To this first point, there is a dearth of talented, skilled, educated bartenders. Very very few cocktail bartenders in Austin have both the practical skill & ingenuity and the academic & historical knowledge that is necessary in making great cocktails. In short, they haven't done their homework. I really mean that, assholey as it might sound. People ask me all the time where I go to get great cocktails in Austin, and it is a very short list. That does not mean there aren't a lot of fun bars and bartenders who I love--to the contrary, Austin has no shortage of places at which to hang out. But the number of bartenders who are truly great, who are in the same league as the best in cities like New York and Portland, is a very small number.

The next problem is the uneducated consumers and writers/critics. I encounter, with painful frequency, beverage reviews in which the critic raves about something that I personally know to be unremarkable. There is a difference between liking/enjoying something, and proclaiming it objectively to be great. You should eat and drink what you like; but when you position yourself as an expert, and don't have the education on the subject matter about which are writing, that is a problem.

A for-example: I am unabashedly fond of Matt's El Rancho. I love that shit. Is it great? Hell no. Is it sometimes just barely better than mediocre? Yes. But I still like it. That is my personal guilty pleasure, and I have lots of them. But I know better than to proclaim it God's gift to Mexican food, or even to Tex-Mex. I know enough about the subject to know that that even though Matt's has a soft spot in my heart, it is far from a culinary destination.

Whereas most Austin food reviewers know that their dirty secret food pleasures do not equate to culinary treasures, they are not so educated about cocktails. They have most of them not tasted cocktail greatness, and so don't know the standards by which cocktails are judged. So they write glowing reviews of crap. It may taste good, but it is almost never as great as the reviewer thinks. They know so little about cocktails, they don't even know what they don't know.

Austin cocktail writers commit all sorts of offenses because of this lack of education: they will rave about something that is technically wrong b/c they don't know it is wrong (for example, two recent reviews of French 75s, at two different restaurants and in two different rags, failed to note that the drink is not traditionally served "up", nor is it served in a Martini glass, which both of these were). Another magazine reviewed a restaurant's "French 76" without noting there was already an established standard for the drink, and this wasn't it. No reviewer of Justine's has commented that the Sidecar does not properly contain lime juice, despite it's unexplainable presence on the chalkboard there. It is one thing for a restaurant to have a "twist" on a drink, it is another thing to make a "mistake." Most Austin cocktail writers can't tell the difference.

Even the "official drink of Austin contest" is, in my opinion, little more than a publicity stunt--the winner two years ago was a Kamikaze served in a carved-out jalapeño; and this past year's winner was a cocktail that had been on a restaurant's menu since it opened. Both winning cocktails violated a clearly-stated rule that the drink must be new and not already in use or on a menu. Both should have been disqualified and yet they both won, because the organizers of the contest know so little about cocktails. Were the cocktails passable? Was the event fun? Yes and yes. But neither cocktail was good enough to be declared the city's "official" drink for an entire year, and I think it does a disservice to our city's nascent cocktail community to have a city-endorsed cocktail contest run by people who don't know from cocktails. But such is the state of affairs in Austin.

There are so few well-trained bartenders, and so few educated writers and critics, that you find some relatively inexperienced folks billing themselves as experts, pundits, even consultants. (I imagine that this has also been said of me, though not to my face.) People are so enthusiastic about the new generation of hip restaurants that they take offense when you offer fair criticism of a place. I tweeted that I didn't think that a particular east Austin haunt was a "real" cocktail bar. That doesn't mean I don't like the place or the people who run it, because I do. But it means that I get tired, from time to time, of places being promoted as being better than they actually are. A customer of the establishment came to its defense, proclaiming their bartender a "Drinks Master." I like bartender in question, I think he has a great personality and an incredible curiosity. When I met him a year and a half ago, he was just getting started on his self-taught journey into craft bartending, and he has come a very long way in that time. He has built up a loyal clientele and a positive reputation. But I think the program there is still too unrefined to be considered a truly great cocktail bar. That is my opinion. But I am an @sshole in Austin for having such an opinion, informed as it may be. Why are people so reluctant to hear such criticism? It should be a vehicle for improving your game, or for demanding more from your favorite spots--not a reason to snub the critic. I think the reason why it is hard to hear such criticism is because places are used to being heaped with praise. The critics are often, I think, too kind, as are the consumers. Maybe that kind of team-player outlook is part of what we love about Austin. Still, I look forward to the day when consumers and critics aren't afraid to show their teeth, and when bartenders aren't afraid to rise to the challenge, and when I can be an unrepentant asshole and get away with it.

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