Applying my Beverage Rule of Seven gives a target beverage service time of two to three minutes, which feels comfortable to most guests. Fifteen to twenty minutes is common for entrées, and appetizer times are usually under ten minutes. I tell every new bartender I train what many veteran mixologists seem to have forgotten: bartending is not about making drinks, it's about serving drinks.Īll good restaurants have target service times for each course. Had I been dining, I'd have been out the door long before then-doubtless followed by the Chef de Cuisine with a fresh boot print on his or her derrière.
In food time, that's equivalent to waiting 70 minutes for your meal. I recently visited three of New York City's top cocktail bars one evening (I won't name names, but all of them were listed in the upper half of The World's 50 Best Bars), and not once did I receive my drink in less than ten minutes after I placed the order. My job regularly takes me into the best bars in the world, and while I'm consistently impressed with the cocktails, I'm almost always frustrated by the service times. Ironically, with the advent of the mixology movement, our industry seems to have lost sight of just how large drinking looms in our subconscious. For example, a 30-minute wait for food-which will seem interminable to a hungry diner-is equally distressing as a 4-minute wait for drinks. This fact, which we all intuitively know, but rarely consider, leads directly to my Beverage Rule of Seven: since we can survive seven times longer without food than without water, beverage service needs to be seven times faster than food service to feel equivalent. Even today, many people in developing countries must walk an average of almost one hour a day to bring home fresh water.Ī keen sense of thirst is critical for our survival. Our nomadic ancestors might easily have found themselves farther than a three-day trek from the nearest water source.