Awful Orpheus

[Con­tent note for miso­gyn­ist, racist and homo­phobic lan­guage]

It’s not often that I’ll go out of my way to write bad things about a hos­pit­al­ity busi­ness, unless it’s a paid review­ing gig and the place is hope­lessly dread­ful. But I’ll make an excep­tion when the exper­i­ence is act­ively repug­nant and based upon a fun­da­ment­ally flawed concept. That place is Orph­eus, a new cock­tail bar and res­taur­ant in Allen St.

Keen to try out a new cock­tail bar, six of us vis­ited on Sat­urday night. We were some­what scep­tic­al of the Dom­Post’s claim that “born out of a revolu­tion­ary cock­tail cre­ation app that allows cus­tom­ers to con­coct bespoke booze using a tab­let, the estab­lish­ment is the first of its kind in the world”, but were nev­er­the­less open to see­ing what happened. Once seated, we were offered a couple of iPads in lieu of menus, and some of us were giv­en tutori­als on how to use the app. That in itself was a wor­ry­ing sign: if a user requires detailed instruc­tions to order a drink (includ­ing “don’t press that but­ton: it’ll close the app”), the app isn’t doing its job. But it’s what we found when we finally nav­ig­ated the fiddly fil­ters and bizarre “cock­tail fam­il­ies” that really made our jaws drop in hor­ror.

Without hav­ing to look far, we were con­fron­ted with some of the most racist, miso­gyn­ist and homo­phobic drink names we’d ever encountered. We’re not talk­ing about risqué cock­tails such as Sex On The Beach or Scream­ing Orgasms: such things are tire­somely juven­ile, but not derog­at­ory. No, these included such gems as “Asi­an Fet­ish”, “Afgh­anistany (sic) Whore” and “Pil­low Biter”. Some might say that these are just words, and we should­n’t be too sens­it­ive. But any­one who’s been the vic­tim of viol­ence or har­ass­ment while being called a whore or a pil­low biter, or suffered from racial abuse or dis­crim­in­a­tion, will know that words are part of much wider sys­tems of oppres­sion, and can be act­ively harm­ful.

Now, I was far too polite and Eng­lish (and to be fair, too priv­ileged as a straight white man to have been on the receiv­ing end of such slurs) to speak up at the time. But one of our group was not so cow­ardly, and deman­ded that the man­ager explain how such things ended up being presen­ted to cus­tom­ers, why they thought it was accept­able, and what they planned to do about it. The response boiled down to two things: “but that’s what the cock­tails are called!” and “we did­n’t choose them; we got them from the inter­net”.

The first response sug­gests that they don’t really see a prob­lem with the names, and that includ­ing these cock­tails under their exist­ing names is more import­ant than not insult­ing their cus­tom­ers. How­ever, I doubt that any­one would miss these far-from-clas­sic con­coc­tions if they were omit­ted, or object if the “Creamy Punani” were renamed to some­thing less vile. It’s not like bowd­ler­ising Harry Crad­dock­’s Savoy Cock­tail Book.

The second response is an abdic­a­tion of respons­ib­il­ity that also reveals an under­ly­ing flaw in their “revolu­tion­ary” approach. If we’d com­plained about some bad shell­fish and been told “it’s not our prob­lem; they came from the mar­ket like that,” we’d be rightly gobsmacked by their neg­li­gence. It’s a cru­cial role of any hos­pit­al­ity busi­ness to check the qual­ity of what they’re present­ing to cus­tom­ers, and that applies to lan­guage as well as ingredi­ents. But Orph­eus’ so-called “revolu­tion­ary” approach blindly out­sources that respons­ib­il­ity to the form­less mor­ass of the inter­net, which any­one who runs a com­ments sug­ges­tion would tell you is a ter­rible idea.

To their cred­it, they imme­di­ately star­ted remov­ing some of the worst ones we men­tioned. But that sug­gests that either they did­n’t see the prob­lem with the names until we com­plained, or they did­n’t see them full stop. If the lat­ter, then it means they’ve nev­er even read the recipes, let alone tested them for taste, feas­ib­il­ity, present­a­tion options and staff train­ing. That would explain the qual­ity of those we’d ordered at the start, few of which even aspired to mediocrity. Of course, how can they expect their bar­tenders to be exper­i­enced in mak­ing all 4000 or so cock­tails in their app? They’ll just be hav­ing a stab in the dark, based on a down­loaded recipe.

And here we reach the under­ly­ing struc­tur­al prob­lem with their approach, which tidy­ing up the cock­tail names (based on the rad­ic­al notion that women, LGBTQI people, sex work­ers and people of col­our are human beings worthy of respect) would­n’t fix. Far from “a cock­tail cre­ation app that allows cus­tom­ers to con­coct bespoke booze”, their app just applies some clunky fil­ters to a long list of untested recipes of unknown ori­gin, on the prin­ciple that quant­ity out­weighs qual­ity. The tra­di­tion­al role of bar­tenders in col­lat­ing an appeal­ing, bal­anced and invent­ive drinks list has been aban­doned, replaced by the illu­sion that tech­no­logy will offer con­sumers the late cap­it­al­ist nir­vana of infin­ite choice.

This philo­sophy is ascend­ant among Sil­ic­on Val­ley star­tup-bros, and it’s the same ideo­logy that’s giv­en us an inter­net drown­ing in click­bait, con­tent mills and chum boxes, but with simple-minded and poorly designed fil­ters in place of quasi-intel­li­gent algorithms. It’s dis­rupt­ive, in that it dis­rupts the “hos­pit­al­ity” aspect of the hos­pit­al­ity industry. It’s like Uber, but for undrink­able racist cock­tails.

The bar­tender no longer gets to talk to a cus­tom­er, dis­cov­er their tastes, make recom­mend­a­tions, nod sagely at their life prob­lems, dis­cuss the best ver­mouth for a Mar­tini, invent deli­cious new cre­ations and gen­er­ally express their human­ity. Instead, an order pre­sum­ably pops up on the screen, togeth­er with a recipe they’ve nev­er seen before, and they mutely mix and shake their way through a shift as drink after drink is delivered to face­less con­sumers. It’s mix­o­lo­gic­al Ford­ism: an assembly line of alco­hol­ic mediocrity.

Even if they removed the egre­giously hurt­ful cock­tail names; even if they pared down their list to drinks they know work well; even if they fixed the UX night­mare of an app that does­n’t let you search by name but eas­ily lets you miss the cru­cial step of actu­ally order­ing a drink; even then one would have to ask: what does this approach offer that estab­lished cock­tail bars don’t?

It could be more effi­cient, if your idea of effi­ciency is being able to order by spir­it type (from a very lim­ited selec­tion) with­in a cat­egory called “Real Men Don’t Cry”. We some­times wish that some of our favour­ite bars wer­en’t quite so slow, but real­ise that artistry takes time. I can ima­gine situ­ations where a large num­ber of cus­tom­ers want to order cock­tails they’ve nev­er heard of before with the min­im­um of wait­ing time and human inter­ac­tion: cruise ships, air­ports, back­pack­er bars, and chain pubs in sub­urb­an strip malls. But giv­en that Orph­eus intends to be “an artsy, cul­tur­al ven­ue”, I really can­’t see this approach being a win­ner.

Orph­eus no doubt has some good people who could run a decent bar, and they don’t need my advice, but I’ll give it any­way. If you want to suc­ceed with a new cock­tail bar:

• emphas­ise per­son­al ser­vice rather than mech­an­ised inter­faces;
• cre­ate your own unique cock­tails, as well as doing the clas­sics bril­liantly;
• don’t assume that your cus­tom­ers enjoy snig­ger­ing at the abuse of mar­gin­al­ised people;
• employ tal­en­ted staff, train them well and pay them (at least) a liv­ing wage;
• trust your staff to col­late a nuanced drinks offer­ing, rather than scrap­ing the worst recesses of the inter­net and get­ting that to do your work for you.