“The bar is the communal table,’’ says Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, 26, who has worked at the Back Eddy in Westport, Eastern Standard in Boston, and Craigie on Main in Cambridge.
(Yoon S. Byun/Globe Staff)
G Force
Tending to their needs
“The bar is the communal table,’’ says Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, 26, who has worked at the Back Eddy in Westport, Eastern Standard in Boston, and Craigie on Main in Cambridge.
(Yoon S. Byun/Globe Staff)
Craigie on Main’s congenial head bartender Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli started at the restaurant before it opened over a year ago. The 26-year-old, who says he’s been working since he could legally pour, had been at Eastern Standard for 3 1/2 years and worked summers for his uncle, Chris Schlesinger, at the Back Eddy in Westport. The bartender is leaving Craigie on Sunday, though he’s not sure what he’ll do. Schlesinger-Guidelli is known for creating drinks for customers.
Q. What’s the difference between table service and bartending?
A. It’s a slightly different combination of skills. You get to create a physical product [when bartending] while offering high level service and quality food. Guests become intimate quicker than they do on the floor. The bar is the communal table.
Q. How do you invent a drink?
A. Sometimes I create off of a mood or a place. I attempt to remember what it was like to be sitting on a beach in Costa Rica or excavating in Honduras, or you crunch into that perfect apple in the fall and it leads you to greater places.
Q. Let’s say I’m at your bar meeting friends for a drink. It’s really cold out and I tell you I love oranges. What will you make?
A. I might take blood oranges and juice those down, or make a blood orange syrup, use sweet vermouth to add an aromatized wine quality - you don’t always want to go high spirits - a touch of gin for that holiday juniper note, and top with champagne for festivity. I’m doing a New Year’s party and making it there.
Q. Is a bartender supposed to recognize customers and remember orders?
A. I think people expect to be recognized, but they don’t expect to have their drink remembered. It relies on an old-school bartender’s mentality of remembering who liked what. Nine times out of 10, recognizing someone is all they want. Anything beyond that offers a wow factor.
Q. What’s popular right now?
A. Hot buttered rum cider: beautiful mulled cider, compound butter of canella - Mexican cinnamon, which gives a bit more pop than regular cinnamon; it’s a little more red - nutmeg, Appleton Estate rum, a beautiful Jamaican rum, and a little Angostura bitters, then grate fresh canella over it. Piping hot cider, lush texture of butter on top, warmth of Jamaican rum, it’s really beautiful.
Q. What do you drink at someone else’s bar?
A. I’m a fan of brown spirits, American whiskey, a little bit of mezcal, an agave-based spirit from Oaxaca. The agave hearts are roasted in pits in the ground and have a much smokier quality than tequila. I drink it neat, sip on that, maybe I have a beer behind it. Beautiful warming quality and it transports you. In cold season you want to drink things that remind you of warm weather or you can drink warming things.
Q. When you’re done at 3 a.m. on New Year’s morning, what are you looking for?
A. The coldest beer, the warmest bed.
Interview was condensed and edited. 
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
