Wesley Straton’s The Bartender’s Cure is a fiercely relatable debut novel about an aspiring bartender at the perfect neighborhood bar, filled with cocktail recipes and bartending tips and tricks.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Bartender’s Cure by Wesley Straton, which is out June 28th 2022.
Samantha Fisher definitely does not want to be a bartender. But after a breakup and breakdown in San Francisco, she decides to defer law school for a year to move to New York, crashing on her best friend’s couch. When she is offered a job at Joe’s Apothecary, a beloved neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, she tells herself it’s only temporary.
As Sam learns more about bartending and gets to know the service industry lifers and loyal regulars at Joe’s, she is increasingly seduced by her new job. She finds acceptance in her tight-knit community and even begins a new relationship. But as the year draws to a close, Sam is increasingly pulled between the life she thought she wanted and the possibility of a different kind of future. When destructive cycles from her past threaten to consume her again, Sam must decide how much she’s willing to let go of to finally belong.
FIRST WORD
You’ve seen bars like this. It’s New York City, the center of the universe, and you’ve seen everything. Speakeasies, dives, pubs, wine bars, beer bars, tiki bars, bars in restaurants and hotels, in breweries and distilleries, in cafés, in grocery stores, in basements, on rooftops, on boats. Bars with twelve seats and two hundred. Bars that serve nothing but cocktails, bars with no liquor license at all.
Joe’s Apothecary is one of many, and yet, there is nowhere else like Joe’s. It’s small, with white walls and exposed brick, big windows looking out onto the street, a scattering of high-tops in the front, a handful of tables in the back. The bar itself a golden gleam in a dim room, a ten-seater “L” built out of wood and brass, lit by Edison bulbs and candlelight. A cocktail bar, at its core, though not pushy about it, though there are regulars who come in for top-shelf Scotch and Narragansett alike. It’s a true neighborhood bar, the kind of place that is harder to find by the year in this city, the kind of place that could only possibly exist on this block, in this neighborhood, in this borough, under these exact unlikely circumstances.
It’s June in New York and the city is awash with kids in robes, blue and black and purple, the class of 2018 on the streets and the subways, double-parked in front of dorms and apartment buildings, and if I close my eyes I can pretend to be one of them, pretend the last two years never happened and I’m twenty-two again, fresh out of Columbia, a Bachelor of the Art of English literature, cum laude, thankyouverymuch. The world my oyster, waiting to be plucked and shucked and swallowed. Pretending I’m not flat broke and sleeping on my best friend’s couch and painfully single and so far jobless, although this last is about to change, I’m hoping, standing outside this lovely bar, ten minutes early for a trial shift, peering in through those front windows with a wine key in my pocket and my hair tied back in a ponytail and my stomach tied up in knots. Brooklyn is still dusky rather than dark, but I can see the flicker of candles inside, a dim warm glow. I crack my knuckles, try to remember the feel of a cocktail shaker, the heft of a tray. I have, as you can probably tell, some reservations.
How do any of us end up working in bars? Some become bartenders on purpose—Han, Gina, Scott the Scot. But more often we stumble into it, in moments like these. Because our shiny degrees have not delivered the futures we were promised. Because we are night owls in a world that prizes early birds. Because we are tired of staring at screens, of sitting in unending meetings, of working for companies that do and make nothing. Because something marked us in our lives, or we marked ourselves, as somehow unfit for the office, for the classroom, for the nine-to-five. Because we descended, and found that once we had drunk the nectar of this particular netherworld, we could never go home.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, like so many before me, I am just looking for a job. Something temporary, just enough for rent money, just to get me off Hayley’s couch, just to keep me in the city until next year, when I’ll be going back to school myself. I open the door. I walk inside.
