It’s a time-honored tradition — a sacrament that was once damn-near codified as law across the industry.
“Thou Shalt Enjoy a Shift Drink” might as well have been etched on a golden plaque, affixed to the inside surface of every kitchen door, locker room, wine cellar, chef’s office, and speed rail at any restaurant or bar on Earth. A hospitality employee’s right. A ritual. A cleansing breath of liquid peace, commiseration, and camaraderie after a shift in the hospitality hustle.
Late-nighters from outside the industry have likely witnessed the insider rite radiating through the windows of establishments already closed. Or in a local bar, where the restaurant crew from a few doors down are nursing High Lifes and Jamie shots while collectively bemoaning that insufferable asshat from table 16.
A diverse compendium of low-brow beverage classics within the shift drink canon are still alive and well in some quarters — Whiskey and Coke, PBR, Jägermeister, the Scotch Highball — all immutable fixtures of the trade unyieldingly resolute against the ever-forceful current of fashion.
As long as humans are humans, these stalwarts will never die out completely. There’s a psychological science to it. “You just want something easy and comforting,” explains Alf del Portillo, acclaimed cocktail maestro and co-owner of Lisbon’s Quattro Teste. “If I’ve been making cocktails all night, I don’t want another one.”
But elsewhere, in contrast to reverential loyalists of the trade, the tradition has undoubtedly been altered — or outright replaced — as the neo-temperance movement and