Do It With Flair — The Changing Role of the Bartender in Pop Culture

Isaac Washington stole my heart. I was only seven years old, but I was hooked the first time I saw his bartender character on “The Love Boat.” Never mind that little me had no prior conception of alcohol other than taking minuscule sips of my father’s Old Vienna Lager; Isaac’s wide grin and red tuxedo, his signature finger guns, instantly caught my attention. Here was this man, mixing concoctions for the ship’s guests, right in the center of the action. From what I could tell, a bartender’s job seemed like a privileged position, fun and social and glamorous all at the same time. 

As a Gen Xer, I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s—every Saturday morning, I’d watch “Soul Train” and “American Bandstand” right after cartoons. “The Love Boat” slotted neatly into my routine: The show aired from 1977 to 1987, and for nine years I’d grow up with its influence, beginning as a second-grader until I was a non-rebellious 17-year-old. I didn’t have to be 18 (the legal drinking age in New York State at the time) to imagine myself aboard, ordering those fruity cocktails and meeting people from all over the world. 

But as I got older, so did my understanding of the bartender: what their job entailed, how they worked, and, most importantly, who was allowed to be one. As blockbuster, bar-set films and TV shows like “Cocktail,” “Cheers,” and “Coyote Ugly” were released, each presented its own era-defining vision of the bartender’s persona. Ultimately, those tropes didn’t just influence how viewers saw bartenders—they even changed the nature of bar work itself.

BOTTLES AND BABES

It was only one year after “The Love Boat” ended that “Cocktail” helped usher a new vision of the bartender, and a new era of drinks-making, into the public domain. I distinctly remember going to the movie theater in 1988, popcorn and Coke in hand, with girls who had posters of Tom Cruise on their walls (I myself opted for Duran Duran).

The film follows Brian Flanagan, a former soldier who returns to New York after his tour and briefly works as a bartender at his uncle’s dive bar in Queens while he gets back onto his feet. After an attempt at a corporate career goes south, Brian wanders into a Manhattan tavern (actually a TGI Fridays), only to fatefully meet Doug Coughlin, played by Bryan Brown. Coughlin is a grizzled veteran beyond the bar, who shares his personal codes, or “Coughlin’s Laws,” with the impressionable Brian. The two decide to team up, and their hedonistic misadventures take them as far afield as the Caribbean.

Though it was critically panned upon its release, “Cocktail” earned $171.5 million worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing films of 1988. It’s hard to overstate the influence the movie had on what bartending looked like at the time, or at least what it aspired to be. Keep in mind that this was before “the golden age of cocktails” arrived in the early 2000s, before suspenders and speakeasies and Sasha Petraske. Drinkers didn’t care about artisanal bitters or reviving pre-Prohibition recipes—and neither did the bartenders in “Cocktail.” Rather than what was in the glass, pageantry and showmanship were the focus. This was the high-water mark for flair bartending: Think flaming shots sliding down the bar, or bottles flipping in the air as gracefully as Mary Lou Retton. 

Flair bartending actually arose from 19th-century origins, beginning with one of the first celebrity bartenders, “Professor” Jerry Thomas, as Aaron Goldfarb explains in Vinepair: “Thomas had bartended for gold-diggers during the California Gold Rush, and beneath P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in downtown New York. With that kind of background, it’s almost no wonder he made showmanship a significant part of his drink preparation, if not his entire being. A dapper dresser, Thomas accessorized by putting diamond jewelry pretty much everywhere, employed pricey silver bar tools, and wasn’t opposed to juggling bottles to impress a crowd.”

Still, if flair bartending wasn’t exactly novel, it took on a particularly baroque form in the 1980s. Kenda Carfagno, a 25-year veteran bartender in New York, still remembers how watching “Cocktail” influenced her decision to enter the profession. “I was like, ‘Wow that looks really really fun.’ And then when Kahunaville [restaurant] was in the basement of the Carousel [mall in Syracuse, New York], they had a bartender flair contest, which is really similar to the premise of that movie, where you’re flipping the bottles, and you’re doing all kinds of fun stuff—and I just was really fascinated by that.” 

I still remember the ads posted all over the free weekly papers for bartending schools in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the 30-second TV spots. They promised fun, flexibility, and training in two short weeks. If that was all it took, and if glamour and social cachet were the reward, who wouldn’t want to be a bartender?  

But if the depiction of bartending that “Cocktail” presented had wide appeal, the movie also presented a very limited vision of who could be behind the bar: namely, white men. The bartender as shown in the film wasn’t just a powerful demigod, given charge over a heaving room full of patrons—he was also encouraged to manipulate that power to his sexual advantage, to the point of predation.

Early on in the film, after Doug and Brian meet, Doug shares some advice: “The name of the game is ‘woman.’ The little darlings come in here panting. Their little hearts are pitter-patting for the handsome, all-knowing bartender. And in their wake, a parade of slobbering geeks with one hand on their crotches and the other on their wallets. You get the women, you get the bucks. And boy, oh boy, you’ve got them. Buttons were popping, skirts were rising. When you see the color of their panties, then you know you’ve got talent. Stick with me, son, and I’ll make you a star.”

The film does have something of a critical read on this behavior—Doug Coughlin meets an unfortunate end after the hollowness of his glittery lifestyle is revealed, while Brian Flanagan eventually trades his womanizing for monogamy, marriage, and kids. But the movie’s early acts are enough to cement an aspirational vision of the bartender as distinctly white, male, and primed to capitalize on his empowered position.

SAM AND DIANE

Of course, “Cocktail” inhabited a certain fantasy realm. As critic Roger Ebert noted in a 1988 review, “This isn’t bartending, it’s a music video, and real drinkers wouldn’t applaud, they’d shout: ‘Shut up and pour!’” And yet there wasn’t much more diversity or nuance to be found in the era’s other depictions of bar work.

It’s impossible to talk about the decade’s pop cultural view of bartenders without mentioning “Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993. Where “Cocktail” was globe-trotting, decadent, and hyper-macho, “Cheers” was laid-back, convivial, and humorous, depicting a cozy, communal retreat to a world “where everybody knows your name.” 

In the show, the character of Sam Malone, played by Ted Danson, embodies the bartender who’s got it all—looks, charm, and sex appeal. Far from the frenzy of “Cocktail,” Sam represents the bartender as calm and self-possessed, a pillar of the community around whom all the action unspools. But how open was that vision, really? I still remember a scene when, chastised by another character for the way he dealt with a woman in a position of authority, Sam replies: “Whoa, wait a minute. I resent that. I’ve never had trouble with a woman in ANY position.”  

Back when the show aired, I appreciated the witticisms and double entendres. Did I notice the sexist jokes? Of course I did. Perhaps because of my own naivete as a teenager growing up in the ’80s—perhaps because it all felt pretty normal then—I didn’t read much into them at the time.

Now, however, cultural critics are starting to reappraise the legacy of “Cheers.” “A bar may be a public space, but Cheers highlights it as a para-domestic space where employees and patrons form a ‘family,’ but its mostly masculine characters makes clear who the domestic space is really for,” writer Osvaldo Oyola notes in The Middle Spaces.

In his piece, Oyola writes about watching the entirety of “Cheers” in the present day, and noticing all the snags that catch at contemporary eyes, from “the degree to which threats of male violence against women … are used for humorous effect” to “the fact that despite the show airing throughout the height of the AIDS crisis, condoms are never explicitly mentioned, and are simply alluded to as a joke a couple of times.”

Several women did factor into the “Cheers” ensemble, including Diane Chambers, played by Shelley Long, whose will-they-or-won’t-they romance with Sam was one of the main narrative threads of the show’s early seasons. Diane entered “Cheers” as a college graduate whose verbose conversation was not always appreciated by others at the bar. Unlike Sam, she was anything but smooth—instead, she was portrayed as someone whose personality was fundamentally unsuited for bar work. With the rest of the ensemble cast in mind, the message that viewers got was that a female bar staffer was either short-tempered (Carla Tortelli), bossy (Rebecca Howe), or snobby (Diane)—and that there was nothing else in between. 

“Ultimately, Cheers’ reflection of 1980s America seems apt in how, despite its willingness to play around the edges of the subversive (it was recognized by GLAAD, for example, for including positive representations of male homosexuality in an episode or two), it most of all reinforces fairly conservative ideas, while asserting an apolitical community ideal based on ‘everybody know[ing] your name,’” writes Oyola.

GRUNGE AND GLAMOUR

Eventually, 1980s America gave way to 1990s America. I remember the decade as a 20-something, listening to Alanis Morrissette playing at my favorite bar in D.C. while downing kamikaze shots, or dressed to the nines and smoking clove cigarettes at the local Syracuse cigar bar. Back then, my drink of choice was a snifter of Sambuca with coffee beans swirling at the bottom. It seemed sophisticated, but also meant I didn’t have to wait forever at the bar. 

Changes were happening behind the bar, too, and many of the decade’s films and movies went from depicting bartending as a long-term career choice to a carefree way to make a buck. The bartenders of late-’90s and early-aughts pop culture were often aspiring actors, dancers, singers, or other entertainers, waiting for their big shot at fame—and just happening to mix drinks in the meantime.

Take “Coyote Ugly,” released at the turn of the millennium. The film follows Violet Sanford, played by Piper Perabo, a naive Jersey girl who moves to rough-and-tumble New York to make it as a songwriter. When her dream at first eludes her, and down to her last few bucks, she stumbles upon a job opening at Coyote Ugly: a rowdy downtown bar where the all-female staff do synchronized dances on the bar top while wearing very little, pouring shots into the open mouths of mostly male customers, and pouring water all over themselves and the bar in the process.

There are older tropes that inform the film: Like Brian Flanagan in “Cocktail,” Violet has aspirations of a better life, comes to Manhattan to find them, and sees bar work as a way to attain them. Unlike Brian, however, Violet never finds total agency in that work. Even though she eventually trades her frumpy clothes for lingerie-esque outfits and learns to “seem available but not be available,” as her manager cautions; even as her coming-of-age moment dancing and singing atop the bar seems imbued with power; she’s still not as powerful as those customers she performs for, nor the men in her life—her father and her boyfriend—who come to her place of work to question and police her behavior. 

Instead, this is female empowerment through the lens of the male gaze, equated with swapping virginal prissiness for sexual awakening. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers describes the film in a 2000 review as “a toxic cocktail in which Piper Perabo and a cast of well-toned babes shake, shake, shake on a New York bar while drooling drunks … leer on cue. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer claims he’s made a film about female empowerment, but it’s soft-core pap for horny boys and their hornier dads.”

Eventually, Violet leaves Coyote Ugly behind, and the classic three-arc narrative sees her finally find success by performing at a singer-songwriter showcase and penning a hit tune for LeAnn Rimes. Bartender is not a desired long-term career, but it’s enough to get her on the road to where she really wants to go.

But the way the film looks at female bartenders, the legacy of that gaze, has lingered on far longer. “All the late nights, you know, they’re not fun,” says Carfagno. “One of the things that always irked me was there’s always this preconceived notion that you’re going to sleep with your guests, and you’re just a washed-up drunk.”

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

Passed-down pop-cultural tropes can overlap with real-life bartender-customer relationships in other ways. “Every bar has regulars and their life,” says Brendan Flynn, former bartender of nine years at Beer Belly Deli in Syracuse, New York. “You’re always going to have the crazy regulars because they’ve got nothing better to do and they don’t want to pay for therapy. So I’ll just go and talk to them like Sam from ‘Cheers,’ polishing a glass. Let me hear your problems. I think a lot of people just need someone to vent to, just to listen to them. They don’t really want you to answer them.” 

This notion of the bartender as someone who’s welcoming to anyone who pulls up a seat at the bar—but who isn’t expected to receive the same treatment in kind—is an old idea. It’s only in the last year and a half, as the COVID-19 pandemic has upended so many norms and expectations around hospitality work, that we’re starting to question that model. But beyond the movies, there are many indications that we still see bartenders as a fixture for our convenience—as the person who delivers us pleasure, who serves us, who potentially titillates us.

“As more people in rich countries are vaccinated and are returning to bars and restaurants, I’ve seen the word ‘overpriced’ emerge in a very specific use,” Alicia Kennedy wrote in a recent essay, “On Hospitality.” “Something like, ‘I can’t wait to have an overpriced cocktail!’ I don’t know how these people tip, and I don’t know what kind of places they go to, and I don’t know why precisely they are going somewhere where they don’t find the cocktail quality on par with the asking cost. But it does tell me that people still don’t value the exchange in going out to eat and drink. They are hostile to receiving hospitality, even after a year without it, unless it’s on their terms.”

I too, was once of the mindset that bartenders were there just for me, and not necessarily for themselves—until I became a bartender myself. It wasn’t until I started to work in the hospitality industry in 2000 as a food runner and hostess, and then as a cocktail waitress and beer promo model, that I understood intimately how such stereotypes could be damaging to those of us who choose this field. Later in my career, I became a brewery beertender, and in 2020 I began working as a bartender at my cousin’s restaurant. The days of flair bartending seemed far away during the COVID-19 pandemic when, with double masks and gloves on, I served drinks in plastic to-go containers. Conversations with customers virtually ceased to exist. Nobody could hang out at the bar anymore. The only constant was making the drinks themselves.

Now, as things start to open up again, and as I’ve become a bar supervisor and beertender at a local brewery, it’s a reminder that bars work best when they serve their workers as well as their visitors. “It’s a place that you go to for comfort,” says Flynn. “They [the customers] think they’re going into the entrance to Narnia. It’s like nothing changes here. It’s not supposed to anyway.” 

Neither Carfagno nor Flynn imagined they would become career bartenders. At 18, Carfagno was asked if she wanted bartender training at her job of two years, so she took it. Flynn “never gave it much thought. I kind of fell into it just out of necessity and I will say that it allows for a lot of freedom.” He’s an artist and musician, so bartending fits his lifestyle.

All those older pop cultural ideas about what bartending is, all those tropes that have overstayed their welcome, don’t get the job right. Bartending isn’t a one-way passport to over-the-top decadence, nor is it about sexual predation or performance. It isn’t just for men, or the young and glamorous, and it works best when it’s predicated on genuine, mutual relationship-building. As I now know, the magic is in the real, everyday textures of the work.

“Honestly, who can say that they work three days a week and can pay their bills and have time to do what they love? I feel very lucky,” says Flynn. “I think that’s more the glamour of it. I think living the lifestyle that you want to live … that’s more of a glamorous life.”

Words by Gloria Rakowsky
Illustrations by Colette Holston