10 Rules For Ordering At A Bar On New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve is the time of the year when all of us can let our hair down, celebrate the year just gone, and potentially sink a couple of drinks while doing it. Well, everyone except your bartender, that is. For bar staff, New Year's Eve can be in equal parts fun and torturous. I can tell you this because, throughout my decade-long career as a bartender, I've worked my fair share of New Year's Eve shifts, and I can tell you exactly how stressful they can be. Everyone's in a rush to get their drinks, the queues are enormous, and emotions are running pretty high.

Bartenders like myself have our own strategies for getting through a New Year's shift, which generally include refocusing on teamwork, working as efficiently as possible, and trying to have fun (hey, it's our New Year's Eve, too!). However, nothing helps us like customers knowing the rules. There are some things you should definitely do when you're ordering at a bar on New Year's Eve, and a fair few things that you should avoid doing entirely. Having seen both the best and the worst of customer behavior, I'm here to tell you what's what.

If you're rocking up to your local bar on New Year's Eve, expecting everything to be the same, then you may well be disappointed. Sure, bars may not do anything different for New Year's, but a lot of the time, they'll slightly alter their service rules and style to accommodate how busy it'll likely be. In the bars I've worked in previously, we've had to charge for entry, and in some cases (usually when we're anticipating a large influx of people), we've taken drinks off the menu that are just too complicated to make when the bar's packed. We've also operated different opening hours and had to create formalized queueing systems to stop the bar from being crowded and dangerous.

To avoid any disappointment, make sure you're checking what your bar's doing ahead of time. The last thing you want is to turn up and find that you have to pay to get in when you weren't expecting to. Plus, you may want to go somewhere free — and that's okay! We get it. Just come prepared, or you'll only cause stress for yourself and everyone else.

Okay, look. I'm a bartender. I know how good a well-made Manhattan or a premium Ramos gin fizz can be. However, New Year's Eve is absolutely not the time to be ordering them. Think about it: This is likely the busiest night of the year for countless bars across the world, and the queue to get served can stretch six-deep. Is this honestly the moment for you to be asking for a cocktail that requires a lot of effort and a lot of time to make? Do you really want to be the person who's caused us to stop serving the dozens of people waiting, because we have to stir your cocktail? You probably don't, right? I thought so — so please, don't order complicated drinks on a night like this. 

What you can do is only order these drinks if you can see that we're not too busy, and we can take the time to make you something really good without having to keep everyone else waiting. Some cocktails are totally fine, and if you want a margarita or a cosmopolitan, which can be shaken up quickly, that won't be too much trouble. However, if you want to stay on the safe side, stick to wine, beer, or simple mixed drinks. Your restraint won't go unnoticed, trust me.

So, I'm going to let you in on a little secret here: A lot of the time, as bartenders, we're waiting for you to tell us who needs to be served next. On busy nights, we can't keep track of who got to the front of the bar first, and we generally rely on the crowd to self-regulate and for people to be honest about who's been waiting. However, that means that if you're next, you need to know it — and you need to be ready to grab our attention. This is particularly important on a night like New Year's Eve, when there can be dozens of people waiting at once, and only the strong survive.

That doesn't mean that you should be shouting in our ear if we accidentally serve someone else, though, or reaching over the bar to try and tap our shoulder. That kind of behavior will get you kicked out pretty quickly. Instead, just try and catch our eye and smile. We'll notice you — it's our job, after all — and I'm always more likely to serve the quiet, considerate people over the loudmouths who think they can boss me around. If you're the latter kind of person, you should get ready to be ignored.

If you've been waiting to be served for 10 minutes, then the moment you get our attention is not the moment you should be deciding what you want to drink. On New Year's Eve, speed is key: Everything happens quickly, and while we'd love to stay and chat, we have loads of other customers that we need to make drinks for. So we don't have a lot of time to wait around while you think about what you want, and we really won't thank you if you do so.

There are certain situations, of course, where you may need to wait until you're at the front to ask — you may want to see what beers are on draft or what wine's in the fridge, which is totally cool — but if that's the case, then make your decision quickly. Then, when you order, tell us in one go (and please don't order something that will make us shake our heads). There's no need to space it out; we'll ask if we don't understand. Oh, and lastly, please don't change your mind at the last minute if we've already started pouring your drinks out. There's nothing more annoying, and it just leads to waste.

This one is less of a rule for keeping things moving and more of a rule if you want to have a good night. Bars will frequently try and make your New Year's Eve a little more special, and that can often involve crafting new cocktails for you to try. In the past, I've designed maraschino cherry liqueur and Prosecco cocktails on New Year's Eve that'd knock your socks off, and which feel more festive than anything else on the menu ... and then I watched while no one ordered them. 

Trust me when I say that not only is this disappointing (hey, I spent time on those cocktails!), but that you're missing a trick by not doing so. New Year's Eve specials are often pretty competitively priced, and they can often be a way for bars to get through their stock — what that means is that we're not going to skimp on the amount of booze in your drink. Beyond this, these cocktails often use premade mixes that we've whizzed up during the day, which makes preparation way quicker. As a result, ordering these is a good way to get a premium drink speedily. Oh, and beyond that? It's just fun.

So, you've shown up to the bar with all of your friends on New Year's Eve. You're all drinking different types of drinks, and so you all go up to the bar one by one to order your own. By doing this, you're basically creating a steady stream of people and more traffic around the bar area, which not only works us off our feet, but which makes it difficult for other people to order. You know the way to avoid this? The good old round system. 

When the bar's as crammed as it normally is at New Year's, one person ordering a round is a godsend for us bar staff. Sure, the round may take slightly longer to make, but we're safe and secure in the knowledge that we've just covered a large group of people in one go — it actually takes longer to make all of those individual drinks.

Worried about the number of drinks you have to take back to the table? Don't. If we have a barback or a runner working, we can ask them to ferry them out for you. Alternatively, if one of our trays isn't in use, we really don't mind if you take your drinks on it and bring it back. Just please make sure you're holding it securely; the last thing I want to do is mop up four pints of beer when I have customers to serve.

Like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and your birthday, New Year's Eve is a day that has the potential to get very emotional. People have fights, go through breakups, or finally resolve their differences. When alcohol's involved, things can get even more intense, and for some reason or another, emotions tend to concentrate on the bartender who's serving your drinks, who's kind of an easy target when you're having to wait in a long queue.

Here's the thing, folks: It's not our fault that it's taking a while to get served. We don't have a lot of control over how busy the bar gets, and we're certainly not responsible for whatever you're going through. Plus, we really won't like it if you start to get pushy or irate with us, and it definitely won't get you your drink any faster.

You want my top tip? Just be nice. As bartenders, we're working harder than ever on New Year's Eve, and we want to have a good night, just like you. A little bit of kindness goes a really long way, as does the knowledge that sooner or later, you'll get your drink. We promise, we're working on it.

If you want things to move quicker on New Year's Eve, both for yourself and for everyone else in the bar, then a tab is the way to go. Tabs help remove a pain point for bartenders and customers alike on busy nights: The moment of payment. Settling up for your drink each time takes longer than you might think, particularly when you're waiting for a card machine to connect and for the payment to confirm. As this is happening, we can't really do much, and everyone in the queue is shuffling their feet.

As such, if you're in for the long haul, open up a tab. Not only will this allow you to get back to your table more quickly with your margaritas, but it'll also make things easier the next day. You won't have to try and cobble together all of your payments to figure out how much you spent: All of it is right there, in one sum. Whether you're opting to open a tab or not, though, when it comes to pay, please have your payment method ready to go. There are few things more annoying than having to stand with our hands in our pockets while we wait for a customer to run back to their table to get their card, or count out their cash.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: New Year's Eve isn't the night to get into a debate with your bartender. On a quiet night, we'll happily talk to you about the difference between brands and give you tastes of different types of tequila or gin, so you can figure out which one you like the most. However, when it's the busiest night of the year, we really do need you to have a good sense of what you want in your drink — or you have to be willing to let us decide for you. We're not going to have time to discuss botanicals, aromatics, or levels of smokiness and tartness with you. We'll just need to get that drink made, so we can serve the people behind you.

On that note, if you do make a decision you don't like, or you say that you're happy for us to choose ... Then please, please, please don't ask us to remake it. Certain bartenders might be alright with this, but personally speaking, when it's super busy, it's hard to justify remaking a beverage based on personal taste. This comes back to the importance of knowing your drinks, though: Do your research beforehand into what you like, and you probably won't have that problem.

It might be tempting to get several rounds in one go to try and beat the New Year's Eve queues, but trust me when I say that this will cause nothing but irritation to your bartender. Asking us to pour 18 beers for a table of six won't be looked up with a lot of grace; all this will do is make the queue even longer, and leave you with a load of slowly warming drinks on the table. You're wasting your money when you do this, folks. We're happy to make a big round, but doubling up so you don't have to queue is just annoying.

Furthermore, please don't come to the front of the bar with the express intent to get wasted. Having a few drinks is part of a lot of people's New Year's Eve experience, but bartenders can spot the troublemakers a mile off, and we've had to deal with countless unruly customers in our time. Not only will we likely not serve you if you order dozens of tequila shots, but in a few hours, we'll just have to kick you out, which you really won't like. Everything in moderation: Make your night a good one, not one that you'll regret.