Education doesn't stop at the education system – bartenders should keep learning or stand still, says Iain McPherson.
In bartending, you can learn a lot on the job – service, techniques, prep, speed and efficiency to name a handful of skills – but there is a whole lot more that you can learn outside of your shift. Allocating time to your development on your days off can feel like the last thing you want to do. You’d rather sleep, binge-watch a series or just hang out with pals and be merry. This is all great in the short term, but you also have to keep an eye on the long term. Someone once told me: “You need to think about future Iain. Present Iain needs to set up future Iain in such a way that one day makes past Iain’s efforts seem worthwhile.” That really stayed with me – it changed how I approach my day to day.
As a younger bartender I would too often fall into the “I’ll do that tomorrow” ethos. But by doing that, tasks build up, coming to a boiling point where you have a frantic day of last-minute things you need to do. You’re not investing in your future self.
It’s not just about putting off tasks. It’s about learning and broadening your horizons. The night out that you prioritise is often less memorable than the experience you invested time (and sometimes money) in to take part. That could be working with a brand that took you to learn about foraging or how to make sausages (yes, sausages). It could be a tasting or talk you attended at a bar show or it could be as simple as reading Class. Learning about something you don’t know about or being outside of your comfort zone has a way of sticking with you. Learning is a mental reward and it’s very stimulating for personal wellbeing.
So how do you make time to invest in yourself? Like doing exercise, the first time is the hardest. Book it in, make that first step – the doing it is actually easier. One way is to organise the activity with a pal, that way you are accountable to each other. In the run-up to opening Panda & Sons, a decade ago when I was in my early-to-mid 20s, I spent a year doing night classes and coming in to learn at the bar I was working at on my days off . The night classes were to learn how to write a business plan and write financial forecasts. Going into work was to learn all the business owner stuff like VAT returns, which my former employers were very kind to let me do with them.
Building blocks
Mental stimulation doesn’t just need to be bar related. It just really needs to be a building block for something you want to achieve or do in life. Every time you learn, it’s a new piece of a mental jigsaw, and sometimes you don’t know what the big picture of the puzzle looks like until you’ve completed it. For example, I went to Gelato University to learn how to make ice cream because I was interested in it. It wasn’t to identify freezing as a means for creating flavour techniques in cocktails. The more you learn, the more pathways you create.
Bringing it back to bars, I’ve always been curious as to why so many good bars don’t age well, losing their shine after fi ve or so years. Part of this is novelty bias among the trade and public, but I feel that can be counteracted by a bar team’s ethos of progressiveness.
The moment your bar sets out its stall, other bars open, equalling or surpassing your USP. That’s just how markets work. So that’s why it’s so important to be on a constant mission of regeneration. At Panda & Sons, we have redone our bar station set-up three times in 10 years, and we will be doing a slight overhaul again next year.
We have also enhanced our bar’s reputation by coming up with some techniques over the years that have now been taken on by the bar industry. Those that have adopted these techniques have improved certain steps, which have also improved our way of doing things – reverse mentoring, if you will. Be open to all forms of learning, from all people, young, old, less or more experienced than you.
That curiosity goes for every seminar, talk or guest shift you are a part of. Ask questions – the only person judging you, is you, and the more you ask, the more you learn. And don’t stop when you’re in late 20s or early 30s – or indeed ever. The Dunning-Kruger effect (a cognitive bias that occurs when people overestimate their own abilities or knowledge) is so prevalent in our industry, I’ve started referring to it as Bartender’s Flu. Please don’t become one of these people who think they’ve cracked bartending five years into their career.
Which brings me to one last point of inspiration: the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In the fi lm, Jiro worked in his restaurant every day with the belief he could fi nd a way of doing some element of his job better – he believed in constant, incremental progression. Jiro only stepped down from service last year at the ripe old age of 98.
There is no completing knowledge. It’s a journey without an ending.