Kyiv school teaches bartenders how to mix with customers
Some people experience a lifechanging epiphany on amountaintop. Others acquire a new perspective in a shrine, a temple or a mosque. Serhy Kodatstky, director of the Planet Z Modern Art Bartending School, experienced nirvana in the Hard Rock Cafe in London.
“My first shock came when this big waitress approached me. She was enormous. When she came up to me, she immediately said ‘Oh hi! How are you? How are you doing? What can I get you?’” he said.
“I came in expecting to have one cup of coffee, but before I left, I had eaten, had some drinks, relaxed and met people. We don’t have this kind of service here. They don’t teach this in the institutes.”
Kyiv is still emerging from the mantle of the Soviet service culture – or lack thereof. At the time, businesses had no need to distinguish through quality service and the result was the lowest common human denominator – surliness.
However, new nightlife spots are increasingly being built on the Western model. A listing of the restaurants that have sprung up over the past five years reads like the index of a world atlas: Arizona BBQ, Brazilia, Caribbean Club, Chicago Club, Miami Blues, Manhattan. A new paradigm not only for style, but also for service, is in demand.
With that in mind, Kodatstky created the Planet Z Modern Art Bartending Center in 1995. Kodatstky had been working as a bartender since the days of Perestroika, both in Ukraine at places like Korona and Sprut, as well as abroad in London and Vienna. He had also made a number of trips to Western Europe and the United States to study modern methods.
According to instructor Andry Chernenko, Planet Z is the only school of its kind in Kyiv. Service institutes like the Tekhniku Obshchestvenno Pitaniya (School of Public Service), of which Chernenko is a graduate, favor what he refers to as a “classical” style – a cold, stone-faced approximation of European culture.
“The youth aren’t interested in this kind of service,” he said. Nor are the foreign clientele who attend Kyiv’s flashier establishments.
Planet Z’s facilities are a strange hybrid – a cross between a kindergarten classroom and an alcoholic’s nightmare. In the school’s one classroom sits a small rectangular table with instructional material. Rows of empty bottles sit on two mock bars that bear the nicks, dents and scratches of 1,000 dropped martini shakers.
At Planet Z the emphasis is on style and showmanship. The school offers four sequential courses in which students learn to prepare everything from a simple gin and tonic to layered concoctions like the flaming B-52.
It also offers “freestyle” techniques – a series of bar tricks involving flipping glasses and shakers in acrobatic fashion – plus elaborate methods of preparation like the “sausage” in which glasses are filled with various elixirs and then deftly splashed into waiting glass.
The 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule is filled with a mix of practical skills and lessons on the history, culture and composition of each component.
“I believe a good barman should know what he’s pouring,” Chernenko said.
Students also learn the drinking preferences of various cultures such that they can anticipate customer desires. They are taught proper food and drink combinations. The school even organizes tours of local distilleries.
Kodatstky, Chernenko and veteran bartender Galina Lysuk tag-team teach. They accept only six to seven students per term in order to maximize individual attention. Each three-week session costs $300.
Chernenko estimates that between 80 percent and 90 percent of their graduates attain jobs as bartenders after graduation.
They have supplied workers to popular local establishments such as Opera Cafe, Deja Vu, Strike Bowling Club, Khutorok and Atlanta.
The school has reached the point where bar and restaurant managers are actively approaching them as a source for quality bartenders.
Before Eric Aigner opened his latest establishment, Cocktail Bar 111, he requested the school’s services. Kodatstky designed a special two-week course to train Aigner’s singing and dancing bartenders.
Bartenders have always had a certain cachet value with the youth culture. The optimal bartender is the aristocrat of the bar, the authoritative arbiter of cool. In Kyiv, the staff of Western-style nightspots have been as famous as rock stars. They are interviewed on local radio stations and plastered on the society pages of fashionable magazines.
“They (young people) love the style and image that our bartenders project,” Lysuk said.
The lure to become a bartender is not only cultural. It is also financial.
“We’re living in a time of crisis, of wild capitalism and depression like the 1930s in the West,” Chernenko said. “And at this time, barmen, unfortunately, are the carefree ones.”
“Carefree” because bartenders tend to earn between $150 and $250 per month, a figure that far exceeds the local average income.
But even though many are interested in becoming bartenders and there is a growing market for bartending work, Kodatstky stresses that Planet Z has not been able to exist as a school alone.
“Five years ago when I started this, I understood that it’s impossible to do this [operate as a school alone]. You can do it in America because, of the drinking establishments that open there, 90 percent adhere to the standard bartending system.”
By this he means a set design of bottle, apparatus and appliance placement, such that a bartender can find everything automatically and can work effectively in any given bar. Once a bartender is educated in this system, it is difficult to adjust to a randomly organized bar, which is the norm in Kyiv.
In order to provide a market for his services, Kodatstky is struggling to educate purveyors of alcohol. Planet Z offers bar consulting services including design and layout. They have also started selling bartending equipment appropriate to the “American” system.
