise, I’m not advocating the whole “breastaurant” concept for this either. But if given my druthers, I’d rather the bartenders and servers be attractive, and perhaps just a bit younger than the clientele… so long as they don’t act like it.

The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

Yes, I really like a good bar that has a well-maintained but lived-in feel. And true, nothing makes a space feel more “lived-in” than yellow nicotine stains. But I do not personally like the smell of cigarettes; not when they are being smoked, and especially not when they were smoked 18 years earlier. That said, the perfect bar can allow cigarette smoking. It just won’t be my hangout. Bars should absolutely be allowed to allow smoking. As a business decision, most of them should not. But that should be their choice. A perfect bar for the smoker is one that allows smoking, and non-smokers should just go elsewhere. And vice-versa.
A great bar is filled with happy people, and smokers who can’t are not, and non-smokers who essentially must are not either.

There is more, and the piece is well-worth reading just for the atmosphere it evokes. It is nice to see that Orwell could paint a luxurious fantasy idyll just as well as he could a hideous, plausible nightmare. What else do you think a perfect bar should boast?

My pace of at least one full post a day throughout this year’s Tiki Month got a little attenuated at the very end, not because I was burning out, but because I was ramping up to and recovering from a sort of doctoral dissertation on all I’ve learned so far about Tiki. We hosted an all-out Tiki party at home for about twenty of our friends. I’ve hosted a ton of cocktail parties, of course. And I’ve thrown in some Tiki elements or drinks from time to time. But I’ve never done the whole magilla, and I wanted to see how much Tiki knowledge I could employ and still pull it off with out some kind of capsize event.

I think it worked. I learned a lot of lessons in the process, and spent more than I needed to to get the effect I wanted and offer the refreshments I required. But I didn’t mess anything up, and I definitely got the atmosphere I was looking for.

I started with modifying my basement bar. I’ve written quite a bit about it already, and it is most definitely not a Tiki bar atmosphere in its bones. It is all black and aluminum and purple, with bright white lights. I started by replacing all the can lights with colored floods. I used red in the areas where guest were to go, and lit the far corners and service/inventory areas in a mix of blue and green. This gave the effect I was looking for of an evening, fire-lit environment. I then removed the barstools from the bar, and ran a long, fairly lush length of rush skirting along the entire length and around the end, enhancing/disguising the top edge with some fake flower leis. The soffit overhead, I covered with vinyl printed like bamboo, and used more to wrap the base of all the pillars in the room. I covered a table along the opposite wall with sand-colored fabric and “planted” two fake palm trees covered in Christmas lights. Two cheap flower door curtains did a remarkably godo job obscuring the messy inventory room in the back.
If I had been making a permanent Tiki bar, I’d have done much the same things, but with all natural, far more sturdy materials.

I also jacked up the ambiance with a few inexpensive hand-carved objects like a nice Tiki Bar sign, a small electric fountain for some running water, and lots of fresh cut orchids all over the place. Again, in a permanent installation, I’d have used potted orchids (with more variety of look), a larger fountain, and more wooden carvings, rather than the cardboard and vinyl Tikis I put in badly lit areas to disguise their nature.
I even dug into the Summer gear and lined the front walkway with burning Tiki torches.

I put in several hours putting together a really good iTunes playlist of Exotica and other Tiki-sounding music. Two songs that I just loved, and which served as some vocal moments in the list were Don Tiki’s Pagan Lust, and An Occasional Man. The music was especially effective in adding depth to the atmosphere I was trying to create, changing the lighting in the basement from merely dim and hard to see, into darkly exotic.

I always create a menu for each cocktail party I throw. That way I can control what I need in stock, and gives me my talking points for the booze portion of the evening’s conversation. I decided this was especially important this party, since most of the guests didn’t know beans about good Tiki drinks and would have had no idea what to order. You can read a copy here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. With this, I was able to keep the ingredients under control, or so I thought. I ended up getting way too much of most fresh ingredients, and my respect for the professionals who run real Tiki bars and manage to stay in business has gone way up. I wanted to do all juices fresh, and while this did show in the drink quality, it also means I have way too much juice lying around to drink in the aftermath. With the right tools, the juicing wasn’t that hard, but guessing the right amounts needed was beyond me this first time.
I bought a few extra stems of orchids for garnish, preserved pineapple tops, and had a bowl of kumquats, which are a great Tiki alternative to cocktail cherries. And I went to the local produce wholesaler to buy gobs of super fresh mint for garnish. I wholeheartedly recommend you find such a business, likely located on the backside of your airport, for times like this. In Columbus, the place I found is Sanfillipo Produce, who have a retail Cash N Carry in their warehouse.
My wife and I both managed to buy, without consulting each other, a box of each fun/tacky garnish toys available in Columbus. As a result I now own approximately two gross of paper cocktail umbrellas. (We probably used five during the party.)

While I planned to spend more time behind the bar this party than most, I still hired my regular bartender Tony to assist. With the planned on number of guests, one guy would certainly not be enough when making the kind of Tiki drinks I was offering. A little more than a year ago, I kinda went postal on some hapless Brooklynite who declared you shouldn’t have a party if you’re too poor to swing a bartender. There are plenty of party formats where you don’t need staff, no matter how large. But if you are having a drinks geek party, (and why would I have anything else?) and you are having more than 10 guests, you won’t get out from behind the bar to enjoy your guests if you mix things yourself.
Tony is particularly great because, while he’s ten times the pro I’d ever aspire to be, he is always willing and able to absorb whatever new tricks and/or schtick I’ve got up my sleeve for my parties. Cultivate at least one good working pro bartender in your town who can work your own occasional parties with or for you.

I placed the barstools around a small high-top table across the room from the bar. This gave me a place to serve the bowls on my menu, with their flaming garnishes and make a big stinking production out it. The fire extinguisher is there but not visible in the picture….
Always have plenty of better than average fake flower leis on hand, in case an actual Tiki shows up at your event….

A few other tips that worked out well:

• A chunk of dry ice is a cheap and easy way to liven things up. Tony usually had one or two mugs frothing away on the bar, and he and I dropped a sliver here and there into random drinks to keep people’s attention.
• There is genuinely something fascinating about a swizzle stick being employed properly. People really dig it.
• People are afraid that Tiki drinks are too sweet. It took me a while to understand that what I thought of as “sweet” drinks on my menu weren’t all that sweet to them.
• Cultivate a good relationship with your fishmonger. I was able to get mine to give me 15+ pounds of crushed ice from his machine and it was plenty usable for the party a couple of hours later.
• No one wants to order a bowl drink. Everyone wants to drink out of them.

Of course, some drinks worked, some didn’t. My earlier idea that Dr. Funk might be a good Absinthe Entry Drug? Yeah, no. The kindest comment I got from this group of Absinthe virgins was, “It tastes like Good n’ Plenty”. The surprise hit was a new drink I learned about just that week on Mixology Monday, Gilligan’s Ginger Swizzle by Ed at Wordsmithing Pantagruel.
And of course the number one cocktail (almost everyone had one) was the Mai Tai (half Appleton’s V/X, half Smith & Cross). It is a never-ending surprise and delight to me to see the look on a friend’s face the first time they take a sip of a really well-made Super-Weapon of Tiki. If you are any kind of cocktail geek, you have no excuse not to know how to make a good Mai Tai. Even with Tiki Month six months away in either direction, when I am in full Pegu, Manhattan, Old Fashioned, Aviaton, Gin Rickey-mode, I always have the means to make Mai Tais. Not only is it among the easiest Tiki Drinks to make (the orgeat is the only remotely weird ingredient), not only is it likely the best Tiki Drink, but it is simply hard to make the case that Trader Vic’s Mai Tai isn’t one of the best straight cocktails ever invented.

The food looked like it was going to be hard, but turned out easy.

Easy for you to say, Mister!
I didn’t see you in the kitchen making any of it….

True. But at no point in the process did you threaten to take a hostage, so in comparison to the usual situation, I’d rate this party as pretty easy.

Hmmm.
You may have a point.

Anyway, the key to remember in Tiki food, as with everything else Tiki, is that the key is in selling the presentation rather than in any kind of authenticity. Our most successful dish was a South Georgia and Carolina Low-Country specialty, Shrimp Sea Island. (Note: That’s not our recipe. No one gets our recipe.) There is nothing remotely Tiki about this dish, but skewer the shrimp on bamboo skewers with chunks of mango and serve on a bed of the lemons and Bob’s Your Uncle.
Sous vide chicken chunks, skewered with pineapple bits and finished under the broiler made for a second delicious main dish. Between the two of them, all the bamboo spears made the table look like the aftermath of Magellan’s last stand. Beyond that, we surrounded some pre-made spring rolls with fresh fruit and crudité, and were left with a tropical-looking spread that helped the guests extend their evening quite nicely.

Here’s the bottom line: Tiki parties aren’t hard. Certainly no harder than any other kind of party. Nor need they be much more expensive, especially if you plan on having them ore than once. But they do take planning, and especially imagination. Use plenty of both, and your Tiki party can be one you really hit out of the park.

I’m big into logistics. It’s in my blood. Most of the useful work I’ve done in my life (as opposed to killing people or cocktail blogging) has been in transportation or logistical support. But even I find the logistics of leaving a bar a pain in the backside. And whatever your background, I’m guessing that we have at least that in common. Moreover, your bartender is of the same opinion as well.

There are a lot of moving pieces to paying your check, and each has to happen in the correct order. You have to get the check, look it over, pay the bartender, wait for change or for your card back before you can finally move on to the next stop or to home. At any point in this process, your bartender may be in the weeds, or maybe he’s just down at the other end of the bar, flexing for the group of young ladies with questionable virtue but unquestionable cleavage. It is frustrating. And it is for the bartender as well. The time she spends running your tab, finding your card, or making change, is time she can’t spend with other customers who are still producing revenue and need service. Most times, things go pretty smoothly, but even the occasional hiccup is a memory you don’t want, and can be a disaster for the bartender and his employer.

But technology rocks logistics, and there is a new company out there that aims to radically ease this particular burden on both patron and bar. It is called TabbedOut and it would seem to offer a really great way to nearly eliminate this scourge from our lives, through a nifty little app on your smartphone and some add-on software to common Point-of-Sale systems.

When she turns around to that POS system, she isn’t helping any thirsty customers.

TabbedOut is incredibly simple, and like many simple things, incredibly powerful, too. Here’s how it works:

• You enter a restaurant or bar that supports TabbedOut. The app uses location services to tell you whether your chosen watering hole is hooked in, and if not, which places nearby do. You tell your app you’d like to open a tab, give it your password, and it returns a short code. You show this to your bartender, and they enter it in the POS system. Your tab is open.
• From now until you leave is the same as any other way of operating. Order drinks just like usual, and they go on your tab.
• When you are ready to go, open your TabbedOut app, review your tab online on your phone, select the amount of tip you’d like to leave, and walk away. That’s it. You’re bill is paid, your tab is closed, you can go, and your bartender can go right on pulling Budweisers for the crowd of Steelers fans drowning their sorrows down the bar.

The ease and convenience of TabbedOut’s basic features alone makes it well worth checking out, but there are more considerations here than meet the eye, as well as more functionality.

This is a very secure way of doing things for everybody involved. Most importantly, you never let the credit card you pay with out of your possession, much less have to leave it in some plastic index card box behind the bar all evening as you must in some places. TabbedOut’s servers send your card number from your phone securely and invisibly to the POS system.
I once had my Amex card skimmed. I hadn’t used it anywhere for a while, so I knew it had to have happened in one of two bars I went to the previous weekend. I called both places to give a friendly heads-up to management about my suspicions. One was apologetic and thankful for the opportunity to watch out for the problem. The other was defensive. I’ve never been back to the second place, despite the fact that it was (is) a great bar here in Columbus. My point is, credit card fraud is a disaster for both the patron and the bar. With TabbedOut, your chances of a security failure are significantly reduced.

“Let’s see… Phillip, you had the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and three Jager Bombs…”

There are other very nice features beyond that bare-bones description, too. The biggest one is check splitting. The only people who like this process are those who revel in arguing their share down to the last twenty five cents on a four-hour dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. And yes, I have sat next to those people. I hated every second of that process and it wasn’t even my check.
TabbedOut offers several very easy ways to split the check. You can split the check in equal parts. You can manually split it into shares. Or best of all, and this short-circuits the quarter-pinchers, you can bring up the tab on your phone and pick which items each guest had. If your friends are also on TabbedOut, they can get your tab code from you and add themselves to your tab. Then they can pay their portion, as determined above, any time they want to. Or they can go through the hassle of paying the bartender directly, and their portion will be taken off your tab. Regardless, all the information and tools you need to easily split the check are always in your pocket.

There are a few other handy features for customers of TabbedOut too, such as CabbedOut, which will find a cab company for you whether you are in an unfamiliar city, or just so drunk you can’t remember your own.
For the social media addicts out there, TabbedOut has all the hooks needed to Tweet, post to your FaceBook wall, or check-in with Foursquare automatically whenever you open or close a tab.
The system also facilitates a really good pubcrawl, as you can keep a number of tabs open simultaneously in different bars. Incidentally, this and other factors make TabbedOut more popular in areas where there is some density of establishments that offer it, but that doesn’t mean it cannot work just fine at only one place in a city.

And TabbedOut has much to offer bartenders and owners as well. Foremost, it saves a lot of the bartenders’ time. That is time that can be spent taking care of customers (or flexing for the attractive barflys). This can mean significant extra revenue at time periods like Last Call, or the end of a ball game. In restaurant bars, a patron won’t have to delay to get their check when their table becomes ready. Also, like with OpenTable, patrons who get used to using the app will prefer to go to places that support it, and the app provides a very nice feature to help them find bars that do.

There are significant financial protections for the bar as well. The reputation of the bar and its honest employees are protected should a bad apple slip in. More importantly, should a customer just walk off, there is no need to chase them down. The bartender can close out any tab any time they want, or just at the end of the night. Or should the customer forget to close the tab, they can still close it themselves from home or the next bar over.

TabbedOut is easy to setup for most establishments, as it hooks in to most of the major POS systems, such as MICROS, Focus, Future POS, Dinerware, Jumpware, and others. It does require some additional training, which can be a consideration in such a high-turnover business. But the system is so simple and transparent, I imagine much of the process is taken up by simply convincing a new employee how easy it is going to be.

The last thing I’d like to address with this system is tipping, something that is important to both patron and employee alike.

Tipping is also made easier with the TabbedOut model. When a customer chooses to close their tab, there is a percentage slider to set the desired tip amount, and that is it. There is no math to trip up or embarrass you after three Pegus and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Each restaurant sets its own default tip percentage, and if the customer forgets to close his tab, that default amount will be applied for him when the bar closes it. The default amount is also a minimum amount, so the staff will not be stiffed on any tab run through TabbedOut any more than they will be stuck with a walked check.

I’m really very excited about this product. TabbedOut appears feature-rich, easy to use, a little fun, and offers value to both customer and establishment alike. I suggest downloading the free app from the iTunes store or Android Marketplace and seeing what bars near you are set up to use it. And if you are a bar owner or manager, may I suggest giving them a call?

A gallery of famous literary drunks. I touched on the subject of giants fueled by booze in my post on Hitchens recently. Here are many more.

Many great writers put away a bottle or three. Many are known for it. And a few are known to be fueled by it. Men like Kingsley Amis and of course, Ernest Hemingway are forever associated with drinking, and doing it with the same epic skill as they wrote. This week, we lost to cancer one of our day’s greatest writers, one for whom alcohol also loomed large in his legend, Christopher Hitchens.

How good a writer was Hitch? An unabashed lefty and an outspoken atheist, he was admired by, beloved in some cases, by most writers on the Right, even the religious conservatives. His atheism was matter of fact; a simple, calculated, decision. While he often defended his lack of faith the only way he wrote anything, powerfully, he never begrudged others their faith. And throughout his long, horrifying battle with a cancer he knew he would not win, he dealt with it in a manner consistent with how he had lived his life before. He did not turn to God in desperation. Nor did he rail against a deity he professed not to believe in, in order to defend his professed lack of faith. He just was who he was. To the end.

And Hitchens was a larger than life man, not just a larger than life writer. In 2009, he got into a street brawl in Beirut with street thugs in the pay of Syria. While walking down a street with two unfortunate friends, he spied a poster of theirs and took exception to its message. He drew his pen and granted them a sample of his writing, “No, no, fuck you”, I believe….
Eloquence takes many forms, changing with the circumstances. Hatred of eloquence usually takes more uniform shape. In this case it took the shape of six or seven bad guys who showed up, took exception to Hitch’s “contribution” to their Jew-hatred, proceeded to try to beat the holy hell out of him until a cab driver more brave than smart stopped and let him and his friends in. This was at three in the afternoon, and they had been on their way to a bar.

While most of what Hitch wrote was political, he did contribute to the assemblage of written words on drink itself. I’d like to share some quotes from two pieces I found. The first is a bit on staying healthy through drink.

I’ll be 54 in April, and everyone keeps asking how I do it. How do I do what? I’m never completely sure what the questioner means. I *hope* they mean how do I manage to keep producing books, writing essays, making radio and television appearances at all hours, traveling all over the place with no sign of exhaustion, teaching classes, and giving lectures, while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike physique which is the envy of many of my juniors. Sometimes, though, I suppose they mean how do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule? My doctor confesses himself amazed at my haleness (and I never lie to a medical man), but then, in my time I’ve met more old drunks than old doctors.

A few swift tips here, to show that I am perfectly serious. On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis — and all gin drinks — that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few, and three is one two many. Do try to eat the olives: they can be nutritious. Try to eat something, indeed, at every meal. Take lots of fresh or distilled water. Don’t mix from different bottles of red wine: Dance with the one that brung ya. Avoid most white wine for its appalling acidity and banality. (Few things make me laugh louder than the ostentatious non-drinkers who get plastered when they condescend to imbibe a glass of toxic Chardonnay, and who have been fooling themselves for so long.) Avoid Pernod and absinthe and ouzo. Even if it makes you look like a brand snob, do specify a label when ordering spirits in particular. I once researched this for a solemn article and found that if you just ask for, say, vodka-and-tonic the barman is entitled to give you whatever he has on hand, which is often a two-handled jug labeled “Vodka” under the bar. It can be even worse with scotch, where imitation blends are rife. Pick a decent product and stay with it. Upgrade yourself, for Chrissake. Do you think you are going to live forever?

There is much more there, all of it great.

His memoir Hitch-22, written around the time of his diagnosis, ends up an eloquent goodbye that too few great writers get the chance to make. You can read excerpts of it at Slate, including this one on the grape and the grain. From that excerpt, conservative curmudgeon Smirkdirk excerpted a list of Hitchens’ 11 Rules on Booze.

1. Making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic.
2. Watching the clock for the start-time is probably also a bad sign.
3. Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food.
4. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure.
5. Drink when you are in a good mood.
6. Cheap booze is a false economy.
7. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain.
8. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night. (If you really don’t remember, that’s an even worse sign.)
9. Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—​as are the grape and the grain—​to enliven company.
10. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop.
11. It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know quite why this is true but it just is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.

Smirkdirk’s post is entertainingly illustrated (illustrations I won’t steal) and worth visiting.

Like everything Hitchens, there is much there that is true on the face of it. And there is some that I question, but that is presented in a manner that is hard to argue with. In similar fashion, we find his wisdom on a product that is the reason (finally) for this post. As a cocktail writer, among the wages of my sins is a steady parade of email press-releases filled with material that does. not. interest. me. But every so often, there is one that strikes my fancy, such as the one from Perrier Water I received yesterday, leading me to this little article.

…a section of Hitchens’ autobiographical 2010 tome Hitch-22 in which he details his everyday alcohol agenda. ”At about half past midday,” writes Hitchens, “a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice.” He also enjoys “At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal.” Clearly, this was a man who knew how to drink with class.

As I said, eloquent advice that I don’t entirely agree with. I, Scot that I am, put a bit of ice in my whisky. Why? Because I am also an American, and we put ice in everything, dammit.

As for Perrier, I go through a lot of the stuff, especially in the Summer. But never in Scotch. Among the things that distinguish scotches from one another are the unique properties of the water at each distillery, so using Perrier, with all its own distinct character, alters the whisky irrevocably. But Perrier is indispensable for Gin Rickeys. Nothing else is as good, marrying perfectly with good gin. And I mean Perrier specifically, not mineral water in general. Pellegrino, for instance, just does not work at all.

Regardless, raise a glass of whatever you like, with Perrier or without, alongside me to a man whose departure impoverishes us all.