Drank No. 10: Some things bars are doing

Mayahuel

Guest bartenders

It’s increasingly common for serious bartenders in big cities to either hold shifts at multiple bars, or to do guest residencies. The first time I noticed this was in San Francisco when I had drinks at Bourbon and Branch, Heavens Dog and Alembic on three different nights and had the same bartender serve me each time. The New York Times saw it too.  Chefs and cheese mongers and baristas have done this for some time, I think it shows how the craft of bartending is maturing.

Guest drinks

I’ve been to a couple restaurants and bars where they offer a drink from another contemporary establishment. The other place is named, the drink is given full credit to the bartender who invented it, and there’s maybe a short explanation about it on the menu. I think it’s a great idea that builds community and credibility.

Bars based on a single alcohol

New York now hosts bars whose entire cocktail menu is based on gin (Madame Geneva), tequila (Mayahuel) and rum (Cienfuega). There are several who do brandy (The Brandy Library) and Bourbon (Char No. 4), though they mostly focus on the main ingredient, not mixing it. There’s also The Bubble Lounge which features champagne, something we should all be studying. I am sure there are some that I’m missing. These are great places to taste a spirit in depth and see how it performs in all kinds of concoctions.

Drank No. 11: Italian Amari, Campari and Negronisplosion

il Negroni sbagliato

Campari is one of a family of Italian alcohols called amari (plural of amaro). The literal translation of amaro is “bitter” but that really doesn’t mean the same thing so I’d stick to using the Italian word. There are lots of different amari. It seems like every village in Italy makes one. Besides Campari two other popular amari include Aperol and Cynar.

In Italy Campari is usually served as an aperitivo. The word sounds like appetizer and, essentially, that’s what it is. Think of an aperitivo the same way you think of an appetizer at dinner. For example, an oyster. Eating one makes you hungrier. It inspires you to eat more. Same for drinks. They should whet the appetite.

Amari are built from a base of wine, not liquor, so their alcoholic content is low, usually not more than 20%. That makes them a good choice before dinner.

Their origins are medieval. Monks macerated spices to extract their supposed medicinal properties. Amari are still chock full of spices and weirdness. Aperol has sixteen different ingredients, Campari has ninety-nine.

The modern development of amari began in the late 19^th century in the café cultures of Milan and Turin. When you think of café  here you should erase any idea of Starbucks from your mind. These were grand places, with vast ceilings, windows and chandeliers. The waiters wore serious clothes. Table service was the norm. American doesn't really have an equivalent, the only thing I’ve seen that comes close are grand hotel bars.

In northern Italy, before dinner at a restaurant or trattoria, you’d take an aperitivo at a café. (It’s a tradition that’s still followed today.) You would make a reservation for a drink at one place and, later, a reservation for dinner at another. Doesn’t that sound splendid?

The best cafés had a position called the maître’ d di liquiriza —the liquor host. They worked in front of and behind the bar where they blended their own amari. A bar with a great liquor host who had a great proprietary amaro got a lot of reservations so they were kind of a big deal. The two most famous liquor hosts of their day were the friends Gaspare Campari and Alessandro Martini (the first half of Martini & Rossi, the vermouth).

These two celebrities collaborated on a cocktail, mixing their namesake alcohols, Campari and Vermouth, in equal portions with soda and a wedge of orange. The result was the Milano Torino, named after the two towns where they worked. It was the most famous drink of its day. No one calls it that anymore, though: U.S. soldiers fell in love with it and the name changed to the Americano.

Later, a Count in Florence 86'd the soda and replaced it with gin. He drank it in the afternoon, something you can do when you're a Count. His name was Negroni and the drink has been called that ever since. The Negroni has taken off in the last couple years and, to some extent, it's become a placeholder name for lots of 3-part coctails that use an amaro, a vermouth and something else. I even saw "Negroni of the Month" on a menu at a restaurant recently. 

The best of the new-Negroni lot has probably been been to replace the soda or gin with prosecco, an invention of Bar Basso in Milan where it was named il Negroni sbagliato or “the mistaken Negroni" (in the US it's usually known as "sbaglio"). Having ordered several over the past couple years I can assure you that as far as mistakes go it is delicious. Replacing 80 proof gin with prosecco nicely reduces the alcohol level which takes the Negroni—an aperitivo by nature but one that has too much alcohol to make you a reliable dinner guest—back to its role as a great pre-meal drink. Apparently the Milanese absolutely go bonkers for ice in il sbagliato, something you'll recognize as strange if you've traveled in Europe where ice cubes are rarer than white tennis shoes. It's often served in oversized wine goblets loaded with cubes.

I'm of the opinion that Negronis should be stirred, not shaken (and you can't shake a sbaglio—it'll ruin it). Shaking makes a completely different drink, changing the color of the Campari and adding bubbles which reduces the luxurious feeling on the tongue, one of the Negroni’s most lovely features. I've tasted one delicious variation where orange wedges were marinated in sweet vermouth overnight, caramelized on a flat top, then muddled into the drink. 

Unprocessed

 "One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches."

MFK Fisher

The new bread

"We have broken bacon together,
we can safely assume we are familiar."

House of Cards

Doctors have two sets of books

I went to a doctor in Brooklyn this week. Since my insurance is sold to Zingerman's in Michigan I can't use it for a regular doctor visit here; the insurance doesn't work out of state. More about how that's a bad idea another time. This time I'd like to talk about prices.

Most of the time doctors are opaque about what things cost. You don't know what costs what, you aren't presented options, you may never see a bill. Not at this doctor. I was told right up front how much my visit would cost. They took my credit card when I handed in my paperwork. Before I was given a shot the doctor said it would cost an extra $25 and was that OK. ("Sounds cheap, let's have two!") This kind of this-is-what-it-costs-will-you-pay is common courtesy in the retail world but I've never had it happen with a doctor so I was kind of shocked.

I went to check out. They gave me the bill. It was laid out in a matrix, like a spreadsheet. There were three rows and three columns:

New patient  visit		$250.00	$150.00
Injection		$112.20	$25.00
Total		$362.20	$175.00

 I was confused. "What's going on with the different prices?" I asked?

The clerk answered matter of factly, "Oh, the first column of numbers are what we would charge if you had insurance. The second are what we charge you if you don't."

In other words, if I had used insurance the procedures would have cost $362.20, twice as much as the $175 I paid. They would have been the same procedures. They would have lasted the identical amount of time. They would have had the same result. So it appears that the identical product, given to the same person, has two vastly different prices depending solely on how they choose to pay. Of course we're all used to price discrimination from airlines based on when we want to travel. But this is isn't a case of priced scheduling. It's priced paying. Gas stations sometimes charge a few cents more for paying credit card instead of cash but never anything like this. If I had stopped the clerk at this point and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I DO have insurance!" they would have said, "Great!" and promptly charged me double.

This may seem strange to the rest of us humans. But I learned it's actually normal in health care. "Normal," that is, for the worst run industry in America. There's a simple — and ridiculous, I assure you — explanation for it. I'll write about it soon.

The Worst Run Industry In America is my look at the American health care industry, its service, prices and promises, from my view as a merchant.

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How not to price a product

Our partners group held its annual retreat last week. One of the topics we discussed was health care costs. A little background first: each year Zingerman's benefits committee solicits bids from insurance companies and creates a proposal document to help us understand the menu of costs and changes. It's not typical for us to talk about the proposal at the retreat but this year we had a few more changes than usual.

It took an hour. To say that people were mildly baffled is an understatement. It was a clusterfuck. It's not that things cost different amounts—that part makes sense. It's that each insurance company offers so many different options that cover so many different contingencies you need a degree in Kafka to understand how to read the bid. Explaining it is an exercise in invented language; the health care industry has so much jargon you need a glossary to understand what they're saying.

Yet a one hour meeting explaining a financial bid to seventeen experienced partners is nothing like what happens when we have to share the costs to our crew. That meeting takes two hours—per employee. We have dozens of those meetings during the enrollment period, which for some reason that's never been explained reasonably to me, only happens once a year. (That's right folks. You have the privelege of buying health insurance at most American businesses just once a year.)

Imagine if we had to sell sandwiches this way. Imagine we had to have meetings with our customers that took an hour to explain how to buy a sandwich. Imagine we had two dozen different pricing schemes per sandwich. Imagine we only let customers get in on the sandwich buying action once per year. Imagine any other industry where service remotely this bad is inflicted upon its customers.

The Worst Run Industry In America is my look at the American health care industry, its service, prices and promises, from my view as a merchant