Kitchen Confidential Vol. 4: Coffee Syrup and iPad Tipping
“Any bodega will do. I don’t want to wait for my coffee. I don’t want some man-bun, Mumford and Son motherfucker to get it for me. I like good coffee but I don’t want to wait for it, and I don’t want it with the cast of Friends. It’s a beverage; it’s not a lifestyle.” -Anthony Bourdain
Ah, coffee. Most people’s favorite, daily use drug. Unless you drink too much and develop acid reflux and you have to take Omeprazole instead because you turned 32 and apparently that’s when your body starts to fall apart.
Irregardless, Americans drink so much coffee that water is the only beverage more popular. I read somewhere that 2% of all credit card transactions in Massachusetts happen at Dunkin’ Donuts. Can I track down the source for that right now? No. But if you know someone from MA, are you really going to question the validity of that stat?
Coffee in cocktails is synonymous with the espresso martini, which has become wildly popular in recent years, as bartenders have expanded the idea of what it means for a drink to be an espresso martini. It is no longer subject to the framework of a standardized suburban neighborhood bar cocktail with vodka, coffee liqueur, espresso and Irish Cream. Bartenders have creatively incorporated rum, tequila, mezcal or whiskey into the drink depending on what type of cuisine they’re serving at their restaurant. Sweeteners like maple syrup, cardamom and cinnamon add warming spice notes in place of the coffee liqueur to layer in a flavor that accompanies espresso. Bittersweet liqueurs (amaro) such as Averna from Sicily or Amaro di Angostura from Trinidad and Tobago can add subtle notes of citrus, chicory or herbs to round out a once boring cocktail. Bartenders may even ask if the guest would like it dark or creamy, which allows the Irish Cream to be omitted. It seems wherever you go these days, an espresso martini with unique and attentive ingredients can be found on the dessert menu.
But here is my point: espresso martinis fuckin’ slap so hard these days that it makes me really happy they have been creatively embraced by bartenders near and far. But on the other hand, coffee has a ton of usage in cocktails beyond just this one drink.
So let’s talk about how to make coffee syrup and some delicious cocktails with it.
I also decided to write this week about tipping at a café and give some insight on iPad tipping. I am aware it is a somewhat controversial topic, but I do believe, as someone in the service industry, that there is a lot more to it than being a black and white issue.
Let’s get it
What you’ll need:
Ingredients:
2 cups warm water
2 cups white sugar
1/3 cup instant coffee
Couple drops of vanilla extract (if you want)
Tools:
Measuring cups
Quart container or Tupperware
Whisk, spoon or clean finger
Making the syrup:
Add the warm water to the quart container or Tupperware. Slowly add sugar and stir with the whisk to dissolve. Next, add the instant coffee and continue to whisk until dissolved and integrated into the syrup. Lastly, add the vanilla extract if you’re using it and whisk thoroughly.
That’s it. That’s the syrup
Now, let’s drink.
The Drinks
This is cool and all, but I’ve only ever made drinks a couple times: Old Fashioned
Old Fashioned cocktails slap because they’re extremely versatile and easy to make. This one pairs our coffee syrup with peppery rye whiskey and the warming spice flavors of Angostura Bitters.
2 oz rye whiskey (see note)
.5 oz coffee syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Add all ingredients into a double old fashioned glass, add ice and stir for 15 seconds. Top with a few more cubes and garnish with an expressed orange twist.
Note: Feel free to use any other brown spirit here such as aged rum or bourbon. I recommend rye because of it’s spiciness that will give complexity to the cocktail. Bourbon, that inherently leans sweet as it is distilled from corn, will make a more one dimensional drink and rum, depending on which brand you choose may produce a drink too sugary.
Sipping Soundtrack: Ghost Funk Orchestra - A Song For Paul
I have a setup at home. Give me something I can impress with: Secret Handshake
It’s tiki time! This cocktail drinks kind of like a wintery, rich margarita.
1.5 oz reposado tequila (feel free to try this with any brown spirit like whiskey or rum!)
.75 oz toasted white sesame orgeat (see: Cocktail Confidential Vol. 3)
.25 oz coffee syrup
.5 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
.5 oz freshly squeezed orange juice
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with crushed ice if you have it, shake for 5 seconds, dump everything into a double old fashioned glass and top with more crushed ice. If you have regular ice, don’t sweat, just shake it for a bit longer to dilute it a bit more! You can add a fancy garnish like a mint sprig, a big ol’ orange twist, or a cocktail cherry, or just drink it.
Sipping Soundtrack: Major Lazer - Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do
Sound the cool guy alarm, because I have a full home bar: Coffee Manhattan
So many cool Manhattan riffs exist nowadays, and this one
1 oz rye whiskey, preferably Rittenhouse
.5 oz aged overproof rum, such as Hamilton 151 or Privateer Navy Yard
.5 oz aged rum, such as Privateer New England Reserve
.5 oz Punt E Mes
.5 oz coffee syrup
2 dashes bitters - Angostura, cardamom, tobacco or orange would all work!
Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add ice and stir for 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe and garnish with a lemon twist or a cherry - not a neon red one.
Sipping Soundtrack: Lindstrom & Prins Thomas - ST
I don’t feel like drinking today: Espresso and Tonic
Espresso and tonic originated in Sweden in the early aughts, and has since been mildly embraced at coffee shops. But tonic is relevant to what I am writing here so I thought it was appropriate.
All you gotta do is get a shot of espresso into ice, top it with some tonic water and add the coffee syrup until you have reached your desired sweetness. Garnish this one with an orange wedge for a touch of citrus.
Sipping Soundtrack: St. Germain - Tourist
The Barista Spun The iPad - What Do I Do?
You order your drink, get rung up for a couple bucks or a couple bucks +1 if you want oat milk in your latte, tap your American Express Gold Card to make sure you’re maximizing your credit card early potential with 4x points back at restaurants globally and then it happens - the barista swings the iPad around. 3 buttons. 10% - Good! 20% - Great! 25% - Excellent! Well, which one should you press?
I have no clue. I’m honestly not here to answer that, but I hope to provide some insights, opinions and facts that might help you make a more informed decision.
First off, if you are a regular at a coffee shop or café, always tip 20%. Odds are, those kind people remember your name, welcome you with a smile and maybe give you a freebie once in a while. You actually mean a lot to them and the best way to show you feel the same is to thank them… with your money.
When I really think about iPad tipping while going out regularly to get coffee, I feel as if I remember less of it happening every time I got coffee or pastries before COVID-19 than compared to now. Wherever you go now, it really is the norm, and I imagine the pandemic had something to do with it. When looking to cut costs, removing labor is the easiest way to go about that in the service industry. Food costs have only increased but you can’t stop having food and most chefs don’t want to lower the quality of their ingredients. Overhead stays the same and I’ve personally never met a landlord who would lower the monthly price of rent.
So if labor cost is lower, everything can go along as normal. The pandemic allowed for a lot of opportunity for owners to make regular changes to wages with a bit of a “take it or leave it” attitude. It’s a bit irrational for workers to agree to a pay cut, but when there is no where else to go, that doesn’t leave much of an option.
Now we have lower labor costs but the pandemic is over, and in all likelihood wages have not returned fully to where they were. Even if they have, inflation on everyday goods paired with sky high rent costs have meant that money doesn’t have the same value. But all of this to say that I imagine the post-COVID recovery of coffee shops and cafés have driven owners to try to keep wages low which can be subsidized by tips. If you were an owner and could keep wages low by reasoning with your employees that COVID has had a long-term impact on your company, and then allow customers to subsidize wages with tips, would you really take the high road?
Keeping wages low has a way of making workers angry, and angry workers have a way of making unions, which in the Boston area has definitely become a popular movement in recent years.
Food service workers “are constantly being shown by the industry and [the public] that [they] are disposable, that anyone can do [their] job,” said Emma Delaney, an organizer for NEJB and a former Pavement employee. But their work providing services at the height of the pandemic showed that they are “100 percent essential workers,” she said.
Boston and the surrounding area has recently seen a large wave of unionization efforts by locally-owned, independent coffee chain employees. Pavement, a local roaster with 8 café locations, became the first coffee shop in the state to overwhelmingly vote in support of unionizing in 2021, allowing them to collectively bargain their wages with their owner. As mentioned above, the pandemic shifted the perception of café workers from replaceable to essential, and the need to recover from COVID-19 should not fall on them. Their wages are fixed. They do not have equity in the company. Don’t steal from workers.
And then we have Darwin’s, which had 4 locations in Cambridge. The workers voted to unionize to collectively bargain for a base rate of $24 an hour, and Steve Darwin decided to close all the locations after 30 years in business. Convenient.
Lastly, roughly 50 employees from Somerville institutions Bloc, Diesel and Forge unionized in late 2021 and their owners voluntarily agreed to recognize the union as their employees’ bargaining representative.
Shoutout to New England Joint Board UNITE HERE! for working with essential workers to pursue fair pay.
The last thing that I think is important to think about when you’re considering tipping or not is that certain states actually have a different set of labor laws for tipped-employees that includes a much, much lower minimum wage, as tips are used to make up for the lack of money that owners are required to pay. Yes, the state has a set minimum wage that owners must ensure workers make, meaning if tips don’t get them there, the company has to. But in Massachusetts, for example, the minimum wage for tipped employees, or those who receive $20 or more in tips monthly, is only $6.75 an hour.
Yep, your favorite barista or favorite bartender likely makes $6.75 an hour in Massachusetts, and your tips are actually how they earn money. This varies state by state, so tipped workers in California make the state minimum wage plus tips, whereas New York has a tip credit that can be applied to the minimum wage - kinda confusing honestly. In Mississippi, and this is real, the minimum wage for tipped employees is… drum roll please… $2.13! But the point is, these wages are likely lobbied for by huge restaurants companies, because it’s cheaper to push the government to keep wages low for owners than to actually pay employees. Fun stuff.
My point is this - tipped employees are generally treated differently from a wage and tax perspective, and it is important to understand this and consider it when you’re thinking about leaving a tip or not. Owners are owners, and they’ll do whatever they can to ensure they maximize profit, and it is quite rare to find considerate and caring restaurant owners who actually go above and beyond to ensure their workers are paid correctly. Unionization efforts are becoming more common in the café industry, but still are relatively absent in restaurants, allowing owners to have complete control of how they distribute their money.
For the record, I always leave a tip and I think you should, too. If you don’t believe you should tip, you may consider getting involved in promoting local and state legislature change to ensure fair pay for workers. Trickle down economics are a lie - sorry to break it to you! And I didn’t even more you with the lack of benefits like health insurance and retirement funds. Maybe another day.
But that’s what I have to contribute to this conversation. It isn’t just a black and white issue. It comes down to owners abusing their position of power which in turn suppresses the wages of workers, forcing them to unionize and collectively bargain for higher pay. For those who work in cafés that aren’t buoyed by union agreed wages, tips are even more imperative considering the likely low hourly wage they have with states treating tipped employees so differently than .
Note: I work in a restaurant for incredibly reasonable and kind owners, and I have no interest in unionizing the food and beverage industry, but I will always support those who do because I have worked for other companies that are incredibly unfair with the wages they pay their workers versus themselves.
FAQs
You’re talking a lot about cocktail tins and .75 oz and other stuff I’m unfamiliar with. Can you elaborate?
So in order to make these cocktails, you’ll need some basic bar tools. You can usually purchase these in a set with a cocktail shaker, a jigger (measuring tool), a barspoon for mixing, a Hawthorne strainer and a mixing glass. Jiggers typically have a 2 oz side with a 1.5 oz line, and a 1 oz side with a .5 and .75 line.
I don’t have a bunch of these cocktail tools, but this seems interesting. Where can I get all this stuff you’re talking about?
I personally would recommend checking out Cocktail Kingdom’s complete sets. They’re very high quality and beautifully crafted.
You’re talking a lot about glassware. What’s the difference between all of them and what would typically be served in them?
There are three primary cocktail glasses that every home bar should have - highball, double old fashioned and coupe.
Highball - Ever order a vodka soda close it? Jamo ginger? That is a highball glass! Tall and thin, usually 12 - 16 oz in volume.
Double Old Fashioned - The style is in the name! Old Fashioned! Other names include ‘rocks glass’, ‘tumbler’ or ‘low ball’. They’re short and sturdy and usually 10 - 12 oz in volume.
Coupe - This is a stemmed glass that has a broad, shallow bowl to sip your concoctions out of. Think martini glass but you don’t have to be scared of the physics behind drinking out of it. 6 - 8 oz in volume is the typical size.
My cocktail doesn’t seem ‘balanced’. What should I do?
Bartenders love getting into discussions about the ideal build for a classic gin gimlet or whiskey sour. Some prefer a 2:1:1 build which would mean 1.5 oz base spirit, .75 oz citrus juice and .75 oz bar syrup, while others prefer a 2:.5:.5, which would mean 2 oz base spirit, .5 oz citrus juice and .5 bar syrup. Some might even go 2:.75:.5. But the point is, people have different preferences and you can feel free to adjust. If you want more of an acidic pop, add more lemon or lime juice. If you want it a touch sweeter, add more bar syrup.
Why is there a ‘Tip Your Bartender’ button on here? Can’t you just make it a paid subscription?
Yes, technically I could. But unfortunately the minimum charge is $5 a month, and quite frankly I find that too steep. I’d like this to be accessible to everyone who wants to mix drinks at home, so I thought a ‘pay what you’d like’ system makes the most sense for this newsletter. Tips are absolutely not necessary but always appreciated!
What’re you concocting and talking about next week?
I dunno, that’s for next week. Stay tuned!