“What’s your problem with a Rum and Coke?”

A good question and one I’m asked quite frequently here at Salud. I don’t dislike a rum & coke now and then, in fact I’m working off a wicked Cruzan 151 & Coke hangover as I write this. (the new bottles from Cruzan are so damn similar I didn’t notice until my second, which technically was my fourth…) When I’m behind the stick and nipple deep in the weeds with multiple tickets hanging and a full bar testing my control, I welcome a ticket with a couple dark & diets on it. It gives me a moments reprieve and allows our guests to have fun, fluid service.

I love simplicity. I love comfort. I love the old standby and for every right or wrong reason it’s ordered, I never look down on my friends the rum & coke drinkers.

What I hate is laziness.

I was at a boardwalk bar last week having a cold beer to wash the sour grapes taste away from the Yankees World Series win, when a mid twenties looking guy walked up to the bar and asked the bartender for “something tropical”. To which the Bartender snidely replies “how about a rum & coke?”

Really? C’mon!

This bar has a tropical cocktail list 15 Drinks heavy, all the pre packaged mess is there, with some more semi-well thought out tourist friendly additions as well. All the Bartender had to do was give this yokel the opportunity to look at it and make a decision, instead he took the easy way out and instead made this kid feel like a pansy for wanting “something tropical”. The bar wasn’t busy, I had a full beer and the one other customer was immersed in a diet coke and a trashy romance novel. It’s drinkslingers like this that bastardize us all. The kid gave in to macho pressure and got a rum & coke, but it felt dirty, like a lost opportunity.

As I pointed out in a previous post, I am not a fan of sickly sweet frozen drinks, nor do I ever enjoy juice heavy cocktails (why hide the booze?), but I do understand that my palette is completely different from anyone else’s, by god, it’s okay if you don’t like the taste of Rye Whiskey, but I do. To each his own, right?

As I so blithely dismiss this preferred drink of most locals on the opening page with zeal , “you’re rum & coke rehab” has become more of a personal goal to motivate my customers to challenge themselves and try something different, hell, a Cruzan Dark and soda with a dash of orange bitters is delicious. Not too different, but enough to maybe give pause before you take the easy way out next time you sit down and the Bartender asks “What’ll it be?”