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Despite being surrounded by alcohol all day, every day, a growing class of bartenders are choosing to drastically cut down on drinking, or even abstain entirely. How do they do it?
The F&B industry is an especially gruelling one, where workers face unforgiving hours in a high-speed, high-pressure environment. It’s enough to drive anyone to the bottle, and for bartenders who are surrounded by alcohol, indulgence is an occupational hazard; consider, for example, the tradition of doing shots with customers. Factor in the creative side of bartending and the idea of becoming teetotal, or even cutting down, seems even more unrealistic. If quitting drinking is hard enough for those outside the industry, then how does—and why would—one resist the siren call of the sauce from behind the bar? Yet a small but growing class of bartenders have managed it in Hong Kong, despite representing some of the city’s finest and most cutting-edge drinking establishments.
Jay Khan, the founder of world-renowned mezcal and tequila bar COA in Central, often makes it clear that he won’t be partaking in any revelry with a kind but firm “No, thank you.” “I feel like people who know me won’t force me,” he says. Khan acknowledges his non-drinking comes as a surprise to many, though. “I’ve been surrounded by booze my whole career. A lot of guests who don’t know me find it hard to believe that I don’t drink.” He likes to taste cocktails when visiting bars but usually won’t finish them, and, out of consideration for the bar staff’s feelings, will communicate his intentions beforehand: “We’re all in the same industry; it’s embarrassing sometimes for me, if somebody comes and doesn’t finish my drink. I feel bad. It’s a thing, you know: you work so hard on a drink and somebody doesn’t like it—it’s not a good feeling. So I always give them a heads up.”
Though when he was younger he went through the requisite stage of work-drink-eat-sleep-repeat (even going so far as to live across the road from a club where he worked), it didn’t last long. “I’ve never been a big drinker,” he explains. His involvement with booze tends more to books on mixology and F&B-related topics, adding to his already-encyclopaedic knowledge, which has surely contributed to earning COA the number one spot on Asia’s 50 Best Bars list for two years running. “I’m more of a nerd, you know,” he says with a wry grin. “I like to understand what’s happening within the industry, keep myself up to date.” Khan’s team at COA reflects his values: the staff possess an extensive knowledge of the bar’s generous (read: 41 pages) mezcal and tequila offerings. And they are generous with their knowledge: it is possible to emerge from COA with an intellectual, as well as corporeal, familiarity with agave spirits if one is so inclined.
Khan believes part of the key to the bar’s success lies in hiring like-minded people—while his staff are not teetotal, none of them are big drinkers. “It’s about making our guests comfortable,” he explains. “When you drink a little bit too much, you say or do certain things that you wouldn’t do when you’re sober. I tell my staff to have fun, but don’t abuse it. You will never see our staff drunk.”
Khan’s love of trail running is another reason he doesn’t drink much; he’s not the only one for whom fitness provides a compelling reason to abstain. KT Lam, currently the assistant bar manager at Darkside in Rosewood Hong Kong, used to drink regularly. “When I started working behind the bar, I turned to drinking alone on a daily basis so I could try what mixes best with what when creating a cocktail.” But he realised that this approach wasn’t sustainable. “I had to be honest with myself: my relationship with alcohol wasn’t healthy and it was time to cut back.” Hong Kong’s widespread bar closures as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic gave him an opportunity to make lifestyle changes in terms of diet and exercise. It also opened his eyes to the number of people who were in a similar mindset. “Sobriety is more of a discussion than it once was, so I can still create drinks and push forward [in the industry] without drinking,” Lam says, noting that the growing demand for mocktails and other non-alcoholic beverages is reflective of an emerging public desire to take better care of oneself.
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Tyson Subedi, who bartends at three-Michelin-starred restaurant 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana, has never had more than a teaspoon of any alcoholic beverage in his life. “Alcohol has been a total mystery to me,” he says. “I only know that people drink to socialise, and I saw them open up more about themselves after a few rounds. I didn’t even know what it tasted like.” He’s just over a year into his career with Otto e Mezzo, and the experience gave him his first encounter with alcohol—strictly when tasting drinks he’s mixed: “You might think it’s strange or that I’m lying, but it’s my reality.”
That reality includes seeing how schoolmates’ drug and alcohol dependency led to violent behaviour; he believes life is challenging enough without adding alcoholism to the list. He instead focuses his energy on well-being, which includes waking at 2am to run up hills. “I guess that’s my way of getting drunk; it feels almost like a trance when you push your physical limits early in the morning.”
Subedi has started to cut down on even his limited exposure to alcohol as he masters drink recipes and becomes more confident. He views his unique status as a work bonus. “I can see and read my guests and colleagues much clearer. I never get tired or bored. I just love my job.” And while he isn’t—obviously—anti-alcohol, seeing his friends’ struggles make him ever conscious of how drinking can become an unhealthy coping mechanism for those in the trade. “I don’t think I [am in a position] to give advice. But being a fellow bartender, I can say this: if you think your life is a mess, try not to make it worse by drinking more and more. But you can always appreciate a drink or two.”
For Agung Prabowo, one of Hong Kong’s most respected and beloved industry leaders, a healthy attitude to drinking is about balance and discipline. He will embark on up to four consecutive dry months at a time, depending on his R&D work (“I’m not stupid enough to do the dry months while developing a cocktail”) and the Islamic calendar followed by his wife Laura, who co-founded closed-loop concept bar Penicillin in Central with him and their business partners Roman and Katy Ghale. Penicillin opened in the throes of the pandemic, and the fact that it has survived Hong Kong’s restrictions and wave of closures is testament to its success—to say nothing of its in-house fermentation lab and award-winning, do-gooder drinks menu—a tree is planted in the Borneo rainforest with each order of the One Penicillin, One Tree cocktail.
It was around the time that he opened this bar that Prabowo began to make lifestyle changes in earnest. “During the pandemic, after we opened Penicillin, I wanted to be a role model to my team, especially in terms of health.” He started running, waking at 5.30am every day to run a half marathon outdoors; whatever the weather, hungover or not. He has clocked approximately 5,000 km with the F&B Run Club, a charity project set up in 2021 which pledged HK$10 per kilometre run by participants to benefit youth sports and children with rare diseases.
It is a harsh fact of life that hangovers become worse with age. For bartenders, the easiest solution often is to simply drink through it. “It’s a public secret. We all know. We’d complain, ‘Yeah I drank so much last night.’ But after maybe 7pm, [you think] ‘Okay, why not?’”, says Prabowo while he mimes taking shots. While he defends the right to indulge—“Getting drunk is not wrong”—he also believes priorities start to change. “As we get older, it’s the things we need to do tomorrow that become more important, that stop you from wanting to drink.”
Prabowo acknowledges that achieving a work-life balance as a bartender is easier said than done. It depends on personal discipline, yes, but regularly working 12- to 13-hour days means there is little time left to balance. But he is content with his lot. “We [bartenders] are happy, I think. Maybe because we chose this work. As I always say, this is my way of life.” His long-time advice to his team is, “Drink, but don’t get drunk”—also easier said than done, but wise words to remember for when the next unasked-for shot of tequila is headed your way.
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