Original subtitles

[INAUDIBLE]

It's bar time. It's my time.

NARRATOR: "The first time I walked into a bar,

"I was fascinated by the many bottles,

"fascinated by the agility of the man behind the bar

"and his calm, professional way of working.

"Unerringly, he reached for short, long, rounded bottles

"and coaxed from them their many-colored secrets.

"A world of its own that bemused me

"and which I wanted to understand."

Charles Schumann, 1985.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

NARRATOR: New York is the city of barkeepers

and of the great old bars

with resounding names and stories.

Bemelmans Bar, Algonquin,

The Oak Room, King Cole Bar, the Rainbow Room.

No other city in the world

made visiting bars such a part of daily life.

Ah-ha.

[ALL CHEERING]

SCHUMANN: What's going on?

What are you doing here?

Only good-looking guys are working here, huh?

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]

SCHUMANN: Principal bartender you are.

Yeah, great, yeah.It's nice to meet you, man.

Hello, hello.He got a standing O.

Huh? Hello.

Charles Schumann!

[ALL LAUGHING]

What's all good? What's all that?

Yeah, come on. Oh, he's in shape. He's in shape.

Yeah, you know it. Bartend boy's always in shape.

They build us to be like that.

We're gonna try and get as many people...

Very nice here.

The friendship Dev and I have and the camaraderie that we have...

Yeah....it all stems from the people who taught us,

the people who took us in,

which is the five founders of Employees Only, the five principal owners.

Yeah.

And every day we were opened, they would work either behind the bar or on the floor.

That's why it's called Employees Only. There's no owners, you know?

They're just employees, just like us.

Ah, now I understand your idea. Yeah.

These are some of the jackets we wear behind the bar.

Um, this one here is our apprentice jacket.

This is the jacket you get after about a year working as a stocker.

And you wear this for a couple of years while you're learning and teaching.

You actually get to learn and teach in this position,

which is really, really wonderful.

The more you teach, I feel like the more you get to learn at the same time.

So, it's nice. Um...

And so you wear this one for a couple of years,

and then when you graduate from the apprenticeship program...

Unofficial, official-unofficial...

Then the next jacket you get, it says "Principal Bartender" there over the heart.

And that's when you've pretty much achieved the most you can do here.

And it takes a lot of work to get there.

I know that, for myself,

when I started making certain cocktails, for instance, the Hemingway Daiquiri,

I was so intrigued by this cocktail, one because it was named after Hemingway,

and it was delicious.

Where did you have the recipe for the Hemingway Daiquiri?

Where did I get the recipe for the Hemingway Daiquiri?

Well, I got it from our recipe list when I first started working here,

before they wrote the Speakeasy book.

And I saw it and I tasted it.Oh, yeah, yeah.

And I thought it was delicious.

But I wanted to be able to make it like that every single time.

I didn't want, like, one day to make it for somebody and taste it and be like, "Oh, it's okay."

And then, other days, it's like, "Oh, this is really great."

I want it to be consistently the best Hemingway Daiquiri that I can make,

every single time, for every single guest that asks for it.

And so, I practiced that drink for months.

I tried it, this much grapefruit juice, that little bit less grapefruit juice.

You know, I just changed everything just a little bit, just little levels that change.

And I'd taste it, and the juice is fresh.

You gotta taste that, you know.

You have to practice, practice, practice.

SCHUMANN: Not from this.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

SCHUMANN: This is the real stuff.

Oh-la-la! Did you see that?

You can't do that, no.

You can see if people are... If they're starting to move,

or if they're just kind of, like, bored.

You could feel it. You can feel people.

And that's what bartending is, you know?

It's not just about what's in the glass. It's about feeling somebody.

Oh, yeah. That's good. [LAUGHS]

I think it's... It was kind of like the finishing of the '80s

and big, big clubs like Studio 54, particularly here in New York.

More like DJ and music-based places, yeah.DJ clubs, like... Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely, and those colors came from the pastels of the '80s,

and they became more neon, and then got a little bit darker, I think, at some point.

But I think the neighborhood bar in New York City

has always been the foundation of the bar culture here.

Those clubs and that style, they come and go.

But they've also shrank. People want a more intimate experience now, I believe,

from my experience.

'Cause we went from, like, big clubs to lounges,

and now, we're back down to cocktail bars and neighborhood bars.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

WOMAN: [OVER PA] So, we are talking about the bar of the year,

Germany right now. Then we go for the awards.

The nominees are Little Link, Cologne.

[CHEERING]

Le Lion, Hamburg.

Kinly Bar, Frankfurt.[CHEERING]

Buck and Breck, Berlin.

Les Fleurs du Mal, Munich.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

The one and only.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]

You know what is inside?

Yes, because, after working here long,

you just pick up. I don't look.

These are all bitters, and then we have all tinctures here.

You made your bitters yourself?

So, it's like half-and-half. We make half, and then the other half, we buy in.

But our signature bitters are Dead Rabbit Orinoco Bitters.

What's the name of the first thing?

Um, it's... Let's see. It says here.

But the guy who makes Boker's Bitters, in Scotland?

He makes bitters for you.He makes them.

So if you want to put... Here.

Okay.

So, it's basically like Angostura, only it's slightly bitter.

Mmm-hmm.So.

So this is always the same stuff here? No, these are different.

No, they're all different.All different.

So, on top of the bar, there's 350 bottles.

So, punch is kind of characterized by five ingredients,

one being Lemon Sherbet, which is called oleo-saccharum.

So we just add some of that in there.

Which kind of lemon do you have?

So, it's just regular lemons.

Lemon juice.

So we add lemon zest to sugar, muddle it.

And then we add lemon juice to it and then we cook it, so it's very concentrated.

And then we just some more citrus to round that off.

And then we start adding tea.

Um, so...Black tea?

Tea, yeah. So it's just a regular black tea.

And it's then finished off with Irish whiskey, which we like.

And we finish it off with your spice, so we put ten dashes.

What do you... So, this is the Dead Rabbit Orinoco.

And then, you just give it a quick stir.

So, basically, we have a guy that comes in and he mixes,

I'd say, three or four times a week.

And then we have these big, uh...

It's premixed. You premix it normally, yeah?

Yeah, we premix it, but we have these systems in the back here that are circulators,

so it keeps everything nice and cold and fresh.

Nutmeg.And then we just finish it off with nutmeg. Okay.

Yep.And then...

There's no orange juice in there.

No orange juice, but it looks like orange juice.

Oh, yeah.That's the problem with punch.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

You want to have a glass of it?All right.

He we go. So here's one of our punches. This is called the Counter Punch.

Oh, yeah. So this is the premixed punch.

Yeah, so this one has Irish whiskey, you have rum, you have bitters, you have Guinness.

It has lemon syrop, you have lemon juice and Assam tea.

Ah-ha, ah-ha!This is one of my favorites.

And you serve it in this...

Yeah, so everything is served in porcelain bowls,

because back it the times when punch was invented,

it would have been served in stuff like this.

SCHUMANN: Great.

MCGARRY: So we're just keen to keep it going, you know?

SCHUMANN: Yeah, really great!

I drink it.It's dangerous.

Okay, then, don't drink it.[LAUGHS]

In New York, they like to drink a lot of alcohol.

A regular New Yorker would drink anything between five, four to six drinks a day.

And what time they start to drink?

Um... They have drinks with lunch.

I swear to God, they drink a lot over here.

And how they arrive to work?

How can they, uh...

I think they're just... They have a good tolerance to alcohol.

So you have only drunken people here, huh?Yeah.

Well, they work hard and they play hard.

When I write the cocktail books...Yeah.

...it's ostensibly about cocktails,

but it's really about the Industrial Revolution.Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because that sort of what caused cocktails to come to be.

The electric light, the fact that people were congregated in cities.

You could hardly have a cocktail bar out in the country.Yeah, yeah.

So it was wonderful the way people could come together

and then they got light, and then they got compression,

so you could make soda water.

And they got refrigeration so they could actually make ice,

artificial ice, on their own without going to the lake in winter.

Yeah, yeah.

Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah.Yeah, everything sort of led to the cocktail.

I think the first cocktail ever was a whiskey cocktail.

It's what they had most of, it didn't require ice.

It was just whiskey and bitters.

They brought bitters over from England.

So you literally just mixed sugar, water, bitters, and whiskey.

You didn't have to drink it cold.

It was fine at room temperature.

It was essentially sweetened whiskey.

No sour?No sour.

Sour required... If you wanted to do that year round,

sour required refrigeration.Yeah, yeah.

And we didn't have refrigeration. This would have been around 18... 1800.

But the first definition of cocktail like I just described it was in 1806.

But the first reference to that kind of cocktail was in 1803.

So it's pretty evident that George Washington was still alive,

and Thomas Jefferson was still president when the first cocktail came out.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

After Prohibition, two things happened to bartenders.

Either they gave up their trade and they retired,

or they moved to places like London or Cuba and they did their trade there.

So when Prohibition wasn't here anymore,

nobody knew how to make the cocktails anymore, make them very well.

And so you had either young people who were starting from scratch,

um... And some older people.

But people started taking shortcuts.

Instead of fresh juice, they'd use this thing called sour mix.

Yeah.You know, which is awful and chemical tasting.

Prohibition decimated the whiskey industry,

you know, because they couldn't make whiskey anymore.

So there wasn't much good whiskey anymore.

We had to get most of our whiskey from Canada.

And then around in the '60s, vodka became ascendant.

Everyone started drinking vodka.

You know a lot of... More than me.

[LAUGHS] No way.

No way do I know more than you.Yeah, yeah, yeah!

No, the people behind the bar always know more than the people on the other side.

No, no, it's not true. It depends, huh?Yeah.

And, so, uh...

And in the '60s, young people didn't want to drink cocktails.

That's what their parents drank.

It wasn't cool. They did drugs.

So by the time the '70s came,

it was just, you know, silly disco drinks.

A lot of frozen margaritas, Harvey Wallbangers, stuff like that.

Really, it had to be completely rediscovered,

led by gentlemen such as this.

Yeah, it was not so easy, yeah.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

What did you serve at this time?

What kind of cocktails? Not so many, huh?

Manhattan, martini, whiskey sour,

scotch on the rocks, vodka on the rocks.

These were all scotch and vodka drinkers.

They drink a classic...Yeah, total classic.

And you had a public which came every day to drink?

Or, uh...See, that was the beauty of it.

We had advertising guys, we had accountants,

we had gangsters, we had actors.

It was such a great place.

Did they have special treatment?

No, mostly we had ways of handling that.

For example, when Rod Stewart came in with a bunch of people,

they're all in blue jeans, and none of them have jackets on.

Right away, the maitre d' says, "We have something special for you."

"Let me take you." They take him to a private elevator that goes to the roof.

Yeah.And on the roof, there's these seats,

and these glasses, you know.

It's not open to the public anymore.

Now, it is. But in those days, it wasn't.

And he says, "We're gonna bring up... What do you like?"

He says, "We like Mudslides."

We brought them pitchers of Mudslides.Uh-huh.

And all the glasses.

And of course, they're up there... [MIMICS SMOKING] Whatever they want to do.

It's the roof, it's outdoors, you know?Uh-huh.

NARRATOR: A bar also has a social

and cultural responsibility.

A bar is a place of its own in the city it belongs to.

A bar is a place you can think of as your living room,

where you are at home.

But you can leave when you want to.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

You, sit here.Where?

She'll be in the middle of you, because she's red dressed.

Red dress.

See the girl with the red dress on

The high red dress, yeah?[LAUGHING]

You sit however you want.

[LAUGHING]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit...

And our Mary.

[ALL LAUGHING]

The Schumann book was the only book we had,

and it sat on our back bar.

And literally, we used it to the point where it disintegrated.

First, the covers fell off. And eventually, it actually moulded.

[ALL LAUGHING]Like, it sprouted...

Because we had got, like, lime juice and sugar on it.

Just, like, it had green fuzzy stuff on it. I had to throw it away.

DAVE WONDRICH: There's a tree growing out of it now?

SCHUMANN: I personally think it's overrated, this book.

Because when I...[ALL LAUGHING]

WONDRICH: I think the American Barbook,

the beauty of that was when it came out here in the US,

it was designed with elegance.Yeah.

You looked at the other bar books, and they had, like,

bad photographs on the cover,

and then there's this one that just looks, "Okay, this is serious."

This is an elegant book about a serious craft.

PETRASKE: And it only had the etchings, right, instead of the photos.

Exactly, it really was... It was so different from all the others.

The others were all just, here's some happy photographs out of the stock photography

world of these multi-color drinks that look like they're for children.

And that was a bar book for adults.

And that, I think, was very important.

I ripped this book off like crazy at the Rainbow Room.

The Flamingo recipe, Hemingway Daiquiri came out of this book.

This was an important book to me at the Rainbow Room.

SCHUMANN: And this is the most famous bar book,

uh, famous drink in Schumann's, I hate it.

It's called Swimming Pool.

[ALL LAUGHING]

I started my career out in Hawaii, where I grew up.

And I was a cocktail waitress at a place in Waikiki

serving people pina coladas and Blue Hawaiians and Mai Tais.

And I went college and I started bartending in college,

and then moved to San Francisco where I also was bartending,

and I kind of started taking a more culinary approach to cocktails.

Mmm-hmm.And then when I moved to New York,

I started managing a little lounge in the West Village

and began putting out, sort of, seasonal cocktail menus,

and really taking that culinary approach to drinks,

making my own sirops, using fresh juices...

How long is it?

How long? That was in 1997.

Oh, that's a long time, huh?Yeah. Yeah.

So that was really where it started.

And Dale DeGroff heard about what I was doing in this bar,

and suddenly, I was on the front page of the food section of The New York Times.

Because at the time, not very many people were really using fresh ingredients

in drinks, here in New York.

SCHUMANN: What is your favorite bar?

It's kind of tough to say.Or one of your favorite bars.

Dead Rabbit, I think is great.

I love the staff there. They have a couple of my favorite ladies behind the bar.

Ladies.

Do you have a... You don't think women should be behind the bar?

I want to clear this up. I want to clear it up.No, no, no...

Because every time I make a... You say, "Ladies."

You know why...Like you have an aversion to it.

No, no, no...So let's clear it up.

In our countries, it's very difficult to find a lady behind the bar.

Uh-huh.And I always said, "No ladies in the night."

I have a coffee bar, or day bar,

we call it day bar. Now mostly ladies are working in the bar.

Because I think they are fantastic, huh?

But only during the day.

Until 9:00, 10:00 in the evening. It depends, huh?

Some of the top bars, and the first bars, to open here in New York and, sort of,

in the craft cocktail scene, were run by women.

Audrey and I were at the very forefront of all of that.SCHUMANN: Mmm-hmm.

And most of these bars that have opened, have been opened by young bartenders

who have come through Audrey and I's school.

So, we're sort of the mother hens to...

You're the mother.

To all of these young bartenders.

Yeah, maybe we should start interviewing with the mother.

I think you should. I think you should have...

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know why?

We are looking for someone who replaces me.

We talked about that.

Everybody says, "Okay, when he leaves, nobody can take this bar."

So we both decided as we flew to New York,

we make a TV show looking for the man

behind, uh, no, after Charles.

Maybe it should be the woman after Charles.

Woman, yeah! Maybe we change it now.

Yeah.

I'd like to change your mind on that.

[LAUGHING]No, I really have nothing against them.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[MAN SPEAKING SPANISH]

NARRATOR: Bars used to be a place where men would congregate

to discuss women, horseraces, theater, art.

That was the spectrum.

Now, however, bars are places where business is done,

and, my God, how sad is that?

To have to do business in a bar.

Important discussions are rarely still held in bars.

COLIN FIELD: In 1982, the whole of the Hemingway family were in this bar,

and since then, when I reopened the bar in '94,

it had been closed for ages.

And Jack Hemingway became my friend.

Now, Jack Hemingway. I used to say, "Mr. Hemingway,

"will you ask people if everything's all right?"

And he'd say, "Colin, I can't really do that."

And I would say, "Would you accompany me as I ask if everything's all right?"

And he'd say, "Certainly." And I would say to a table,

"Excuse me, is everything all right?" And they'd say, "Yes, it is."

And I'd say, "Oh, may I introduce you to Jack Hemingway?"

And people would say, "Oh, my God," standing up straight away.

And slowly the bar would end up becoming an amphitheater,

like the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.

All of a sudden, Jack would be sitting somewhere

and everybody would be looking at him, and they would be asking him questions.

And he would give all his information out

whilst he would drink Famous Grouse and Perrier.

And that was absolutely brilliant.

And he was here. The last time he was here, Jack,

he would have been just there, sitting just there,

with Paul Newman.Yeah.

And... It was October, 2000.

And that was an absolutely extraordinary experience, to have Jack here.

And then, after that, we now have Dree Hemingway,

who is lovely and she was in a Voguemagazine.

And she's a lovely model and...Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So even Dree comes in to see us.

So, not only is this a Hemingway bar because Hemingway came here,

it's a Hemingway bar relationship-wise.

I say always, most of the bars, in my place, too,

serving people are too close to the clients.

What do you think about that?

I hate it. Personally, I hate it.

I hate these young bartenders and service people,

especially in neighborhood bars which are... Not in hotel bars.

Which are very, very close to the client.

And I had an old Jewish barfly.

He said always to me, "Charles, if you want my respect, respect me.

"If you want my advice, pay me."[CHUCKLES]

Yeah, yeah, and he was never close to us, huh?

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

Definitely, one of the six 100%'s that a bartender must have...

100% is doing fantastic cocktails, but that's just there.

Liking people.

Liking people, very, very important.

If you like someone, you can't get it wrong.

And also, someone that senses that you like them sincerely

can't get angry with you.Mmm-hmm.

I'm about to make for you a cocktail that is probably one of my most famous cocktails,

my signature cocktail, the Serendipity.

The Serendipity is a cocktail in a tall glass made with fresh mint,

Calvados from Pays d'Auge, fresh mint, apple juice,

ice, Champagne.

Here we go. Now, a little bit of sugar.

Just a little bit.

Some Calvados.

SCHUMANN: You pour free, yeah?Yeah, absolutely.

It depends on who I'm making the cocktail for,

but I don't do what I call supermarket cocktails,

which is everything's the same.Yeah.

I always look at the person who's in front of me.Yeah.

For example, if someone is young, I'm going to do slightly sweeter.

If someone is older, I'm going to do it obviously drier.

So, I'm not going to muddle, I never have.

This is just fresh mint, imbibing, drinking in the Calvados.

If I left it there for 15 minutes, the mint would actually go black.

Because it cooks in there.

So, once I've done that, then I add a little bit of ice.

Apple juice. But again, even the apple juice, bitter sweet and bitter apples,

this apple juice, if it wasn't here,

would be destined to ferment and make Calvados.

So, a little bit of this delicious apple juice.

Now I turn it a little bit, just to get that right.

And now I'll finish with some Ritz Champagne.

I have to say Ritz Champagne, because if I didn't, I'd get myself into trouble.

Um...

That looks very nice to me.

One small stick.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Serendipity.

A votre sante.

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

NARRATOR: Cuba saved a lot of American drinkers' lives during Prohibition.

Very quickly, classical drinks became rum drinks.

But the aficionados' favorites remained mojitos and daiquiris.

My favorite drink is still the Petit Punch

made with rhum agricole, a powerful rum distillation.

It's very simple. One of sour, two of sweet.

Three of strong and four of weak.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[WOMAN SPEAKING SPANISH]

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

Oh!

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

BARTENDER: So, we're gonna make a daiquiri, cold. With sugar, first.

Lime juice.

Maraschino liqueur.

Rum.

Ice.

[WHIRRING]

Salud.

Everyone wants to go to Cuba to see, at least once in his life,

this bar, so I arrived before I die.

This place is famous for daiquiris.

And customers that have been here years before,

he say that we still make the daiquiri the same way it was made

during Hemingway's time.

How many drinks a day the bar make?

So we make over 700, 900 daiquiris a day.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[MUSIC PLAYING IN BACKGROUND]

[INAUDIBLE]

[BOTH SPEAKING SPANISH]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[BLOWS WHISTLE]

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

[BLOWS WHISTLE]

[BLOWS WHISTLE]

Okay.

Okay?

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

[ALL CLAMORING]

[INSTRUCTOR SPEAKING SPANISH]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[BOTH SPEAKING GERMAN]

[LAUGHING]

NARRATOR: A bar should be international.

The barman should be able to speak several languages.

Only then can he cater to an international public and win new patrons.

That's how I found new bar friends over the years.

I give them a place they like to remember and return to.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[HUMMING]

Hello, hello, hello.

Huh?Come in.

Good to see you.Good to see you.

How are you?Yeah, good. I feel good.

How many cocktail bars are in this building?

In this building, I guess it's about three, four...

Cocktail bars?Yep.

And do you know these people?Most of them, yes.

Most of them, you know.

[ICE CUBES CLATTERING]

SCHUMANN: And you are very famous.

You are always under "The Best 50 Bars in the World."

So, how come?

You have good relations to papers?

Or you make the best cocktails in Tokyo?

Uh, not at all. Not at all.

Um... I don't even know why I'm...

It's very honored, very appreciate to be recognized, but, uh...

I just do what I can do

and I cooperate as much as I can.

Uh-huh, uh-huh...

And luckily there is not much bartender

who speak English in this country.

Yeah.So... [LAUGHS]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can I have a little espresso, a little one, with milk? Macchiato.

Macchiato.Yeah.

This is a nice block, huh?Yes.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SCHUMANN: Ah-ha.

They have original techniques.Yeah.

Like these hammering techniques they have in Japan.

TRANSLATOR: And then he actually invented, with the hammers.

Because if it's only knives,

they are not going the same direction.

Like, same points into the ice.

So he uses a hammer on to the knife and hammers it,

so he can make the square ices.

Nice.

The importance is not the shapes,

but importance is the the spaces between the ice and glass.

Yeah.

Come here, Hisashi.Thank you, very much.

I'll see you Saturday, or... Oh, you'll post dates there.

NARRATOR: I see the things the same way as my friend, Yohji Yamamoto

who says, "I'm aware of the trends, but they don't interest me."

The drink is perfect when nothing else can be removed.

A good bar distinguishes itself by offering all the classic drinks,

that are just as well and properly mixed

by a barkeeper in Munich as they are in Tokyo.

And which taste just as good, too.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello.Hello.

Okay.

Hello.

Hello. Hello.

Hello.Hello. How are you?

Hello.

Hello.[SPEAKING FRENCH]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Hello.

There you are.

He's always trying to get in.

Can I close it?

Yeah, yeah, I sit. I settle there.

[CHEERING]

Okay.

Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Schumann.

SCHUMANN: I'm not a normal manager of a bar.MAN: Yes.

SCHUMANN: I am the personality of this bar,

and many, many people come because I'm working here.

MAN: Right. Right.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

[CHUCKLING]

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SCHUMANN: Wow!

Bravo!

Hey, Nick!

Ah-ha.

So this is the famous Schumann's bar in Tokyo?

Famous bar in Tokyo.Schumann's Bar. Schumann's Bar.

Let's go in.

A three-bottle bar is is mostly enough,

if you have the right stuff to work with.

Did you see here?

WOMAN: I don't think I can.MAN: Gin and grapefruit.

SCHUMANN: I put a little grapefruit here now.

A little more.

MAN: How long were you working before you were doing free pour?

We always, we are always free pour.

But when you started. In your training.

No. We train with water.

We trained with water in the bottles.

We trained, I got trained by an American.

But how do you know if it tastes nice?

Ah, I have it in the blood.

No, I mean when you're starting. When you're training,

if you're just free pouring water,

it's always just gonna taste like water.

Yeah. You knew about how much

of different spirits you should pour in this drink.

And I saw working at lot of people, not a lot, but many people,

in New York free pouring, and I'm sure

they make the better drinks than the other ones who measure.

Maybe the drinks are sometimes a little different.

He was making at the hotels last night, and just told me to wait here.

[CROWD CLAPPING AND CHANTING]

NARRATOR: Mixing isn't a circus performance.

My word.

The motto is shake the shaker, not yourself.

Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Nice to be here.

SCHUMANN: How comes that he should,

you have to create a special shaking

which is famous all over the world, which is called hard shake?

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SCHUMANN: Lemon shots and sugar?Sugar.

SCHUMANN: Yeah.

[SCHUMANN SPEAKING GERMAN]

Ah-ha.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

What is this here?

Lime juice.Lime juice. Lime juice.

Lime juice.Fresh lime juice.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

SCHUMANN: This is the hard trick, huh? The bubbles.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SCHUMANN: Yeah, great.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SCHUMANN: There are two ways of...

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

MAN: I think we don't really need to introduce the man

I think Charles is a familiar face

for everyone. I think that

we saw him last year, so,

Charles Schumann,

in the bar.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

Your bar has always been the place to be.

And you told me,

At one point you just get tired from the people

not in person, but generally saying.

It's my opinion, my personal opinion,

if you are working a huge bar like that,

a small bar is more dangerous than a huge bar.

In a small bar, you're very close to everybody.

And you drink, you smoke, you take drugs,

because if you don't take, you cannot stand the people, mostly.

Because I hate people.

Yeah.

[APPLAUSE]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, lets talk. This is honest.

If you have to work every night,

with really, sometimes very disgusting people,

if you, you, stop drinking and smoking.

Drinking, I drunk before, many many years before.

But my problem was... You had a time...

and I smoked. Smoked is, for me...

because I make sport, so when I make sport, in my age,

and I smoke,

no way. I cannot, I have no...

I cannot do that.

And drinking,

yeah, I lose my mind, more or less,

and when I drink I lose it completely.

Don't travel so much.

Don't?Travel so much.

Because your bar needs you.

After my studies, I had been looking for the perfect bar.

Yeah. One day, I'm going to find the perfect bar in the world.

But what happened in 2005, during my trip to New York, I realized

in the bar called Angel's Share,

that I'm never going to find the perfect bar, yeah, because,

there is nothing like that.

There is nothing like a perfect bar that exists in this world.

You know?

It's just up on the customer

who can say that was the perfect experience to me.

That was the perfect night to me, you know.

But there's nothing like a perfect bar.

Who can say that that bar is perfect?

And that is not perfect, you know?

Maybe for that crowd and those customers

that bar is the most perfect in the world, yeah?

But for a different crowd,

the people who are visiting that bar, this is the perfect place.

NARRATOR: An American bar has to be dark.

The Oak Room in New York is my favorite bar.

In Europe, it's Vienna's Loos bar.

And of course, Harry's Bar in Venice.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[LAUGHTER]

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

NARRATOR: The barman is more than an excellent mixer.

He has to be a host to the pleasant patrons.

A tamer to the difficult ones.

And a therapist to the sad ones.

It sounds simple, but it is the hardest thing to master.

A feeling for which drink,

when and for whom is suitable to which occasion.

You should never forget, the most important patron is the one you lost.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]