Cocktail Simplicity – Less Is More!

Our society has been dominated by the complex and over-the-top culture that has left us always wanting the next best thing. Whether that’s a phone in our pocket that can do everything from managing mutual funds to turning on the lights in our home when we’re across the county to drinks and foods that sometimes contain more ingredients than some pharmaceutical drugs. Focusing on the restaurant and bar industry, this has been the trend for quite some time now.

Extremely competitive by nature, establishments are constantly striving for innovation, in hopes to create that “next big thing” but somewhere along the way, especially in bartending, the true identity of what makes the drinks special has been lost.

When the complexity and number of ingredients increases, the inherent value of that drink goes up, and in a lot of cities, bars, and nightclubs across the country, there has been a price war on who can charge the most for their complex cocktails. Not to say that this hasn’t been a successful approach to the industry, I’m saying that there has been a noticeable shift back to the basics with cocktails specifically.

Focus on Serving Simplicity

There’s an old saying that applies perfectly to the approach that some bars and mixologists are now shifting back to and it is, less is more. Over-the-top drink making has, to some industry experts, gone a bit overboard. It is common to see a cocktail on the menu of a fancy restaurant or popular nightclub that has 5+ ingredients.

While the drink may be popular and complex, does it actually make it a “good” drink? Mixologists are artists in the way that they craft delicious tasting drinks from the sum of different ingredients. I like to think of it this way – when you were a kid, did you ever paint? Mixing two colors together created a third, unique color, and adding in another created a new color altogether, and if you continued this process by adding more colors, you soon probably realized that you just had a pile of black paint.

This approach can be loosely applied to cocktails that go overboard on the ingredients. Simple, short ingredient list cocktails allow for the individual flavors of the ingredients to stand out and blend together much more effectively than one with a cornucopia of parts.

Three Ingredients Make the Perfect Combination?

Author Robert Simonson recently released a book called, “3-Ingredient Cocktails”, in which he makes the claim that it only takes three well-matched ingredients to create great cocktails. When it comes to creating new drinks, simplicity is crucial, even in the brainstorming phase. Starting more general with an idea or direction can lead to much greater success, like creating a drink variation on an Old Fashioned.

What Should You Do?

Evaluate your own cocktail menu, not just from a customer perspective, but also from a financial perspective. What are your top performers and underperformers? Do you not recoup the benefits of stocking unique liquors that are required for a few complex, specialty cocktails?

By breaking down the performance of your own menu you can really hone in on where you can start making simpler choices. Creating the right menu that compliments your bar or nightclub is important, and a tricky task to master. The challenge doesn’t stop there, though. Once the menu is set with some tried-and-true winners, along with some new, simple cocktails, figuring out how to properly stock and manage your inventory can be tough.

We have identified the challenges that bars, nightclubs, and restaurants face when it comes to identifying areas of high-risk in their operations like POS transactions, employee behavior, and inventory management. Glimpse’s solution is to provide owners and managers with detailed, image-accompanied reports that identify specific instances of lost revenue or unnecessary costs, so that management can take corrective steps.

With Glimpse, you will see an increase in your top line and a decrease in your bottom line, through our proprietary video image analysis and reporting system. To learn more and to schedule your demo today, visit https://glimpsecorp.wpengine.com/contact/.