POV: Bartender at One Of LA's Busiest Bars

[upbeat music] [people murmuring]

[Max] At Mirate, we do what I consider to be

volume craft cocktails, which means we're providing

a craft cocktail experience, but at a much larger volume.

We're serving around 260 seats,

which means we have to utilize technique and technology

in order to execute at the same level of quality

at the volume.

Throughout this video, you'll get a glimpse

of what it's like to be a bartender at a bar,

serving around 500 to 600 cocktails

on an average Friday night.

Hopefully by the end of the video, you'll get some ideas

around the incredible amount of thought and care

that goes into each cocktail.

But for now, let's get back to these drinks.

[people murmuring]

So I'm making two rounds of cocktails.

Two of them are gonna be served on the rocks

and two of them are served up.

It looks like I'm making the Yaki.

Then it looks like I'm making two of our house margaritas,

which is a Tommy's Margarita, but we don't use agave syrup,

we use what's called no gave,

which is our house-made, more sustainable version

of the agave nectar, which is not processed.

I'm at the the third well,

so there's, like, three wells back there,

one's the service well, which provides the most

for the actual restaurant.

And then this is, I'm working at the one

where I'm shaking up some drinks for some actual guests

that are sitting in front of me,

which is always the most fun.

[shaker clacking] [people murmuring]

Normally when I'm shaking, I'm not worried about hitting

this little camera on my chest,

so I had to be very conscious of it.

And then also, what's hilarious is, like,

you could do something a million times,

and constantly do it perfectly,

and the second, you know, someone's watching you,

[laughs] you're, like, messing up and overthinking things.

Oh! [shaker clinking]

As I knock everything over, oopsies!

Camera pressure.

So what I'm doing, basically, like, normally with egg white,

you would do what's called a dry whip,

which means that you shake the cocktail

without any ice first,

and then you shake it with ice,

and that creates the froth, right?

So instead what I'm doing is I make a simple syrup

our of methylcellulose that we use to create a foaming agent

that is a replacement of egg white or aquafaba.

We use a Hamilton Beach blender.

That one's, like, a little corroded

'cause of citrus hitting it all the time,

but it functions great.

And basically what I'm doing is we shake the cocktail,

and then I hit it with the immersion blender,

and that's what whips all that air into it

and it creates that super dense foam.

Essentially when you're building cocktails,

cocktails that are served on the rocks

are designed to be sustained at a cold temperature

'cause they'll continue to chill and dilute,

whereas an up cocktail is served at the ideal quality

and temperature from the moment you set it down.

If you're having a cocktail that's gonna continue to evolve,

you'll want that to be timed out

so when you're serving it with an up cocktail,

they're served at the exact same time,

that way they're both at peak quality

when they're dropped down,

'cause they're gonna continue to develop

in opposite directions.

And then a little fennel pollen on top

is what you're seeing here.

All right, here, this is for these folks, here?

These guys?

Okay, perfect.

We have two Yakis.

[Customer] Are these margaritas?

[Max] Those are the Yakis, those are the sours,

and then these are the mezcal margaritas, right here.

[people murmuring]

What you're seeing here is me making

four taquero number twos.

And then you'll see, you'll notice I made a little divot

on top of the ice with a copper ball.

We fill that full of a cilantro avocado oil for aromatic,

that also, if you slosh into the drink, is super tasty.

[ice clinking] [people murmuring]

A lot of prep goes into all of our cocktails,

but the taquero number two is no exception to that.

Actually, I'll just show you

how my team prepped it yesterday.

So what we start with is we take our house mezcal,

we take cochinita pabil fat

at about a one-to-five ratio with the alcohol,

and we take old tostadas,

we break them up and put it in there.

We sous vide it at 135 degrees for one hour,

agitating it every 15 minutes,

and this is just to make sure that the fat

remains liquidated at all times and consistent,

and also releases the flavor of the tostada.

After about an hour of that, we remove the alcohol,

which is mixed with the fat and the tostadas,

and we put it into the freezer

so the fat gets frozen back out,

and then we combine that with Oaxacan pineapple brandy

and Alma Tepec, which is the Pasilla Mixe liqueur,

and that becomes our liquor batch,

So that's all the liquor components, pre-batched together

and pre-infused with the meat and the tostada.

Whenever you're building a cocktail,

you want to put in the least expensive ingredients first,

which means you put in things like juice,

and then you put in alcohol last,

'cause if you mess up the juice and you have to toss it,

that's a lot cheaper than if you're tossing the alcohol.

We did a test when we opened, which is a temperature check.

Basically what we did is we shook cocktails with our ice,

and we measured how we could get the lowest temperature

with the ideal dilution,

so adding the perfect amount of water

and getting it as cold as possible,

and we found that mixing with four cubes,

or shaking with four cubes gets the coldest temperature

we could possibly get with the ideal dilution.

So I'm mixing two in each,

which means I'm gonna be using six,

which is the ideal for two in a 10,

so everything I'm doing is incredibly deliberate.

Most 50 Best bars that you come into

are not two and a half floors,

they don't have 260 seats.

So our challenge is to make cocktails of this quality

and caliber, but make 'em consistent

and pump out a ton of them.

Not every cocktail has to be for everybody,

I just need to have a cocktail for everybody,

so it's like I want someone to come in

and go, Oh my god, there's pork in that drink,

that is insane, and I want them to talk about it, you know?

And even if they don't get it and they're like,

I'm a vegetarian, I went to Mirate, it was crazy,

they had a pork cocktail in it that I couldn't have,

but I'm gonna tell my friend about it

'cause that's freaking nuts.

All right, we have four taqueros.

[Customer] Yes, thank you so much!

[Max] You're welcome!

Hey, how's it going, everybody?

[people murmuring]

Thanks, everybody, have a great night.

Or enjoy your meal, one of the two.

No, they wanted to come down here, but we're full.

[Max] Oh, bummer, okay.

And then we started getting pretty busy outta nowhere.

What's funny about being a bar director is

I get to do bar stuff a lot,

but, like, when the ship is running smooth, like,

I've been in the restaurant industry for a long time,

and if I see a dirty glass on the table, I'm gonna clean it.

I'm not above any role in that restaurant.

After that, it was staying busy,

making sure everyone's doing good,

making sure that the tables are full of drinks

and not empty glasses,

making sure everyone's taking their breaks,

making some banging cocktails, having some fun, you know?

On any given night, things can get a little wacky.

You have people coming in already having a good time,

you have people that come in looking to have a good time.

You might see the executive chef

prepping a goat for an event.

Did you see the whole goat?

[Max] I mean, really, anything could happen.

And my team, they're here because they love what we do.

If I take care of them, they take care of me,

and we have an amazing shift,

which means we can take care of people.

Hey, get back to work.

I'm trying, here! [laughs]

[Max] So here I am prepping the glass

of our in-house canned cocktail, the Tu Compa.

The Tu Compa, even though it might appear

simple in it's serving, is actually

the most labor-intensive cocktail.

A lot goes into it, and the canning is made

so it's perfect every time.

Tu Compa, this is our Paloma variation here.

Super, super tasty.

Salted grapefruit cordial,

little bit of high-proof tequila,

pulque, Mexican sake, a bitter pomegranate.

So is this, like, a new brand?

These are canned cocktails

that we make here in house, actually.

Oh, you make these here?

[Max] Really quickly, let's go back to a day before,

when we were prepping this drink.

[tape squeaking]

[machine whirring]

Normally, if you were to get a paloma, a gin and tonic,

a tequila soda, whatever it is,

you're taking carbonated liquid

that you want to be super carbonated,

and you're adding flat ingredients into it,

which makes it into a flatter cocktail.

The goal behind these canned drinks is

we're carbonating every single ingredient all together.

But that presents a lot of challenges too,

so the ideal target temperature on this beverage

is between 20 and 23 degrees.

So the tricky thing here is

is that fridges don't get down that cold,

and freezers don't get that warm,

so you need a fridge that doesn't exist.

But what we do is we take a temperature regulator

called an Inkbird where we plug it into the wall,

we take a freezer, and we plug it into that.

And then also you can't carbonate anything

with material in it, so first we start with

grapefruit juice.

If you ever leave, like, watermelon juice out,

you'll notice that it naturally separates.

Lime juice doesn't do that, so we need to make it separate.

We treat it using three natural clarification components

so those components do that.

We spin it in a food grade centrifuge,

where now we're left with completely clear grapefruit juice

in this case, we also make the pulque paint

for the rim of the glass here in house.

This one we don't use fresh pulque,

we use a bottled pulque, that way it won't develop.

We want the flavor and we're gonna

create the texture anyway, so we want it to be stable.

So what she's doing now is she's taking titanium dioxide,

which is gonna dye it white,

and then she's gonna add the pulque.

She's gonna take Ultra-Tex,

which is the tapioca-based derivative,

and she's gonna blend it using the immersion blender

to make it into our salt rim.

An alcoholic salt rim, I might add, so 7% alcohol.

I don't want you to have to know what goes into this

to be amazing, but we're gonna make you

an incredible product.

We're an award-winning bar,

and if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right.

Which means if you're getting a carbonated beverage,

we're gonna carbonate it the most

we could possibly carbonate it,

and this is how we do that.

Can I get this outta your way?

Yes, please.

[Max] Of course, would you like another cocktail

or anything? I already got one.

[Max] You already did?

What'd you get?

[Max] The coconut... Coconut marg?

I put that on the cocktail menu, is it-

Oh, my god, you're Ghostbeer.

[Max] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

I'm Max. Alex, good to meet you.

[Max] There was this really lovely couple.

I, like, ran out some of their drinks and

the guy, I guess, is a at-home cocktail nerd?

Are you in the industry?

No, I'm just, like, a geek.

[Max] Yeah, same, same. [Alex laughing]

They were saying that they've been fans,

it was really cool 'cause it was, like,

a very natural interaction,

like, it almost felt like a plant.

This is, like, the best night of his life right now.

[Max] Oh, there you go.

I'll pour you a taste.

And, you know, it's like when people come in,

and they're like that, it's like, dude,

I wanna show them so much attention and reward

for being into what we're doing.

And he was engaging with me,

he was asking lots of questions.

I had noticed that they were having our, like,

short rib dish, which comes out

with bone marrow on the side.

You guys got this done.

We're R&Ding, like, a luge that we're gonna put on the menu

[gasps] if you guys wanna try it. No!

[Max] You wanna try it? Yes!

[Max] It's really good, okay, cool.

Pizza luge, pizza luge,

it's time for you to drink more booze.

Normally what they do is they take rum or brandy,

they infuse it with raisins by letting it sit

for a couple of weeks, and then they add water

and sugar to it, and they make into, like,

an after dinner gigesivo.

I do one where I use a technique called a justino,

where we're basically rapid infusing these

house private barrel rums with raisin in the centrifuge.

So all the sweetness naturally comes from the raisins

rather than added sugar, and we can make it in about

half an hour instead of the multi-week process.

This is, like, something I've always wanted to do

and I, like, never got it.

[Max] Well, tonight is your night.

Tonight is my night!

[Max] So basically, the marrow is coated

with all the fat from the bone marrow,

and we're essentially washing it out

with the pasita into this woman's mouth.

A lot of delicious, ideally.

[customer humming] Feeling okay?

[Max] Oh, that's hella good! Good?

All right, awesome.

Ready to go?

Oh, they got the big boy camera out, are you okay with that?

Yeah, that's fine.

[Max] All right, let's see.

Let's go, all right, and there we go.

Oh, wow. That is delicious.

[Max] Good stuff? Yeah.

[Max] So this is fun because I get the benefit of

getting to try this out and see their genuine reactions,

which they enjoyed, which means that my

research and development was a success

and we could put it on the menu,

and they get to feel special

'cause they get to try something that's off menu,

which is awesome, and we get to reward them with that.

And they were super, super lovely,

and she was super blown away by some of our custom drinkware

for the our mezcals.

She, like, fell in love with them.

Basically, like, you know,

we could have sent out some food items that would've cost,

you know, the restaurant $10 or whatever it is,

and I was like, I would rather send them home

with two of these copitas,

and every time they drink mezcal out of them at home,

they're gonna think about us,

and they're gonna want to come back.

You made our night so great.

[Max] I mean, you guys, too, that was awesome.

[people murmuring]

I know I had the camera on me,

but there's a lot of great bartenders here at Mirate,

so I wanted to show you guys one of my bartenders, Adam.

He's working upstairs at the up bar,

and he's making the Guero.

First he's chilling the glass,

and he's rimming it with Arsebian salt.

We chill all of our glasses with liquid nitrogen

because it makes it so the part that the drink touches

is colder than a freezer could possibly get it,

but the handle where you would be putting your hand

is at room temp, and that would never happen

out of a freezer.

Then he's building it reverse order of cheapest ingredients

to most expensive, so first he put in the lime juice,

then he putting in our aguachile syrup,

and now he's adding in a pre-batch mixture

of our avocado fat washed high proof tequila

and Mayan coconut liqueur.

He's gonna be adding about four to five cubes in there,

perfect. [ice clattering]

[shaker clacking] Shaking it up.

[classy music]

And then, yeah, he's gonna be pouring it in there

and topping it off with that nice ice cube, and that's it.

And then, of course, a blood sorrel garnish on top,

which is indicative of our chef's garnishing

of his aguachile.

[people murmuring]

So it's pretty close to last call,

the night's starting to wind down,

and I'm preparing one of our more popular items,

our house mezcal flight.

So here I'm doing the setup, which is gooseberries

with sal de gusano and chapulinas,

so Oaxacan crickets that we get and we finish in-house,

and then I do some strawberries

with some orange salt on the side,

just in case someone's feeling squeamish

and they don't want any bug salt.

This is alternative to what most people would use,

which would be sal de gusano,

so worm salt and orange.

I find that majority of the time when you

put that on the plate, it gets left there,

and it's like, so I try to be intriguing

and use things that they haven't seen,

that way they engage with it and we're not wasting.

It's a palate cleanser, essentially, and a snack.

And then this is roasted agave from Oaxaca,

so this is the base that all mezcal comes from.

So this is something, this is an aspect of the experience

that you can normally not get outside of

when you're visiting these producers that we wanna share.

I picked that up from Mexico, we get it, we don't sell it,

'cause technically, since we're bringing it back

from Mexico, we can't sell it, but we give it away.

Kinda like foie gras law, you know what I mean?

Like, you can't sell foie gras,

but you can give it away for free.

And then we're making our custom flight,

so four different mezcals,

most of them from Oaxaca and one from Durango.

The reason I concentrate so much on our well,

well has, like, a bad connotation most of the time.

It's like if you go into a bar and you get the well,

it means you get the cheapest stuff

that they don't have on the back bar,

they're not on display, it's hidden.

And it cracks me up that it has been become

so normal that you have to, like, upgrade

to get something good.

But, like, my whole idea is, like,

I don't think you should judge an establishment

based on what's on their back bar,

I think you should judge them based upon

what they do the most of, right?

So, like, 95% of people are coming in,

and they're engaging with one thing,

that's what I'm being judged on.

And on top of that, we're working with a small batch spirit,

which means that if 95% of my revenue is from the well,

that means 95% of the money that I'm spending

is going to the family that's producing the well.

So this is gonna be from a Neta Mezcal,

which is a mezcal project from Oaxaca.

Most of these are gonna be from Oaxaca.

Then we're gonna have that service of gooseberries

with sal de gusano, some chapulina, so Oaxacan grasshoppers,

strawberries with the orange- Grasshoppers?

[Max] Oh yeah, they're good.

We get 'em from Oaxaca, we finish 'em here in house.

They're like potato chips or something.

Oh, wait, legit grasshoppers?

[Max] Oh yeah, yeah.

You do it, you have it.

Yeah, not bad, right?

It's like a potato chip.

Say cheers. Cheers!

[Max] We have the craziest freaking job in the world.

It's the service industry,

like, we are in service of people.

And that notoriously does not have a good connotation,

and it takes a very special type of person

to find love in that.

It's my favorite part of my job,

you're getting to be hospitable,

and you're proud of what you're doing,

and you're getting to share it with people?

It's like home field advantage.

You're in your place of power.

I'm like, I'm at my bar.

I have all these things I love that I'm so proud of,

and I get to share it with people, and that's awesome.

All right!

What do you guys wanna try?

Oh, I know it!

Uh...

[camera clacking] Oh!

Still on, is that okay?

Salud.

Good shift, guys.

[glasses clinking]