I love Russia

So saturday and sunday I catered at a wedding. The call was at 1:00 on saturday at some house in Bedminster which, for those of you who don't know, is about half an hour's drive west of here in the Jerz. So I showed up early (because that's always a good thing to do on day one). There were about 70 waitstaff, 30 chefs, and 30 or 40 miscellaneous people there setting up for this party of 214 that started at 6. To cut a long story short, there were six full bars at this party, four of which worked cocktail hour and two of which were for dinner. And I bartended the cocktail hour. For dinner... my sole duty was to cover half of the party and continuously walk around refilling wine (I must have gone through at least 20 bottles each of white and red wine that evening for half of the party, and that didn't count the mixed drinks). So after 11 hours of catering (which is essentially standing up continuously, we had one 20 minute break at 4 for dinner, which was provided), my manager came over to me and said "I need you behind the bar now. Drop what you're doing, go." There wasn't a rush at the bar or anything like that. Instead, the russian kid working as one of the four bartenders had gotten so drunk he couldn't stand of his own capacity and so my manager kicked him out. And I got to replace him. Go me.


That was all fine, except that I was almost deleriously exhausted from standing and walking hither, thither and yon, not to mention i'd thoroughly destroyed the muscle in my left forearm from constantly opening wine bottles with the waiter's corkscrew for 4 hours. Now let me add that each bar station had space for 2 bartenders, and there were two bar stations servicing dinner. My partner left my bar at around 1 for some reason i don't know. And then they closed down the other bar (i didn't realize this) so i was the only bartender for the last 100 or so guests. The last song was played at 1:30-ish so i was relieved that I could finally go sit down. Except when the last song ended the entire group on the dance floor came to my bar. FUCK. So I managed to make them all their drinks in a pretty good amount of time (a bunch of them asked for champagne, and that's easy to do) except I ran out of glasses of all different kinds. So my manager came up to me and said "Matt, I love you. What do you need?" so I rattled off a list of things I needed to satisfy my 'patrons' and he barked orders and everything was done immediately. And after 13 hours I had earned the respect and admiration of both chief managers at the party AND $260 AND I could finally sit down. That was awesome.

The not awesome part was that i finally got to sleep at 3am, but I had to get up at 6:30 because I had to be back at the house at 8 to work the brunch that morning which ended at 2pm. But that was much more laid back and quite simple to do. There were only 2 chefs and 10 waiters as opposed to the massive scale of the party the previous evening.

I hope I can work like that every weekend from now on.

And if it wasn't for that schmuck of a drunk russian kid my manager would hardly know me. Rock on.

On a side note, I'm thoroughly exhausted.