Confessions of a Bartender: The Thanksgiving Shift

Thanksgiving is officially upon us, so it’s time to gather with friends and family to reflect on exactly why dinner starts at 3 P.M. and wonder how the Dallas Cowboys still draw such massive crowds despite breaking our hearts year after year.

It’s also time to get as drunk as humanly possible and fall asleep on the sofa. I won’t lie — that’s my favorite part.

But there are also those among us who would prefer not to have random drunk family members passed out in our living room and instead opt for a night out at our favorite restaurant.

This is a story about those unlucky few of us who, year after year, open our establishment’s doors to the masses and serve hundreds of turkeys, thousands of potatoes, and an incalculable amount of wine.

There are two types of people that volunteer to work at a place like this on Thanksgiving; lunatics and psychopaths. The type that will happily dive into a poorly planned service with a last-minute menu designed to maximize profits and turn times, and the type whose relationship with their family is so strained that they find it infinitely more appealing to slog it out at work with people they can barely stand. But Thanksgiving has a sort of magical power to bring these two groups together; with its many elixirs capable of making friends of enemies, bedfellows of strangers, and menage e cinque out of quiet couples. It’s booze, of course. The elixirs are booze.

One Thanksgiving about ten years ago comes to mind. I was working in yet another swanky hotel. The kind where celebrities, politicians and billionaires all gathered to rub shoulders and…other things. The service itself was unremarkable. Everything took too long, nothing was the right temp, but Goddamn it, it was a holiday and everyone still tipped 20%, so let’s call it a win. Now, there was a tradition at the hotel to have a family-style Thanksgiving after service had ended. Plates of turkey, ham, stuffing, salads. Dozens of bottles of wine. This took place what I ironically call the “good old days” when drinking at work was considered pretty run of the mill. By the end of the meal, my whole team was…well, to call them merely drunk would be an understatement. They were so drunk that they could look both ways before crossing the street without turning their heads, if you catch my meaning. When you’re in such a state, naturally a nightcap is required.

All night up until this point, one of my colleagues had been on the prowl. She was a wild one on her best day, and I say this with true peace and love; that Thanksgiving, she was absolutely feral. Like a horny honeybadger with a toothache. For the purpose of this tale, we shall call her Claire.

We ended up down the street at our local haunt — always open till 4am and always willing to tolerate our nonsense, and boy howdy, did they have to put up with us that night. The kitchen is always open late, and they have plenty of seating, including some really nice booths with curtains that can be drawn for privacy.

We poured ourselves through the door around 3 A.M., beers and shots for everyone, plus the obligatory Negroni for that one new kid who doesn’t understand that they’re being a pain in the ass for the bartender who just got 20 guests all at once. Claire sidles up to the bar, which was being run by a bartender we’d all affectionately come to refer to as “The Hot Bartender” and orders, giving him one of those looks that could light a match from across the room. I’m casually observing from a distance, watching the hunter in action. Clearly whatever she was doing was working, because a few moments later they were making out over the bar. Or she was eating his face. My eyesight isn’t great, and the room was already spinning, so it could have been either.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but about 10 minutes later we all hear bloodcurdling screaming coming from the back of the bar, and Hot Bartender comes storming out yelling variations of “The f**king b*tch bit my f*cking cock!” over and over again. Apparently the kiss at the bar had escalated, then taken a hard left turn, and escalated in an entirely different direction. The two lovebirds must have gotten their fill of sucking face, and I’m assuming one of them proposed that they retire to one of the private booths in the back to continue sucking…other things.

What he said or did to this day remains a mystery, and quite frankly we were all laughing far too hard about it for the next several weeks to bother asking Claire exactly what happened. I’d like to believe it’s because we were kind enough to remember that we all had some sort of “wild night out” story and that we would love to be forgotten, but in reality I think we were all just afraid she’d kill us if we asked.