Children in bars

He’ll never remember this right

uh calstars what did you do

lol

Haha

I have very mixed feelings about Orwell (of course) but he got it at least about excluding kids from pubs. https://t.co/0g2aPEDDVN pic.twitter.com/jmOetE8nCT

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) July 25, 2022

Two adolescents here with mom and dad, dad keeps ordering rounds for himself and mom. Who am I to judge, there’s so Much I don’t know

I heard about an article in last Sundays n y times about children in bars
Anyone have a link?

I subscribe to the Sunday NYT and try to at least glance at every article in the paper, but that doesn't ring a bell.

Yeah, I just tried a few different searches for the month of August and didn't find anything.

5 year old holding daddy’s hand in line for the rest room
Surely there’s a better way

40 year old genius brings his five year old daughter in to sit under the disco lights

Maybe Cib is not such a bad idea when you consider the alternative — dads drinking 40s on stoops while their kids look at dead bugs on the sidewalk

I gave up my seat to a family with a stroller and a toddler

Mom walks in holding a baby with a head brace

Children in bars they have no conscience
No resistance

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/01/i-dont-come-here-to-enjoy-other-peoples-children-should-pubs-and-restaurants-be-kid-free-zones

my dad took me to the village pub every Sunday lunchtime in the early 90s, not that they had any food besides crisps and kinder eggs, he got the Sunday Times even though he hated it, because it was the only paper that came with a free comic. all seemed very standard at the time.

On Sunday night my wife and I had dinner at a place called A Bar, Montana (it's in an A-frame building). It's a bar, but it's got tables (and digital slot machines, because every third business around here is a "casino"). The food's great, and yeah, people bring the whole family, and sit right next to groups of drunken dudes in camo caps, squads of aging ex-cheerleaders (going based on demeanor here), retired couples, and everybody else.

LOL @ the idea of my dad talking me to the pubs he used to drink in, or any child being anywhere near them!

rural herefordshire is a bit different, there are a couple of dodgy pubs in hereford (and my great grandad was once the landlord of the worst one) but there's not enough people around to justify smokey men-only boozers when only a few hundred people live within walking distance.

The place where I tend bar promotes itself as a family restaurant that happens to have a full bar rather than a watering hole that serves food. One of my regulars is a local tax preparer who talks loudly about her 80-hour workweeks, whose husband is on the road all week as a truck driver and who likes to bring her 13-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son to the bar to be bored to death while she drinks. She leaves them sitting at the bar to continue to be bored to death while she goes out and smokes. She always goes out to smoke right after she's gotten a very cold drink, so it's closer to room temp by the time she gets to it, which may offend me most of all. Last week she came in with her husband, the 12-year-old boy, and her husband's sister and the sister's babe in arms, not yet two. The baby got its own barstool, so the group took up five of our 11 bar seats. I saw my boss come through the room and take several extra beats assessing the situation; he decided not to say anything. She tips reasonably well.

WmC, this might seem like a strange question, but do you “like” bartending? I like it, but my partner hates that I do it, for whatever reason. I figure— I don’t drink when I’m bartending, I don’t do other drugs, what’s the big deal!? It’s a sticking point.

Anyway, the bar where I work in the summer/fall has been super nice this year.

Not a strange question at all, and in fact my wife and I talked about exactly that this afternoon. I'm usually exhausted when I get home and unload frustrations about the shift — bad tippers who ask for bad drinks, people who wander in ten minutes before closing time wanting a big meal and a long drinking session, etc. When my wife and daughter have come to the restaurant, they see me having fun, turning drink orders around quickly and still managing conversation with bar patrons, performing in my lowkey way. J said, "If I were to go only by the way you talk about the job when you get home, I'd say you were the most miserable person in the world." So I need to work on that and acknowledge the pleasure I get as well as the frustrations. The short answer is yes, I like bartending. (But the job has a thousand moving parts and the parts change from shift to shift as I'm sure you know, and some of the parts are shitty. But occasionally three of the pieces are a perfectly made Sazerac, a customer who practically weeps for joy because I'm the only bartender within 75 miles who knows how to make one, and a 60% tip for being that bartender.)

i haven't tended bar, but back in the day when i worked in books/music stores there was almost a joy during christmas season when you just non-stop knew where everything was/understood what customers meant by 'you know, the red book' or whatever/just kind of flowed through eight hours

(unfortunately there was no payoff. on december 26 you started getting returns from people who have very obviously sliced bread on the cover)

but when you find yourself mastering all the moving parts, the flow is wonderful

btw, how do you handle buybacks?

As a formal policy, they don't exist at my workplace (and I don't think they're much of a thing anywhere in this conservative part of the country where small towns and counties are only recently going wet), but if I miscount the number of rounds a regular had in their favor when they tab out, well, it was a busy night.

(sorry for thread derail, should move to the bartending thread, p.s. we have plenty of kids at the bar)

Honestly I had never heard the term "buybacks" until ilx.

In my experience the verb is/was "housed." As in, "it's on the house." She housed my beer.

They're not "buying it back,:" they're just not charging you for it.

Perhaps I am an outlier, but I don't hear this term in any bar I have ever been in (and I have been in quite a few).

Maybe someday I will tell you about the time I was sitting in a bar in Washington DC and a British woman tried to tip in an English way ("and for yourself?"). Neither person understood the other at all, and I sorta wanted to intervene but decided not to.

My previous knowledge of buybacks was 401(k) forfeitures and restorals lingo so it was nice to learn a less boring use of the word

friends who are bartenders or barflies say 'buybacks', i think those who are neither mostly don't know what it means. but maybe it's also a regional thing?

buybacks are just a bartender who’s like ‘this one’s on me’, with ‘this one’ being maybe a fifth drink. tab’s a little less but you tip a little more

still miss dc’s frank v., who would basically just make up a number at the end of the night and we’d tip him the difference

The pub mentioned in that Guardian link up thread is my local (or one of five or six locals I suppose). They may ban U10s now but back when the kids were that small it was a total dive anyway; the gastropub refurb was fairly recent. Most annoying thing about that place is the insistence on table service.

Deflator and mookie, I have been a waiter and a barfly, mostly Mid-Atlantic. Just never heard it called that.

"This one's on me"? Definitely. "This is on the house"? Absolutely. "They housed my beer"? Many times.

Clearly it is accepted jargon somewhere but "buyback" makes no sense - buying it back would imply that you give me some money and I hand the drink back to you, instead of drinking it. But drinking it is the entire fricking POINT.

Why not just say "on the house," which everyone understands?

‘this one’ being maybe a fifth drink.

ouch

my peak barfly days when I was super in with the bartenders at 3 different joints, it was usually after 2 or at the most 3 when the buyback would kick in. Then heavy pours, free shots, experimental drinks, wild shit would come soon after. I don’t do any of that shit now I just drink at home because at a certain point you just age out of the bar scene unless you are into the daytime dive scene

it was usually after 2 or at the most 3 when the buyback would kick in. Then heavy pours, free shots, experimental drinks, wild shit would come soon after.

^^^

not a barfly myself but if i'm with someone who's a regular, it's after the first drink or at the most 2

cocktail bars, if the bar manager recognizes me, will usually offer a free shot while i'm waiting for my first drink and i seldom order more than 2.

"They housed my beer"? Many times.

Whoa wait -- ime to "house" something is to devour or destroy it. ("Monty housed his roast beef sandwich") and for freebies we use the verb comp ("I comped the drinks on 13 bc that's Angela's friend")

butthouse is like smash something and destroy it, in the style of sitting down hard on a cupcake

― tuppence b. bag (roxymuzak), Sunday, April 19, 2009 2:34 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks, La Lechera, "comped" is a more elegant verb and yes I have heard that one too.

Still I maintain and contend that "buyback" is alien to me and it also doesn't make any lexical sense. If it is an idiom in your personal world, great; rock on, drinking people.

Buybacks are what they're called in NY and what I've always called them.

And housed definitely means to devour or destroy so if you said someone housed your beer I'd assume you meant they drank it.

Maybe it is regional but I know it from growing up/working in two restaurants my parents owned in NY and then bartending in MA.

Why not just say "on the house," which everyone understands?

To be clear the act is called a buyback but I don't think the term is used in the moment. Then obv you'd say - this is on me or on the house. You would use the term if you were talking about someone doing it like oh that Gary sure gives the regulars a lot of buybacks. Something like that.

But you don't buy it back so why is it called that? The bartender is not buying anything, he/she/they is merely not charging for it. It makes no sense.

Sorry, I will shut up now.

I only heard it after my friends befriended a bartender in Brooklyn circa 1998 or so. It seemed like a very NY concept to me at the time bc I had never spent extended time in a bar as a young adult.

I understood the word from context the first time I saw it but yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. Nobody's ever used it with me. Comps, freebies or on the house, sure.

we need a regional map of these variations

yeah, i’d never heard it til calstars began using it, but most of my serious bar years occurred in Northern California, where “comped” or “on the house” were used.

Llwe need a regional map like coke/pop/soda, yes please

*We