Come Sail Away... Bartender on the Road

I haven't been a bar tender on a regular basis for a while, but that it's like the mob, you can never get out. I have long been a fan of exploring new bars. There is a two-fold ideology behind this: 1) Alcohol saturated adventure, and 2) You can see what you shouldn't do and what you should do to be a better bartender. Traveling to Ohio this past week I had some prime time to investigate. Here's the gem.

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The White Sail.

We pull into a gravel driveway next to a white building that has a hand-crafted (and uneven) sign above the door that reads: The White Sail.

“Are we going to get hurt?” I ask my friend Marc.

“No,” he responds laughing slightly at my innocent question. Marc has previously told me the tale of how he finally discovered the White Sail after searching for it for years. Stuck in the middle of a small residential area I can understand how it might even be looked directly upon without recognition – the building more closely resembles a house than a ‘bar’ destination.

We walk in and immediately my eyes shrink – it’s about two o' clock in the afternoon on a sunny June day but in here its nine PM, October 25th 1972. The only light comes from objects like novelty beer signs and out of season Christmas lights that border and outline displays. The first thing I see as my eyes adjust to the light is a small child, sitting at the bar in front of the video poker machine. Then another small kid, the first a boy of about eight, the second a girl a year or two younger. Several seats past them are folk who appear to be their parents.

We sit down and the upper-middle aged platinum blonde woman behind the bar asks us for our ids in a tobacco-damaged voice. Her demeanor is a bit gruff, but in this part of the country that’s commonplace in establishments like this. As I suspect, once she discerns we are of legal drinking age she becomes immediately more personable and asks the age old question:

“What’ll it be?”

Marc is a Budweiser man and he answers accordingly. I look around knowing my predilection as a beer snob will win me no favor here. Two tall coolers on either side of the woman showcase MGD, Michelob Ultra and not much else. Our host procures Marc’s bud from a cooler just in front of us – I smile as I hear the can crack open with a burst of freshness. ‘What the hell,’ I think to myself, ‘when in Rome…’.

“I’ll have a bud as well.”

I’m treated to a second Crack and as I sit and take a sip from the aluminum can I’m not so surprised to find that a beverage I normally find abhorrent hits the fucking spot on this 80+ summer day. It comes as no surprise really. It’s only in a place like this, at a time like this that a can of cheap American lager tastes good to me. Marc and I settle back into our beers and begin to look around.

The bar is rounded and big enough for between twelve or fifteen nice leather-backed barstools. Behind it are two or three faux-leather apolstered booths and then a small succession of simple tables and chairs. Chances are if you’ve gone bar hopping anywhere in the mid-west you’ve seen the prototype the White Sail is based on – possibly best described as if imagined your aunt turning her basement into a bar…

Shifting my attention behind the bar one of the first things I notice is on a door next to the cooler to the left of where the bartender served us. Suspended by a single piece of Scotch tape is a child’s crude drawing of a large white sail with the words The WHITE SAIL scrawled in sloppy crayon below it.

Nice.

The Bottles on the shelf have color-coded plastic pourers and Marc points out a handwritten list to the left of the old fashioned cash register. I don’t recall everything, but yellow was the most expensive color at $4.25 and topped such items as Level brand vodka (easily a $6-$8 vodka in a lot of the places I know of back in LA or Chicago), and Christian Brothers VS. Total there cannot be more than 20 bottles on that shelf, and I'd say only four or five of them had yellow.

Did I mention our beers cost $4.50 for the two?

After a few minutes the kids leave with their parents and in short order a new guy enters the bar via a screen door in the rear of the place and sits down at the poker machine.

Wait... yes, I said a screen door. I did mention how much this place looks like a house didn't I? Moving right along...

When the bartender asks him what he’s having he asks her about Margaritas – he does this in a way that makes me think he has only just learned of this drink for the first time recently. Our host looks a bit confused and he goes on to recite what he remembered to be the recipe, apparently related to him by another employee of the place. She listens for a moment but he does not express himself with confidence in his description or any kind of accuracy in terms of pronouncing the names of the suspected ingredients so she dons a pair of generic reading glasses and begins hunting around for a recipe book. Once said recipes are found they are not a book but a loose packet of index cards rubber banded together. She begins rifling through them.

“You tend bar, ask her if she needs help,” Marc prompts me.

“What’re you trying to make?” I ask cautiously.

“He asked about a Margarita,” she tells us, “I’ve never made one before, I usually work the day and get all the beer and whiskey drinkers.”

I’m about to offer up some advice when she lifts a card from the stock and holds it to the light. She moves away to grab her cocktail shaker.

Now, I’m all for offering advice, but here’s one thing to remember- don’t be a condescending prick about it. And I say that because step two is you never know who will find what condescending.

This is important in any bar, at any time, so let me repeat it in bold:

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO IS GOING TO FIND WHAT OFFENSIVE. If you write off every single other piece of advice I offer, please remember that one and always think before, during and after you speak. It could save your life, or at the very least your job.

I notice that after Jose Cuervo our host picks up the bottle of Grand Marnier (one of the few cordials the Sail offers along with the likes of Frangelico and DeKuyper's Razzmatazz) even though there is a bottle of Triple-Sec almost next to it. Now, for conversation I could get involved and tell her she could just as easily use the Triple, but the motivation behind using that instead of GM is its cheaper. This may piss off the guy ordering the drink, and might make my host think I’m a know-it-all little prick. Maybe not, she seems pretty cool, but I air on the side of caution. I figure with her apparent need to let Marc and I, two total strangers, know that she had never made a margarita before I’m betting she’s a bit self conscious and I figure let her figure it out herself.

So once the ingredients are in she shakes the fucker up and pours it into the glass she has already rimmed with salt (I missed this process but it looks to me like she used table salt, not margarita salt). She serves it up and goes back to opening cans of bud, what everyone else in the room appears to be drinking.

Marc and I go back to our beers and our constant appreciation of the room. It's a common misnomer that bars like this are cutthroat. I mean, yeah, if you're out dive hunting then you need to mind your shit, because a room can go pear-shaped in an instant and you need to be ready. However, and this is a big however so I should say HOWEVER, bars like the White Sail are typically, from this bartender's experience, the nicest places to drink. Blue collar folk (of which I am one) are in their element when they are drinking with friends and not being charged through the nose for it. You find a bar like The White Sail, it'll be your huckleberry for a long time. My bar in Chicago I left behind, Kraus' Gaslight is the same way and I miss it and the patron's every day, and especially every time I walk into a corporate drinking hole bent more on being a restaurant than a tavern.*

Like I said, find one of these and you'll have friends and a place 'where everybody knows your name' for life, and that's good for relaxing and reconnecting with the human race, especially as a bartender who has to serve people all the time. It's like the masseuse's masseuse.
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* When you find a place like this you will understand the distinction of the term 'tavern' as a colloquial from the various other terms around for establishments of drinking.