Metroland Online - 2008 Bar Guide

‘Honesty.” That’s what my friend, who has been a bar manager at a big, successful suburban restaurant for years, says is the most important quality in an employee.

If someone is honest, “Ken” (not his real name, for reasons about to become glaringly obvious) can forgive a lot. Take the case of one former employee who was honest, skilled, fun to have around—and given to smoking pot before showing up for work.

Under normal conditions, this wasn’t too much of a problem. Weekends, however, were another matter; the volume of business required senses not dulled by the weed. So Ken laid down the law: “Saturday nights you gotta be fuckin’ straight!”

Listening to Ken’s stories, it’s amazing to learn about the number of people who want to work in the hospitality business who have absolutely no idea that they’re unsuited for the hospitality business. People getting into the bar business need to understand a few basic things, Ken explains. For one thing, you can’t just start out as a prime-time bartender. You’ll have to start out as a barback, stocking the ice and other supplies.

Also, he says, “you’re working when everyone else has the day off, like Christmas and New Year’s Eve. You have to work weekends.”

He remembers one applicant who did well in an interview, up to a point. Ken was almost settled on hiring the guy, when he mentioned that the would-be employee would have to work Saturdays.

“I can’t work Saturdays,” the man replied. “I chill.”

Ken responded, incredulously: “You what?”

“I chill.”

Needless to say, the fellow was not hired.

Asked what she looks for when putting together a staff, Tess Collins, owner of the Albany mainstay Tess’ Lark Tavern, answers (only half kidding), “people that give a shit.”

When Collins sits down to talk with a couple of Metroland reporters on a recent weekday evening, both the front bar and the back dining room are packed. The waitress is in overdrive, efficiently taking orders and serving up drinks and food. And Collins is helping her: She seats people, brings over silverware, takes initial drink orders and refills water glasses.

Asked about this, Collins explains that “the girls aren’t afraid to help me, because I help them. We’re a team.”

Collins explains that “the owner sets the tone.” When the staff see how much work she is willing to do, there’s no way resentments are going to build up. It’s all about, she adds, “team spirit.”

And diversity.

“We have people from 21 to 55 working here,” Collins says. This age diversity also reflects the Lark’s clientele—as does the ethnic diversity of the staff.

Collins also says that it’s about “family,” in the sense that the staff have to be able to work together smoothly and, well, just plain-old get along. In other words, she doesn’t hire people who don’t play well with others.

“It’s not who you hire,” Collins says, “it’s who you keep. I’ve had really great employees that I’ve fired for being catty.”

There is also the matter of balancing personalities. Collins explains: “Everybody has different strengths. For example, on one shift, I’ll pair somebody that’s social with somebody who is antisocial.”

Whatever Collins is doing, it seems to be working. In a little over an hour seated in the crowded, busy dining room, no one has come up to her to complain; the waitress hasn’t had to bring any problems to the owner. On the other hand, during the 15 minutes Collins sits with the reporters, three customers stop by to say hello (and give her a kiss).

And the only people chilling are the customers.

That’s Entertainment

The path to hosting live music in a bar has more hurdles than a track-and-field meet

By John Brodeur

Turn around the open sign. Take down the barstools. Wipe off the tables. Stock the liquor. Pay the ASCAP license. WTF?

Starting up any new business takes guts, organization and, ultimately, a fair amount of scratch. The bar business is certainly no exception to the rule. And when a bar owner decides to bring live music into the equation, the associated concerns and costs pile on like a rugby scrum.

“Starting up a new venue is not easy, especially in today’s business economy,” says J. Kip Finck, owner of decade-old Clifton Park nightclub Northern Lights. “The larger the venue, the more obstacles you face. The different types of music that you need to cover”—Finck’s venue, being a music venue primarily, hosts music of all genres—“make staffing and security issues very challenging. The larger the venue, the more money that is needed for operating costs in order to stay afloat on a daily [or] month-to-month basis.”

Operating costs. Right. So besides the regular costs, like electricity and liquor and licenses, you have your additional bartenders—Northern Lights sometimes operates as many as three bars simultaneously depending on how big the show is, and as anyone who’s ever been to a club concert knows, alcohol is very popular among rock & roll fans. Then you’ve got to hire security personnel (or “bouncers” depending on what kind of night the club is having). Don’t forget the sound and lighting engineers (though many smaller clubs might have one person covering both).

And you have to pay the band, too. Without the band, you wouldn’t have the live music, obviously. So where does the money come from?

“Larger venues such as Northern Lights depend on three main ways to cover our bills,” Finck says. “Ticket sales are needed to pay larger band guarantees and show expenses. Restaurant and bar concessions of these larger shows are needed to pay the bulk of our monthly bills. Smaller local shows, room rentals, and special events also contribute to the bottom line.”

Oh, and there’s another thing: performance-rights licenses.

What are those? In brief, a handful of performance-rights organizations, or PROs, handle the distribution to songwriters and musicians of money collected from public performances of their copyrighted music. “Public performance” is the term used to identify everything from the use of a theme song on a television sitcom, to the background music played in a hair salon to, of course, a physical performance by a band.

Live-music venues, bars with jukeboxes, as well as any other public place that intends to pipe recorded music into their space, are required to purchase a “blanket license” from each of the PROs to cover all of the music “performed” in their venue. And the licenses aren’t cheap: The cost to a nightclub for a blanket license from just one PRO can exceed $1,000 a year; most venues are expected to obtain licenses from at least the two major PROs, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.).

Finck recently found Northern Lights on the business end of a lawsuit—to the tune of a $40,000—from BMI among others, for not keeping these licenses current, facing his venue with some serious financial distress. But Finck’s club is more of a scapegoat than an exception to the rule; lots of venues (and hair salons) either let these licenses lapse or bypass obtaining them altogether. Sure, the cost can be prohibitive, but silence is more so. Couple that with a flagging economy, and 2008 looks like a tough time to be in the live-music business.

But Finck, who says he’s been “involved in one capacity or another in the restaurant, tavern or club industry” since he was 16, says it’s possible to make it work. “I think our business is very cyclical. I have always believed if you can expand or make it in a down economy you will be in good shape when the good times come back. Yes, you must tighten your belt and try to do events that limit your risk factors. However, at the same time, you must stay true to what you love and what has proven to be successful in the past.

“Ultimately, finding your own niche is the key to long-term success in this and most any business.”

Lessons in Civility

Running a bar is not always drinks and laughs— occasionally someone has to get tossed out on their duff

By David King

‘It’s like this,” says a former bouncer named Cole, “you’re at the door of this club and you get your orders from the guy/girl who owns the place, plus the bartender. The bartender equals your boss for the night. If they are in a shitty mood they can make your whole night suck.” The 6-foot-9-inch-tall former bouncer recalls that during his first week on the job in a rough-and-tumble Lansingburgh bar, “I had to pull a 400-pound-guy off of the guy I was replacing.” To make things even more pleasant, the former bouncer notes the man “pulled his penis out in the bar.”

Needless to say, life as a bouncer is not a cakewalk, and making sure your bar is customer-friendly means that sometimes you have to be not so friendly to some customers. But according to Tess Collins, owner of Tess’ Lark Tavern—Metroland readers’ pick winner for 2007 and 2008 Best Bar—having a good relationship with your customers and knowing the community can ensure that you and your staff will spend more time serving drinks in a friendly social environment than rolling around with an inebriated 400-pound-man on the floor.

“Start drinking here and annoy people elsewhere,” reads a sign that hangs in Collins’ Lark Tavern. Collins doesn’t have much of a problem with rowdiness in her bar because, as she points out, she knows and is friends with most everyone who frequents her Madison Avenue establishment. That doesn’t mean Tess or her staff never have to intervene sometimes when a customer has had one too many.

“People who have had too many already don’t usually come in and start trouble because they say, “Uh oh, Tess is going to yell at me,” she explains. But Tess does employ two bouncers. One of them, Mike Guzzardi (better known to some locals as “Grubby Mike”), is a local musician and longtime regular door man at Albany shows. He has been with Collins for years, and Tess says it is because Guzzardi is trustworthy and socially responsible.

“They are more like money collectors,” says Collins. “I talk to people more than they do. I know when someone has had too much to drink and I intervene when they get into arguments. I’ve had Mike Guzzardi telling me to calm down,” she laughs.

“In my bar, you have people in the Spitzer administration hanging out with punk rockers, and lawyers asking the advice of young musicians. I have more trouble with the yuppies from out of town who feel entitled than I do with the kid with the tattoos and nose ring,” she explains. Collins insists that by knowing her neighborhood, befriending customers and learning her bar patrons’ limits, she makes sure that everyone has a good time.

Collins has been known to drive customers home rather than tossing drunks out by the scruff of their neck. Her doormen know to tell her when it is time to offer someone a ride instead of lumping on the head or tossing them out on their duff. “It doesn’t always help to be a tough guy,” she says.

“I was once punched in the face by the same set of female twins—in the same night,” says Cole, the anonymous bouncer from a Lansingburgh bar. “It’s like your job is babysitting people who are drunk and on drugs.”

As it stands, Collins says most of her problems come not from clients but from incidents outside the bar. She says people from outside the community visit Lark Street sometimes to drunkenly cause trouble, but she says the Albany Police Department is always responsive to her calls. “They don’t get many calls from me,” she says, “so when I do call they get here fast.”

Cole is not unhappy that he is no longer involved in “babysitting drunks” in a bar. “I do carpet installation and home renovation now and it pays the bills with this recession we are headed into,” he says.

And on the even-brighter side, he hasn’t spent any nights wrestling around on a bar floor with a 400-pound man, and he has not recently been punched in the face by a set of twins.

dking@metroland.net

The Good Old Days

Bar owners lament that New York state liquor laws are frustrating and unfair

By Chet Hardin

It used to be that a restaurant owner could call a supplier and say, I want to tee off at 9 AM at the golf course in Saratoga Springs, and I want my rep to be there. And hey, presto! Not anymore.

“There used to be a lot of wheeling and dealing,” I’m told, doing an interview over a beer. It’s a sad story of pining for the good old days, and lamentations of the draconian present.

“There used to be a lot more napkins, coasters, signage. A wine rep would open a bottle for you to sample, and then leave it on your bar. And you could sell it, make an extra $30. Now they cork the bottle and take it with them.”

Restaurants could get menus laminated, glowey signs to hang over the bar, free kegs, and cases of liquor at deeply discounted rates. Nowadays, nothing—it’s a hassle just to get Stella Artois glasses or Guinness coasters.

“The way it was before, that’s the way business oughta be,” another restaurant owner tells me, the golfing and wheeling and dealing, and the government staying the hell out of it.

The way it was before came to a crashing halt back in October 2006, when then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced the end of a months-long investigation by his office into the illicit dealings that made doing business so enjoyable. The investigation uncovered that over a two-year period, nearly $60 million was spent by wholesalers and suppliers on these benefits, as an apparent effort to curry favor from bars and liquor stores, and as a result, wholesalers and distributors paid around $4 million in fines and costs. The New York State Liquor Authority, which polices liquor sales, licensing, and so on, cracked down in an attempt to make everything “fair.”

But it still isn’t fair, one particularly worked-up restaurant owner insists. Liquor stores are able to stock their shelves with booze bought at a lower price than most restaurants, because the liquor authority still allows discounts based on quantity purchased. “So a liquor store can buy five cases of wine and get a cheaper rate than me, cause I only buy a case or two at a time. Or like Jameson, I might go through a bottle a week, and a liquor store might sell a couple bottles a day.” So liquor stores buy in bulk, at a discounted rate, and the restaurant pays the full price.

It is protectionism of the worst kind, he bellows at me, meant to keep the playing field level and to ensure that competition doesn’t drive liquor prices down to sinful levels.

Not fair, right? I am asked.

Another aspect of this business that flat-out drives restaurant and bar owners crazy are the apparent monopolies established by state regulation. Simply put: A bar can buy Jameson only from one distributor in a county. Cuervo? Una distribuidor. Jack Daniels? Just one. And if any distributor tries to break that rule and muscle in on someone else’s turf, they are gonna get smacked around. The right to sell booze is given to only one company per territory—sounds a little like the kind of deal that would get hashed out in a backroom somewhere.

But even under the most draconian state, the capitalist spirit of getting something for less will thrive, I’ve heard. It’s the human way. And I am told in a leaned-in, whispered, I-ain’t-saying-what-I-am-saying tone, that although the state has stepped up its policing, cracks have already begun to appear. The more aggressive sales reps are already working hard to find ways to bring back the good old days.

chardin@metroland.net

A Shot, a Beer, and a Niche

How do bars develop a unique atmosphere and sustain a loyal clientele?

By Kathryn Lange

A gruff voice, falling somewhere around the center of the scale between scolding grandmother and chain-smoking trucker, answers the phone at Margie’s Grill. “Margie is not here,” grumbles the voice, which sounds conspicuously like Margie. “She won’t be in till much, much later,” the voice insists, growing more stern, “and she won’t want to talk to you. She’s not a real phone person.” Click.

I want to talk to Margie about how bars develop a niche for themselves. How, with hundreds of drinking establishments hanging their shingles in the Capital Region, bar owners create an individual atmosphere that draws a specific and, hopefully, loyal clientele. But here I am, my pen poised over my notebook and a dial tone humming in my ear.

The folks at Tryst Ultra Lounge can’t hear me over the “oon ta oon ta” throb of their club music, and a daytime call introduces me to the audibly sexy and smiling Australian girl on their answering machine, who thanks me for calling and wish me a wonderful day. Brown’s Brewing Co. echoes with the din of conversation, and even the big honchos are too busy with customers to break for an interview.

I am getting nowhere. And yet the more dead ends I hit, the more questions that are left unasked, the clearer the answers become. Creating a niche is, in large part, about people. Being individual is about individuals—how their attitudes shade the atmosphere.

That gruff voice on Margie’s line is exactly what draws people to Margie’s. The hole-in-the-wall on 4th Street in Troy is defined by its proprietor. She doesn’t just sound like a scolding grandmother, she runs her bar like one. A large chalkboard on the bar’s wall bears a list of people Margie isn’t speaking to. The power company has been on there. I half expect that, by now, my name might be scrawled there too. If you “cuss” in Margie’s bar she’ll boot you to the curb. While I never literally had my mouth washed out with soap, I do recall, with peculiar sentimentality, my own grandmother’s paradoxical ability to speak her mind and mind her manners. Listening to that dial tone, the crooked smile on my face told me exactly why people sidle up to Margie’s counter.

Tryst Ultra Lounge on Broadway is marketed as Albany’s “most exclusive” and “sexiest” nightspot. If she walked into Tryst’s thumping club music and light shows, if she saw the cocktail tables built into curtained beds, and the scantily clad college girls draping themselves over the college boys lounging on said beds, Margie probably would drag the kids out by their ears. But the whirling lights, the dancing, the mod bar and chic seating—even the perky Aussie on the answering machine—demonstrate that Tryst is making every effort to define itself as a trendy, exotic enclave in what I’m guessing much of Tryst’s clientele might consider an otherwise hum-drum town. I’m guessing this, of course, because they’re there, and not sitting on their stoop tipping back a beer like I’m more apt to do.

Troy staple, Brown’s Brewing Co., on the other hand, is spacious but cozy, with two stories of wide plank wood floors, a massive bar, and a patio out back. A small stage near the bar makes room for live music, which enlivens the atmosphere but doesn’t drown out hearty conversation. The whole place gives off the rustic, earthy smell of homebrew; all 11 of Brown’s signature ales and lagers are brewed on the premises. The space is comfortable and familiar—and so is the crowd. The bosses are too busy to talk to me, because they’re caught up with customers, building that homespun, home-brewed rapport.

One bar owner does find time to chat with me, and reminds me that—while some bar owners create a niche with practiced intention and some develop their atmosphere over time—there is that rare instance where the place itself is a curious niche of history and community, and the bar owner serves mainly to keep it alive. Daniel Osman purchased the Dream Away Lodge in 1997, a place he describes as a “70-year-old brothel on a mountaintop that used to be a speakeasy, and already had a niche of its own.” The Dream Away is housed in a 200-year-old farmhouse deep in the October Mountain State Forest in Becket, Mass. “Just far enough outside of town,” say Osman, “that you can get away and misbehave.” Full of kitsch, and steeped in history, the Dream Away boasts a hefty live-music program, four-course dinners, wooded walks, even a monthly burlesque “anti-art school” life drawing class with “Dr. Sketchy.”

>From steak dinner inside to long-neck Buds on the porch, the Dream Away Lodge caters specifically to everyone and no one. So how do you create a niche like that? According to Osman, who claims that the Dream Away fell into his lap after he left “an illustrious, or, I should say, unnoticed theater career,” he saw the potential in the ramshackle mountaintop lodge. “But it was a 70-year-old brothel and speakeasy,” Osman chuckles. “How much smarts does that take?”

klange@metroland.net

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