Two tongs don't make a right

by Alice Lascelles

The degree of care and dedication that you can now find in many bars across the country is a wonderful thing – but is there, on occasion, such a thing as too much attention to detail?

I’d been pondering this for a while, but the thought was really crystallised during a visit to a much-lauded, and in many respect excellent, Mayfair drinking establishment the other night, when I happened to drop one of the cashews I was eating on the bar. Barely had said nut hit the deck before the bartender whipped it away with a pair of tongs and a great flourish.  Now I’m all for a tidy bar, but were the tongs really necessary? It seemed a tad fussy to me, and it left me feeling kinda jumpy. After that, I couldn’t quite relax for worrying about all the other besmirchment I was probably inadvertently subjecting the place to.

The use of tongs annoys me altogether, in fact. I think people employ them in the belief that they convey a sort of professional humility, by keeping the bartender’s literal and metaphorical fingerprints off the drink. But in fact they simply serve to give the act – whether that’s sweeping up straying nuts, or adding a garnish – a halo of irritating self-importance. If tongs could speak, they would shriek: ‘don’t mind me’. The sight, meanwhile, of a bartender struggling to affix a garnish to a cocktail glass using said instrument is agonising enough to make you wish you’d ordered a neat whisky.

Bare (although, one trusts, clean) hands are good enough for chefs, so why not bartenders? To use anything else is just pretentious. No: if you’re going to squeeze my wedges or sweep up my nuts, then leave the tongs at home, bartender.