When you're young and you take your first job behind a bar, if you're lucky enough to be in the company of wizened lifers, smirkingly amused by your greenery, you're quickly inundated with a confounding mix of bar arcana and cliche. While you're learning how to tap a keg and clean scuppers, you're also picking up notes on the aesthetics of faced bills and the magical import of odd-numbered garnish. Some of the unwritten rules of the bar stood out by way of the conviction in which they were imparted, by the uncharacteristic sobriety with which they were treated.
"It really was one of those hard and fast rules," says Tyson Buhler, head bartender of Manhattan cocktail church Death & Co and former American World Class representative. "'Don't talk politics or religion behind the bar.' I was always taught that how someone aligns politically is their business."
This was a maxim I'd heard before my first bar job. I recognized it from movies and television, and vaguely suspected hearing my relatives who owned or worked in bars echoing a similar sentiment. I heard it again and again as I was hired to represent different drinking establishments over the course of an early, staggering career as a young bartender.
Not everyone has had the same context.
"No, I never heard that," says Giuseppe Gonzalez, proprietor of Suffolk Arms in the Lower East Side. "My dad was a bar owner. These were old Puerto Rican bodega bars. Trump's 'locker room talk' would seem pretty safe there. It was a little bubble. Everybody either agreed with each other or at least had some sort of understanding."
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