

A Strange Thing Happened to Me at the Bar Last Night

And I asked three experts how to solve it.

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I stopped into a bar on my way home from work last night to eat wings and watch the Mets. It's a decent bar, not a dive, but not not a dive. There are maybe 20 TVs and they're all small, as is the place. There's a short flight of stairs that's so short it shouldn't even be stairs. The walls are wood-paneled. The lampshades have tassels that recall the leg lamp in A Christmas Story. Jameson and Maker's and Patron are on the bottom shelf while Jim Beam and SoCo are up top. The food is okay but it comes out curiously fast. The guy next to me was reading a book, willfully ignoring the game, at least until Kyle Schwarber socked a solo home run in the bottom of the first, at which point he sighed and declared "WINDY CITY!" then walked out a few minutes later. 


I ordered a beer, then wings, then a second beer while eating wings. I only finished 8 out of 10 wings because I'm certain one of them was a heart and the other looked like a neck. This being a Tuesday, I was ready to call it a night after two beers. But the bartender, a quiet bartender in his mid-50s, snatched my glass and poured me a third beer. There was a full pint idling on my coaster before I could react. He gave me a nod. I smiled. Hell yeah! Free beer! I drank it in triumph. But then, when I closed my tab, I realized: he charged me for it. What the hell? I paid the bill and made nothing of it, but I kept thinking about it all night.

This morning, I posed the scenario to three experts. What happened here?

Tadhg Ferry, New York City bartender (at a different bar)

Yeah, that's bullshit. I guess it's possible he meant to give it to you for free and later forgot. Sometimes when you do your mental tally before closing someone's tab you will think simply "He had three" and forget contextual details. That's possible. Or perhaps you made an inadvertent hand gesture earlier that he perceived as a beer order. Sidenote: A small percentage of the drinking public will nod silently at their barkeep to indicate both "another please" AND "I'm good." Cut that out, folks.

But it sounds like that's not the case here. It sounds like he charged you for a drink you consumed but never ordered. Which is highly uncool, the bartender equivalent of inviting someone to a destination wedding. Take your business elsewhere, John.

Aaron Goldfarb, Esquire.com resident beer expert and author of Drunk Drinking

With no disrespect to you, John—because you decide whether to actually publish these words I write—I've noticed there are certain people who always seem to get into these nutty, Larry-David-as-bar-rat situations. Don't believe me, just go read some 1-star Yelp reviews. Now, I'm not saying you are one of those perpetually unlucky drinkers and perhaps this was a rare, one-time incident, but I never seem to find myself in any drunken "Choose Your Own Misadventures." That's good, because I'd never want to deal with such no-win options while buzzed: complain about the minor incident, look petty, and never be welcomed in the bar again. Don't complain and stayed peeved the rest of the night. Sure, occasionally a bartender buses my glass while a few ounces are still at the bottom of it, and, yeah, that's kind of vexing, but never worth pointing out. (Even if craft beer is like a buck an ounce in Manhattan!) Other than that, though, I don't sweat much at the bar because I'm there to relax. OK, so an aloof bartender feigned a buy-back. Even a mistake like that still adds to your happy hour euphoria and, what, costs an extra Abe Lincoln? Not the biggest deal in the grand scheme of things. So, ultimately, what I'm saying is...I'd ask my wife to yell at the bartender to take the beer off our tab while I pretended to fool around on my phone near the front door.

Ross McCammon, Senior Editor at Esquire and author of Works Well with Others

That sounds like a buy-back gone wrong. I'm thinking it was a buy-back, because you'd ordered two drinks already and some food and the bar had already turned a profit by serving you (in my experience, the buy-back drink is usually the fourth drink, but still) and this seems like the kind of place that would give you an occasional drink on the house. And I'm assuming you didn't seem appreciably inebriated. The buy-back is a reward for that too. I can only assume the bartender meant to "buy" you that beer and then mistakenly charged you for it.

I think that you should pretend like it never happened. First of all, the bartender was (apparently) sober, and you (certainly) weren't. Point goes to the bartender there. Second, bars are weird. Point goes to the bartender. Third, no bartender in his mid-50s is a bartender in his mid-50s if he's asking people to pay for things they didn't ask for. Fourth: In drinking as in life, you should err on the side of generous.

Go drink there again, pretend it never happened, and know that things will even out in the end. Now, if it happens again, drink the beer you didn't ask for, pay for it, and then never go back. Maybe give him the eyeball, which is a general signal to all bartenders that something is very much amiss and it may prompt him to realize that you don't realize that that's how they do things at that bar and then he explains it to you. (I have never heard of a bar doing things this way, fyi.) Just don't say anything, for the love of god. There are many things worse than paying for a beer you didn't order, and one of them is ruining the delicate balance that defines the bar. You can mutter something on your way out if you want.

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