The older I get, the more I prize predictable quality over the occasional excellence. Give me the ninety-ninth percentile nine over the ninety-fifth percentile nine point five any day of the week.

[In this week's installment of On Eating at the Bar, Mr. Arsenic offers some advice to all the aspiring chefs, brewers, distillers, and vintners out there. Good luck.]

That well tequila comes from the same batch as the top shelf (both are to be avoided of course, another story for another napkin), only the bottling line for the latter is checked twice as often. (Aside #1 – I’ve been told this is in fact urban legend, but I choose to believe it anyway, for the same reason I believe in Bigfoot and God — just in case.) But back to the point, the point here is not that you’re being ripped off, it’s that it’s worth it.

Thomas Keller and Johnny Walker know this, as do Ronald McDonald and Anheuser-Busch. The upside down Big Mac sends the plumber across the mall tomorrow just as sure as the the under inflated soufflé sends the eye-banker over to Bistro Jeanty for next Friday’s casual encounter.

It’s not just the occasional error to be avoided, and this is what separates Cyril Ray’s compleat imbiber from the incompleat, it’s the unexpected. There is nothing wrong with the occasional experiment, but only if the control is well established. Any Davis oenology grad worth his refractometer can spit out a 92 point California Cabernet so big and deep and bright you can paint the walls with it. But that’s not the vintner’s job. The vintner’s job is: second, don’t ruin the fruit; first, make the same bottle this year as last.

Yes, the vintage single malt is ordered by the aficionado and the tyro alike, but the seasoned drinker asks for the blended scotch, for he is far more interested in the finding the familiar than foraging the forest for something new.

And yes, James Bond can ask for a récemment dégorgé Bollinger, but remember, he is James Bond, he has forgotten more about wine and women than you or even I will ever know. Our virgin palates and un-notched bedposts are better served by the common bar wench at the pub than that foxy sommelier at Dorsia.

The pub provides us another illustration. Beer, unlike wines and conquests past, does not get better with age, in fact begins to deteriorate immediately after birth, a process accelerated by sunlight and warmth. Note here I am talking about lagers, specifically of the American style, Trappist ales to name but one category could do well with some cellaring. But here Budweiser can rightly claim to be the king of beers (one of the only three kings in this world, along with Bobby Rahal and Elvis Presley), for no other reason than its economies of scale. Go ahead, try to compete with them, they dare you, they taunt you right there on the label:

This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, a smoothness, and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price. Brewed by our original all natural process using the choicest Hops, Rice and Best Barley Malt.

Drinkability indeed. Beechwood, hops, malt notwithstanding, what really sets Anheuser-Bush apart is their quality assurance department. Walk into any bar, crash any wedding, any day of the year, any Podunk town in the country and you can enjoy that famous Budweiser beer, and it will taste exactly like the one you had yesterday. Pike’s Peak Pale may taste great at the brewery, but I guarantee you that keg hasn’t been changed in three months.

The legions of tall can PBR drinkers and what-do-you-have-on-draught -ers will scoff at this of course. These are the same Trader Janes who will buy a case of Two Buck Chuck (your Charles Shaw will cost you a mere two bucks in the two tier states, but up to three in three tier land, write your congressman), lock it in the trunk of their sun baked daddy bought black Jetta GL for a week before bringing it to their boyfriend’s bad art reception to go with their over- olive-oiled hummus and cardboard pita.

(Aide #2 – Back at the turn of the millennium, a Mr C. Shaw produced a plonk just drinkable enough to influence some irresponsible influencer, and then pulled the ultimate bait and switch, Ponzi-ing us into innumerable unearned hangovers ever since.)

Gentle reader, you may not pay attention to what you put in your mouth, and if so, more power to you.

But don’t let me down.

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[Further reflections On Eating at the Bar from our time traveling correspondent Mr. U. Arsenic. — Editor]

Half-hour five minute waits, the apéritif gone unsolicited, unheeded order-up’s, entrées arriving in the soup. The mobile phone, the mobile phone owner, karaoke, trivia night, open mike. Uncleared flatware, a cleared half-finger of Cutty. Stale bread, unexpected bananas. Medium medium rares, over medium over easys. The setting sun shining through the Levolor, an overzealous A/C, an uncomfortable stool. Small plates, California cuisine, cupcakes. Corked claret, burnt coffee. Last night’s last nightcap. The bill. &c.

And yet, despite all this, may your meal be overpriced and underwhelming, your plate cold, your glass soapy, your fish rotten, yes despite all this, all is not lost, there is hope for you and your rotten Tuesday night, your evening can be saved.

With a simple smile.

Dear waitress, waiter, host, hostess, proprietor, server, bartender, barista, line cook, sous-chef, busboy, Mom, wife, girlfriend, stranger — I love you.

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[Being the second napkin from Mister Unsold Arsenic's meditations On Eating at the Bar. — Editor]

“That’s my stool,” I say, and instantly regret the choice of words. No matter. It is my stool. I discovered it. As the Hollywood producer does his starlet.

Bar stools, like all things worth enjoying, come in myriad shapes, sizes, colors, conditions. One is obligated to explore this space, for both your sake and that of the stool. Keep in mind that what may be a comfortable fit at first might not tomorrow, that that initially intolerable wooden seat may just grow to be quite familiar indeed.

Back to my stool you’re so inconsiderately sitting in. After an exhaustive search, it is I’ve found the only stool in this place that will stand on its own without teetering on like a broken metronome.

The reason for this, of course, is that the bar stool has four, not three, legs. I’m no Pythagoras but in the humble opinion of your narrator the four legged stool belongs in a four dimensional world. I put this to an unshaven topologist I happened upon late one Tuesday night at the counter of the Neutron Bakery (now no more, unfortunately — was once one of Berkeley’s only 24 hour establishments), but was unable to stir him from deep contemplation of his old-fashioned in left hand, his coffee cup in right.

Not that all wobbly stools are to be avoided. The miraculous Mama’s Royal Cafe on Broadway in the sunny 510, a line out the door kind of an establishment, usually has one or two openings at the counter. There one can get just as lost in the Rube Goldberg-esque juice machine as in the be-tatted wait staff pouring the coffee. The chairs at the bar are a lovely wooden curve, curiously mounted as if on the point of a spear, the effect of which is that it is quite impossible to find any stable configuration whatsoever. Unfamiliar patrons invariably sit in one, get up, sit in in another, thinking the first was broken, get up again. No, they’re all like that.

But we’re not at Mama’s, we’re at Tiny’s Too. Again, I implore you, that’s my stool. Go find your own.

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A word of introduction on how I came into possession of the the collected writings of Mr. U. Arsenic (for those of you just now tuning in, here’s the first installation of On Eating at the Bar).

A friend works at a used book store in Berkeley, he’s a buyer, occasionally they get calls to buy whole estates, some old geezer just knocked off and the grandkids don’t know what to do with the four pallets of books Pops collected over the years. Anyway late one Saturday I get a text from Gary — need a favor, can you do a buy tomorrow, I'm not going to be able to make it — which I know from experience means Gary’s getting himself under the better half of a handle of Bacardi Limón and a twelver of Diet Coke and Sunday morning he’s not going anywhere.

Gary knows I know nothing about books, but I’ve joined him on these estate sale excursions in the past, I enjoy the voyeuristic deep dive, and he assures me I can just pay by the pound. So I drive out to North Beach and fight for parking, head up a tight creaky staircase to number 314. The place is pretty well cleaned out, the estate agents had already been through. I’m the first to get at the books though, ten or twelve wine boxes on the floor full of books, the naked shelves showing sun-bleached outlines of their former contents. “In vino veritas” reads the M&K wine shop label slapped on the re-purposed cases of Neuf de Pap.

I pay the grandson? nephew? by the case after assuring him I’ll take everything, carry the boxes down the three flights to the station wagon, then head home. I sort through the books, mostly fiction, some military history, 16 More Responses to the Ruy Lopez. What catches my attention though are a few dozen old cookbooks, all torn dust covers and swollen pages stuck together. I end up keeping these, packing up the others and dropping them off at Moe’s Books.

I forgot about the box for a couple weeks, a deadline at work kept me from doing the dishes much less digging through old cookbooks. Finally a lazy Sunday presented itself and I thought I’d make a lamb stew to last the week, so I start to thumb through some of the late Mr. Arsenic’s library in search of some much needed guidance. The real pearls I discover, though, aren’t the books themselves, but paper cocktail napkins, furiously scribbled upon in a barely legible scrawl. I could tell he’d fill up a side, then turn it over, write some more, then unfold, write some more, until all eight panels were covered so that the upside-down and right-to-left writing on the reverse would bleed through to the front.

The napkins themselves are undated, untitled. On each is self-contained essay on the act of eating, though curiously nothing on food itself, per se. One napkin will be a rant on the correct way to hold a fork, on another he’ll reflect on the simple power of a server’s smile.

In lieu of a proper McG, I’ve collected Mr. Arsenic’s napkins into a series that I, humbly, have entitled “On Eating at the Bar”. Next week we’ll pick up where we left off with installment number two, “Paying Attention”.

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The 9am Astronomy for Poets blackboards rotate away at the base of Pimentell Hall to make room for the 10am stats for the future MBA. Three hundred forty-three burgeoning Byrons shuffle out, three hundred forty-three myopic Milkens take their place. And down on the stage, rotating in as Alex Filippenko rotates out, is a corduroy coated, brown bearded professor clipping in his mike. He begins to drone on and on about some cancer study and how smoking etc etc sample size blah blah standard deviation and by now we’ve stopped paying any attention at all.

“By the way, I’m not a smoker,” he tangents, with an unexpected boom, sensing six hundred eighty-six eyelids drooping like a disturbance in the force, “but whenever I go into a restaurant I ask to be seated in the smoking section.” These two open up again. “The smoking section just seems a little more fun.”

I’m not a smoker either, anymore (nor are there smoking sections anymore, either, for that matter, but that’s another topic).

But where I do sit is at the bar. You might have seen me, or one of my legion, sometimes with company, but more often alone, down at C-1, tucking in to one of tonight’s special additions to the menu.

Who is that guy, down there, at the end of the bar? Perhaps he’s here on on business. Or maybe, you whisper quite audibly to your girlfriend from HR while splitting your two-white-russians-no-cosmos-no-make-mine-a-white-zin twelve-dollar check (”You take credit, right?”), “He’s been stood up.”

Let us take a closer look. He knows what he wants (though he might ask about the fish), and he what to drink with it (but is willing to try something new). He expects good service, and tips well accordingly. He doesn’t ask for salt. He knows how to use his fork. Occasionally, he overindulges. Most of all, however, he’s paying attention to what he’s eating.

And, oh yeah, sometimes sitting at the bar just seems like a little more fun.

[Editor's note - Tonight's post was brought to you by guest blogger and roving restaurant critic Unsold Arsenic. Normal programming to resume tomorrow, and stay tuned next week for further musings On Eating at the Bar.]

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Tags:	OEATB