My mother had eyes in the back of her head; Doug Quinn must have them in the palms of his hands. How else to explain the way he muddled mint for a mojito - and went on to make the rest of the cocktail - while glancing alternately at the door to see if anyone new was coming in, at the far end of the bar to see if anyone was telegraphing thirst, and at the guy in front of him, who was babbling anew?
Not once did Mr. Quinn look down at the drink. He filled beer mugs without watching what he was doing. He could apparently tell, by the weight of them, when to stop. He plucked bottles from their perches without pausing to check labels. He apparently had, in his head, the whole liquor layout at P.J. Clarke’s, on the East Side.
And he remembered what my companion and I were drinking, even though we had ordered just one round so far, and there were at least 35 people clumped around the bar on this early May night, and he was dealing - alone - with all the tickets from all the servers in the adjacent dining rooms, and he wasn’t writing anything down.
“Another?” was all he asked, and a half minute later I had a Hendrick’s gin martini, up, with olives and jagged little floes of ice, just like the martini before it. My companion was sipping a second Manhattan with rye, not bourbon, per his initial request. Mr. Quinn works quickly, and he works without error.
It is legend, this efficiency of his. I asked Jim Meehan, the cocktail shaman at PDT in the East Village, whom he and other celebrated young mixologists of the moment look up to.
Without hesitation he named Mr. Quinn, 42, and not because Mr. Quinn pioneered some clever infusion or paired two ingredients no one had before. Mr. Quinn, he said, does right by the classics and can handle a teeming crowd. He has speed, stamina, dexterity, personality and an awe-inspiring memory: the essentials of bartending, without which the cheeky chemistry is meaningless. He is the bartenders’ bartender.
You need to see him in action, not least because his 126-year-old stage is one of the city’s classic bars, a living diorama of a certain era and sensibility, with its penny-tile floors, carved mahogany bar, tin ceiling and stained-glass transoms.
Along with the coordination of an athlete, he has the build of one: 188 centimeters tall, broad-shouldered, trim. Mr. Quinn, who majored in economics at Vassar College, about 260 kilometers northwest of the city, began bartending before graduation and never stopped.
Mr. Quinn tests himself. Performing. Making people marvel at him. Making people love him.
“When they come here, they’re in my home,” he said.
“They’re in my church.”
He said there aren’t any cheats or tricks to his memory, which one P. J. Clarke’s regular, a trial lawyer named Paul Hanly, described to me as “canny, totally uncanny ? truly as photographic as it gets.”
Mr. Quinn has boundaries. “I try to teach people how to behave in a saloon,” he said. “Don’t ask for a Red Bull and vodka. You want an energy drink? I have coffee.”
FRANK BRUNI
