Stacey Swenson wanted to make a negroni that evoked the flavors of mole, a sauce that traditionally contains a minimum of 20 ingredients. Swenson’s Aztec Negroni comes close with 17 if you count each spice and the garnish. For all of the complexity she wanted to deliver, a nine-bottle pick-up is not in the realm of possibility at Dante, Linden Pride’s small Greenwich Village bar that’s stacked two deep most nights. Swenson’s solution (and Dante’s, in general) is a batched one-bottle pick-up.
“We’re one of the first bars that has been more transparent about batching,” says Swenson. “Cocktail bars have been doing it for a long time, keeping cheater bottles in the well and out of the eye of the customer. The perception is, perhaps, that you’re not putting in as much work, but guests are past the point where they want to wait 15 minutes for a cocktail.”
It’s a great time to be alive when you can get (and serve) an Aztec Negroni with the efficiency of a vodka soda.
Two-thirds of the 50-plus-item menu at Dante is batched or has batched components—including 13 negronis variations all lined up in reused 86 Co. bottles—plus four cocktails on draft. There simply isn’t room on the back bar for all the amari, fortified wines, and spirits required for Dante’s menu, so they’ve chosen variety, ticket time, and consistency over any “magic” that may be lost in a one-bottle pour.
The speed of service enabled by batching translates into better hospitality and more cocktails sold. At Dave Arnold and Don Lee’s Existing Conditions, guests (including a certain editor) can drink a self-serve bottled martini or Manhattan while they wait for a table or seat at the bar. “It’s all about reducing touches and decreasing ticket times,” says Existing Conditions’ Bartender Jack Schramm.
“There’s this romantic idea of the experience where your bartender builds a drink from the ground up, but hospitality is more important,” says Bartender Brian Evans of Sunday in Brooklyn. Four bottle touches is the sweet spot for his culinary-driven program. It’s still a show for guests, and it leaves time for meticulous garnishing. “Often, our garnish work takes longer than building the cocktail itself. We set herbs on fire and dust drinks with powdered sugar. Because we batch six ingredients, there’s wiggle room to go wild on presentation.” Evans sees firsthand the powerful “sizzling fajita effect”: when a server walks through the dining room with a garnished-to-the-hilt cocktail, everybody wants one.
At Dante, too, aesthetics are important. The house Pimm’s Cup has nine garnishes. Even though all the alcohol is batched, it’s still a 10-step drink (hello, Instagram). “Batching gives us time to really take care of each drink, to make sure it looks perfect when before we send it out,” says Swenson.
For Will Pasternak, a batching whiz who recently earned the title of head bartender at BlackTail, the ideal pick-up involves five or fewer bottle touches, even as ingredient numbers climb into the double digits. Unlike Dante or Existing Conditions, there are no 100 percent batched, bottled, and ready-to-serve drinks on their menu, but Pasternak has found other efficiencies.
Let’s say a team member designs a 3 ounce drink that everyone loves and has gone through BlackTail’s exhaustive R&D process. When it comes time to run costs, though, the cocktail exceeds their 20 percent ideal. Batching saves the drink: they can tinker with numbers and adjust the pour to a 2½-ounce serving.
Pasternak also says that batching allows him to more precisely dial-in flavor. There are only so many utensils and measuring vessels you can use during service. A drink he worked on recently called for 1 teaspoon of two syrups. By combining them in a single bottle, he found that he could decrease the amount of total syrup to 1½ teaspoons and still measure with ease (rather than ½ teaspoon plus ¼ teaspoon times two).
“You can either scale up a recipe, add up the numbers, and that’s the batch pour, or you can scale up, make the batch, and determine the pour size,” says Pasternak.
As the industry works on taking better care of its own, the efficiencies of batching add up to fewer repetitive motions and physical work. BlackTail’s most popular cocktail right now is the nine-ingredient, four-touch Foliage. “We save five bottle touches per cocktail, 30 times a night. It adds up,” says Pasternak. He has also stopped using 750-milliliter bottles for components that are required in small quantities; 8-ounce bottles make it through service and reduce wrist strain. “Maybe someone can work more because they’re not burned out. Guests don’t care how hard it is for you. They just want consistent drinks.”
