Tender hearts

Pretty much anyone who’s spent time in a bar is bound to have heard some version of the adage “bartenders make great therapists.” It’s an easy comparison to make. After all, pretty much any bartender will tell you that she’s used to listening to people’s problems, hearing their life stories, or just being the sounding board off which customers bounce their inebriated ideas.

A lot of the times, people come to the bar and want to talk about why they’re there. That’s true regardless of whether it’s a happy occasion or an unhappy one that gets them there. But how often do people stop to wonder how and why their bartenders ended up in the same place?

What motivates a person to become a bartender? What makes it worth sticking around? We asked them.

Royce

115 Ridge St.

Joey Parazo started tending bar at a bottle shop in midtown five years ago. He’s had two bartending jobs, but explained that both basically fell in his lap.

“Both of my jobs bartending, the proprietors have reached out to me, specifically, just because they knew I was out and about on the scene,” Parazo said. “I knew a lot of people. I think, ultimately, they thought that I’d bring people in.”

Parazo—who holds a degree in anthropology—doesn’t just know a lot of people. He’s also interested in knowing more, in general, about people. It’s something he realized he could learn from behind the bar.

“Ultimately, the reason why I got into in the first place was knowledge of what’s available beverage-wise,” he said. “But it slowly evolved into this yearning for wanting to know more about why people come to bars. Usually people come to bars because they want to escape their lives. And feel like I wear many hats. One of the hats is kind of like therapist. … I get a better idea of, I guess, the human condition. I feel like there’s a pretty good cross section of the people of Reno who come in here. And I feel like the picture for me is clearer, just talking with people, finding out what’s going in their lives and stuff.”

Hideout Lounge

240 Park St.

Taylor Herrick had never tended bar before walking into her first day on the job at Hideout Lounge. It was April 1, 2017—the day of the annual Scalleycat bike race and scavenger hunt that brings people on bicycles out in droves to Reno bars.

“I didn’t know what to expect, and it was so wild,” Herrick said. “It was my first day, and it was also my boss’s birthday that night, too. I ended up working a double. So I was here, I think, for 12 hours before I got relieved. It was so packed. It was so busy. Like I said, I had never done it before. It was really exciting.”

Since her trial by fire during the busy Scalleycat event, Herrick said everything else has felt manageable.

When she’s not behind the bar, Herrick’s day job is as a graphic designer for a publishing company—work she does remotely from her home. Her bartending gig serves as a social outlet for her.

“Every day, I’m going to meet somebody new and something interesting is going to happen,” she said. “I just worked a Thursday night here, and somebody hit a 1,200 dollar jackpot. That was rad, and he tipped me out way too much money. He’s a regular here, but he just hit a jackpot and said, ’Here’s a hundred and twenty dollars.’ I was like, ’Cool. That’s what’s up.’”

Herrick said her day is often made by the interactions she has with customers—and she sees improving other people’s days as a vital role for herself, too.

“That’s another good thing about it,” she said. “I’ll have people come in and they’ll be like, ’This, that and the other thing happened to me, and I’m having the worst day.’ And I’m like ’I have the solution for you.’”

Chapel Tavern

1099 S. Virginia St.

Sara Sakurada has been tending bar for nine years.

“I guess the way I originally got into it is, I was working at a restaurant and going to school. When I turned 21, they asked me if I wanted to be a bartender. I was interested, and I just loved it. At the time, I was really young, so I was having a lot of fun with my coworkers. You know, it’s a lot of partying and drinking. It’s good money. It’s pretty easy. You get to meet a lot of different people. I originally started in Berkeley, which—similarly to Reno—has a lot of tourists and different types of people come through.”

At one time, Sakurada intended to go to law school.

“I went through the whole process, took the LSAT, just decided it wasn’t for me and just kept bartending, kept working on things,” she said. “About three years ago was when I got more serious about it. If I was going to stay in this industry, then I wanted to learn more about the history of cocktails, the history of spirits, mixing them together.”

Sakurada began working at craft cocktail bars. She moved to Reno from Oakland about a year ago and has been working at Chapel since. She said that while having the knowledge required to make fancy cocktails is an admirable goal for a bartender, it’s not the most important thing.

“At the end of the day, you’re still a bartender,” Sakurada said. “I’ve never liked the term mixologist. Knowing all of that is a passion of mine and something I enjoy doing, but, first and foremost, you need to be able to handle a crowd, manage a room. The manager here always says when he’s chatting with somebody he’s still taking time to think about the volume of the music, the state of the bathroom, who’s up next. So, there’s a lot of multitasking and social interaction that goes with it. Just knowing how to make drinks is not enough.”

Pignic Pub & Patio

235 Flint St.

Gabe Caballero has been bartending off and on for 20 years.

“I started at a TGI Friday’s when I was, like, 16,” he said. “And then I just worked my way up until they made me a new store opener. So they’d send you around the country. They’d send you out there to train everybody and open the places up. That’s how I got started and learned how to be a bartender.”

Caballero has spent the last eight months working at Pignic Pub & Patio. Prior to that, he helped open 1864 Tavern and worked there for four years.

“It’s just something I like to do,” he said. “Plus, you can make a decent amount of money in a short span of time. You don’t have to work a normal 9-to-5, 40-hours-a-week kind of deal. I just have a really good time doing it. If you find a place where you like to work and like the people, it makes it that much easier, you know what I mean?”

In Caballero’s estimation, bartending can be a good career option for anyone—provided they’re not looking for the finer things in life.

“There’s a lot of pluses to it, especially if you’re the simple kind, you know, you don’t need a lot of extravagant things,” he said. “You can bartend, and you can make it pretty easily.”

Like many bartenders, he’s learned tricks of the trade over the years. A central one, he said, is to approach people nicely. It’s a method he applies even when the people he’s dealing with have had a few too many.

“If you’ve been doing it a while, you can tell if someone’s headed down a bad path or drinking more than they really should,” he said. “And then you’re like, ’All right, you’re cut off.’ It’s easy. You say, ’Hey, man. Why don’t you drink a water, and then we’ll get you a drink next.’ Most of the time, people are like, ’Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea.’”

Wonder Bar

1195 S. Wells Ave.

Craig Gummer worked in the wine industry in California for many years. He’s also a graphic designer—a job he does from home. After moving to Nevada, he took a job at Wonder Bar, tending bar on Sundays. He, like a lot of part-time bartenders, considers it a social outlet.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t get out, but this is a good opportunity to have something in my routine, to come see people I know,” he said.

Gummer breaks out the crockpot to cook something to share with his customers most every Sunday. And he often knows everyone who comes into Wonder Bar during his shifts.

“An hour ago when there were 10 people in the bar, I knew all of their names,” he said on a recent Sunday. “It’s people who work down the block. It’s people who live nearby.”

He also generally knows their drink orders—which tend to be pretty simple.

“Other than Bloody Marys, I don’t make things with three ingredients,” Gummer said. “It’s beertending. It’s not bartending. So, I don’t make cosmos or lemon drops because nobody asks for them. … It’s very few surprises, and I welcome that.”

Death & Taxes

26 Cheney St.

Truly Tanner got her first bartending job four years ago, at the age of 21.

“I started in Truckee and Tahoe-Donner, at a golf course called the Tahoe Donner Lodge,” she said. “I started there, but I didn’t really know anything about bartending at that time. They taught me the basics there. I moved to San Luis Obispo after that and started at a restaurant.”

While in California, Tanner studied viticulture and considered becoming a sommelier. However, the restaurant she worked at was also known for its craft cocktails.

“That was the first bar I worked at that had house-made syrups and fresh-made juices and shrubs and blends and things like that,” she said. “It was my first introduction to craft cocktails. The idea of farm-to-table and all of that was introduced to me in San Luis Obispo.”

A few years ago Tanner, came home to visit family in Graeagle, California, and wound up in Reno.

“I grew up coming to Reno, so I’ve seen how much it’s changed—and in the last five years, especially,” she said. “I came into Death & Taxes. I discovered midtown. My family is all here, so I wanted to move back home and be a part of the new, up-and-coming craft cocktail scene in Reno.

Now, a part of Tanner’s job at Death & Taxes is creating the house-made syrups, infusions, blends and garnishes that go into the bar’s cocktails.

“During the day a lot of the times, it’s like a whole kitchen in here,” she said. “We’re constantly cooking. … I literally cut lilac out in Graeagle, and we made it into a rum-based liqueur. We got strawberries from the farmer’s market, and we made that into a vodka-based liqueur.”

Tanner, who describes herself as a “hands-on kind of person and very social,” said she loves the opportunity to create new cocktails, including ones she mixes up on the spot when customers are looking for something different from the cocktails on the bars menu. She enjoys the creative freedom.

“That’s actually why I stepped away from the wine industry and into craft cocktails—because the wine industry is about tradition and will always be about tradition,” she said. “We expect certain things from certain types of wines, whereas now, with the availability of artisanal and craft spirits and … the fact that it’s not maxed out, it’s really more exciting to me. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”

Fourth Street Bar

1114 E. Fourth St.

Justin Ross likes his job because, he said, “It’s not really too much like work.”

He realizes he could make better money doing something else, but said he doesn’t much care.

“I could go get a job at Tesla tomorrow and be making 40 thousand dollars a year,” he said. “I do not make anywhere near that here, but I get to talk to people, and I get to interact with people, and that’s what I enjoy.”

Plus, he said, it’s a great place to showcase all of his useless knowledge.

“I have the most useless knowledge you would ever imagine, like Lake Baikal in Russia contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. The largest quantity of metal in the human body is calcium. Most people don’t know calcium’s a metal. It’s useless. It’s never going to help me.”

Before becoming a bartender, Ross managed gas stations.

“And I liked that, too, because I could tell the same joke a hundred times to a hundred different people and get a laugh every time and not get criticized for telling the same joke over and over again,” he said. “They get irritated when I tell the same joke over and over here.”

Ross is an easygoing guy who’s quick with jokes. Most days, he said, his job is fun—but not always. And he has a pet peeve that can ruin a good day quickly.

“It’s not fun when people can’t learn to interact with each other properly,” he said. “You can talk politics in a bar. I know it’s a big rule—don’t discuss politics or religion in a bar. But you should be able to, because you should, at the end of the day, have enough respect for the person you’re talking to to be able to say, ’We’re going to have to agree to disagree’ and not get into a screaming match over something. That’s just rude and disrespectful, and it drives me up a wall.”

Ross said he personally doesn’t know the difference between right- and left-wing politics.

“When I was in elementary school, the teacher said, ’Republicans are this. Democrats are this. You should vote for whomever you think represents you best.’ And at that point, I forgot what a Republican and Democrat was—because my views and opinions are much more vast than a single word.”

Piñon Bottle Co.

777 S. Center St.

Prior to starting at Piñon Bottle Co., Brittney Kelly spent nine years working at Whole Food Markets. While there, she often helped in the store’s taproom. And, eventually, she decided she was ready for a bartending job outside of the grocery store.

“My experience was really just beer and wine, and when I was applying, I applied to a bunch of bars, and, basically, this is the one that wanted me,” she said. “And it’s a perfect fit for me. I really like it. I’m cool with not doing cocktails. I like just doing beer.”

For Kelly, working behind the bar has been a way to put her customer service experience to use in an environment she much prefers.

“In my other work experience, I was working customer service booth, so I was dealing with a lot of negativity—a lot,” she said. “I was in a management position, too, so trying to resolve customer issues. So this is more—I mean your interaction with people is completely different. People don’t really want to come in here and be assholes to you, because you’re a bartender. Basically, my interaction with people is way better now. It’s way more positive and fun and relaxed.”

Kelly may be happy not to be mixing up cocktails, but she explained that there’s still plenty to learn, even at a bar that focuses solely on beer.

“My beer knowledge still is pretty basic—because there’s so much to learn, which I think is really rad,” she said. “But, yeah, I look to my other bartenders who have been working here longer for that kind of knowledge and just try to teach myself as I go. Even customers have taught me stuff, too, especially here, because people who come in here are super into beer.”