Charged service

It’s been a while since a bartender served me some character with my spirits. When I was living in the States, it wasn’t uncommon to sit solo at a bar and get a conversation going with the person behind it. The day Kate Middleton gave birth, I remember joking about the royal baby with a sassy bartender in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Let’s just say happy hour became very gay afterwards, especially with said bartender adding a dribble more of booze into my drinks. At an old Irish pub around the corner from the 9/11 memorial, I warmed up to a Viking-sized bartender named Steve, who introduced me to the charred complexities of Guinness. I stuck around long enough for him to show me old photos of the aftermath and hear an emotional account of shoveling people’s remains from the rubble.

Moving back to Manila, I lamented my return to server subservience. Where a barista or waitress was often just the person who got you what you asked for and nothing more. I was resigned to customer non-relations until a friend asked me to drop by a café-cum-cocktail bar in Salcedo Village called The Curator. Located in a wine store, in what could have been its back room, The Curator was a bare bones affair. There was a narrow bar that looked like it was constructed, DIY, for a Brooklyn co-op’s rooftop. Surrounding it, about four small tables that looked salvaged from a failed Filipino restaurant. A bunch of string lights hung from the ceiling, giving the sparsely decorated room a little warmth.

Though I was handed a notecard-sized cocktail menu, it was immaterial to such a personal operation. For one thing, the bartender-owner, a grinning, self-assured kind of guy, asked me my spirit of choice.

“That’s a challenge,” he said, when I went with a rum-based drink that was slightly bitter. But he nodded and instructed another bartender-in-training. The result: a drink of extremities; a ping-pong match between elements sharp and cloying.           

“How do you like it?” the owner asked.

I wavered, staring at the rocks glass. “It’s… not really my thing. It’s okay,” I said, not used to being so upfront in Manila.  

“That’s not how we do things around here,” the bartender declared, taking the drink. “If you don’t like it, we’ll make you another one.”   

Sure enough, with some probing (“Something refreshing? Not too sweet?”) and a purposeful shake, I was treated to a red revelation. In a martini glass filled with pebble ice, smoky Aperol and a dash of orange bitters gave the rich sweetness of Don Papa rum some Mediterranean mystique. Drinking it was akin to having a post-coital cigarette on the balcony of an Italian villa. Yes, that vivid and pleasurable.

As if being asked how I felt about a drink wasn’t enough, I was asked to name it. The name Regla would have been a clear winner, but the staff and I had a few laughs about its repercussions instead.

Manila’s service industry has always been known for its warmth, but lately, eagerness and enthusiasm are more palpable. I heard about a place with as much staff moxie as The Curator’s called Project Pie, a pizzeria on Shaw. While the restaurant was known for allowing customers to create their own pizzas, its servers were known for creating quite the engaging atmosphere. “It’s like I stumbled into a neighborhood where people just hung out and made pizza,” a friend said of attendants who used “man” and “dude” when addressing customers, and who didn’t hesitate to give their opinion. “‘I don’t know, man,’” a Project Pie guy said when the same friend proposed a pizza topped with just gorgonzola, a cheese overpowering on its own. “He recommended I pair it with something else, like bacon and arugula. And he was right — it was good naman. I also had a good time.”

The sort of service Project Pie pulls might be misconstrued as meddlesome but I’m all for the rising spirit of recommendation in restaurants. I’m all for the staff at Yabu in SM Aura demonstrating how to use a mortar and pestle for katsu sauce just as I am with a blue-eyed white girl at New York’s Maharlika Filipino restaurant teaching Americans what suka, our native vinegar, is. It shows that the people serving us are confident and invested in the product they’re pushing.

By having a connection to the booze they’re mixing or ice cream they’re scooping, servers create a more personal atmosphere for customers. Conversations are stimulated, server recommendations are made, and customer feedback is given. Ultimately, all this helps us eat and drink better. At the very least, it makes us feel like we’re richer in friendship after the bill’s been handed to us.