Bartenders Should Shut up People
I like the quiet bar. I have since 21 years old. This is not an unusual desire; Every time I’m in a bar after 8, someone (sometimes not even me!) Ends up saying, “Sorry, I can’t hear you. The bar got so loud! »Even the quietest dive is filled with people from time to time shouting to be heard when everyone individually wants the place to be quieter. Why couldn’t we as a culture find a way out of this loudness war? Why are most of the bars so damn loud?
As my colleague Kelly Stout recently pointed out at Deadspin, one person is enough to make everything louder . And once that happens, it becomes very difficult to calm the place down again. Even if an entire group of visitors dies down, the whisper will not be as viral as the scream. Reassurance requires an active, institutional-wide team. And only the most officious bar visitor has the courage to ask all his colleagues to calm down. The solution, therefore, lies in the bar staff. In any bar that doesn’t have an atmosphere of rage, the staff should silence the diners.
The bartender is the only person in the establishment to whom everyone must obey. While the owner can set the policy, it is the bartender who makes the decisions on the spot: who is served first, who gets a good liqueur, who is off. The bartender is the only one who can claim the right to set the volume level. The bartender gives and the bartender takes, so they will obey the bartender.
Like the universal basic income , this revolutionary idea has been tested in real life experiments. At Burp Castle in the East Village of New York, whenever a conversation gets loud, the bartenders (sometimes dressed as monks, don’t worry about it) drawl and fondly shhh . And it works. Everyone in the house calms down in a whisper. I’ve heard this has happened many times, and almost everyone loves it. They recognized the hiss as friendly, not punishing, a necessary containment of innocent human error. Burp Castle has a 4-star Yelp rating and of course my favorite bar. Some friends are annoyed by the hype; they are still my friends, but I learned a thing or two about them.
I admit that this is a somewhat extreme and idealized example. Burp Castle accommodates only a couple of dozen people, mostly at tables for two or three. This is a brasserie that encourages slower alcohol consumption and only serves a small selection of crafts, which encourages visitors to drink thoughtfully (or at least pretentiously) and gives its bartenders the opportunity to act as consultants and beer somolniks. Sometimes it’s jazz, sometimes it’s Gregorian chants. The walls are covered with frescoes depicting misbehaving monks. Okay, this is a thematic panel. Everyone in this place supports this trick.
But there are plenty of classic bars saturated with beer and natural woods where the occasional barbecue won’t be out of place. Wine bars, bars with high quality alcoholic drinks, bars with numerous signs that the staff are not angry – all bars where the smell of a house / subwoofer comes from the bartender / patron relationship – are ready for silence. This would work great in performatively secretive “conversations” and give these places a reason to exist beyond pretending Prohibition has not been abolished.
The level of noise that causes swelling will vary from bar to bar. In some places, silence will sound like a bell, or a word, or hell, a deafening horn that scares people with noise. And obviously, obviously not every bar needs to have a Shh. Some places are meant to be noisy. Maybe we’ll find that the ideal percentage of overlapping stripes is 90%, or maybe it’s only 10%. But this is absolutely not one.