Lynn Hoffman

Making it the Easy Way

People in the food and drink business like to talk about how hard their business is. Teachers (and textbook authers) agree: after all, if it weren’t difficult, why would anyone need us? So it’s refreshing to be reminded from time to time that the business doesn’t always have to be a struggle and that it’s possible to build a beautiful life around it.

In 1953, a young Italian orphan named Cosmo Fospero bought a dilapidated builiding and the bar on the ground floor. The sign outside the bar said Sam’s and even though the place eventually became known for its new owner, Cosmo never changed the sign. “It’s too expensive”, he explains.

Geneva is a college town and within a few years, Cozzie’s had built up a small following of college students and locals. His customers weren’t the regular college types and they weren’t the usual small-town folks either. The crowd at Cozzie’s on a weekend night was always a bit, shall we say, off-center.

I use the word ‘crowd’ advisedly. The bar was always full, hardly ever packed. A few years after he opened the bar, he shut down the kitchen- “A pain in the neck” -and replaced it with a few loaves of bread and some pepperoni. Hungry? He ‘d cut you a piece of each. Nobody seemed to mind.

If the bar wasn’t busy, Cozzie would ask a newcomer’s name. he’d chat for a bit, then maybe make an introduction. If you were a college kid, he was likely to introduce you to a mechanic from the water department. If you worked at a garage, you’d likely be talking to a professor of anthropology. Being accepted at Cozzie’s meant handling the experience well.

Cozzie’s glassware could be politely described as assorted. Sometimes on a busy night, he’d run out and if you insisted on a glass, he’d suggest that you wash one in the bar sink. He didn’t make mixed drinks beyond a few well brands with soda or juice. Most of the business was in bottled beer. The general rule was that, if you were a regular, you walked in, got your beer from the case and kept track of what you owed. Cozzie figures that over the years, a few people took advantage of him, but many more overpaid. (incidentally, academic research on ‘honor system’ billing bears him out)

The place was deliberately obscure. There was no phone number listed. There was a pay phone on the wall and its number had been obscured with tape. You had to have been there a few times before anyone would tell you the number. People who were mean or quarrelsome were asked to leave. He also gladly ejected people who seemed to be slumming or people he just didn’t like. If he was moved to pick up the guitar and sing, he didn’t serve anybody at all until he was done singing. Cozzie didn’t advertise, but because he felt an obligation to the college students who supported him, he took space in college student organization publications. His ad read:

Grade school, High school, College
Prices now stabilized.
Illiteracy prices still tend to fluctuate.

That was it. No address, no phone, no hours. If you knew, you knew. There was another motto posted over the bar.

We don’t cater to weddings or bar mitzvahs.
In fact, we don’t cater to anybody.

With a minimum of maintainence, no employees and a customer attitude that violated everything you’ve ever learned about service, Cozzie kept a thriving business going for over fifty years. A visit to the bar in 2005 found it covered with post cards from ‘alumni’, people who felt that they may have graduated from the college across town, but that they got their real education at Cozzie’s.

Keys to success

• Marketing: Cozzie’s was a place with a tough, rejecting exterior and a warm fuzzy inside. It made the customer feel that he or she was part of a club-the little clan who know how to navigate

• Crowd control: Cozzie simply didn’t serve people who weren’t pleasant to other people. So the level of social anxiety was very low. Even if a customer didn’t know a soul in the bar, she knew she was among friends.

• No labor costs: having no employees also meant that Cozzie never had to worry about employee theft.

• Minimal overhead: Cozz owned the building and his maintaince was restricted to what was mechanically necessary. Aside from an occasional coat of paint, no cosmetic maintainence was done.

• Minimal inventory: Cosmo understood that he was not selling drinks. The line of bottle that you see in the photos was his whole distilled spirits inventory. There was one reach-in filled with beer and a jug of red wine.

Cozzie's is still there. You can check it out at:

Portrait: Cozzie’s
26 Tillman St.
Geneva, New York

for more about the business of beer, check out: The Short Course in Beer by Lynn Hoffman

The Short Course in Beer gives you the Why and How of getting in on the Beer Revolution, so it seems only fair to continue by telling you Where. Going on the road for your pleasure, my first stop is Toronto.

The Beer Bistro 18 King Street East Toronto

Beer lovers are very fond of the compound adjective ‘well-worn’ and so the truly great beer bars in the world seem to exude patina. The décor- the wood, the leather, the mirrors, even the light itself tends to suggest that it’s all been there forever and that somehow, it wishes you could be too. In this respect as in several others, The Beer Bistro is radically different. It is a place that’s designed to challenge and change the way people think about beer
The main room is high-ceilinged with huge light-gathering windows and an air of shininess. In an architectural translation of the house style, the bar is separated from the dining room by no more than a line of banquettes.
The menu nods to some traditions, but it’s a brief nod indeed before chef Brian Morin takes off on some inventions that explore the possibilities of beer as an ingredient in food as well as an accompaniment to it. The whole conceit is pulled off with exceedingly good humor and not a hint of pretension.
You can get the feel of the place by ordering the corn dog. For those of you who haven’t been to a state fair or a boardwalk lately, the corn dog is a hot dog dipped in corn meal batter, fried and then put on a stick to be eaten out of hand. At the Beer Bistro, the pair of corn dogs are made from molded duck leg confit and served with a pineapple mustard and a house-made cherry beer ketchup. Put aside the fact that pineapple is the lover that mustard has been waiting for all these years and that the ketchup begs to be eaten with a spoon. Concentrate on the richness of the duck and the crispness of the batter and the heightened sensitivity that these little condiments create in you mouth. Try to remember to breathe, sip your beer.
Salmon sliders are strips of salmon, house-cured in beer served on blinis with a capered cream cheese and micro-thin slices of red onion. The blinis are just firm enough to be a foil for the moist fish and the whole combination of taste and texture is just crying out for a beer to make it complete. The house suggests underchallenging them with a belgian wheat beer, you could just as easily confront the taste head-on with a pilsner.
Mussels are pretty much old-hat in a beer bar, but baked mussels florentine open up a whole new field. Without subverting the firm, oceanic character of the mussels, baking opens up a whole realm of possibility. In this case the shellfish are topped with cubes of beer-cured bacon, three cheeses, sauteed spinach, arugala, shallots, and garlic butter. The menu urges you to try Saison Dupont and that seems just about perfect.

You expect beer bar service to be friendly and casual-after all this is beer which even at its most elegant is somehow easy, effortless and available. At the Beer Bistro, you get that and a little more. Listen to manager Kathleen McGinn: “Our staff feels like teachers. We want customers to be confident that if they have questions, their server has answers.” The wait staff goes to regular on-premise beer school and they are more than just knowledgeable, they understand that the point of all that knowing is for you to end up drinking something wonderful.
Then there’s the matter of beer ice cream. (I'm having a hard time believing that I used those words together in a sentence.) You’ll just have to try the one made from Jamaican stout and chopped candy bar.
The owners of The Beer Bistro describe the place as worldly, casual and elegant, just like you and me. They also say that everything is made from scratch, no shortcuts, no premix. They bake their own bread, cure their own bacon and salmon, smoke their own short ribs. They are the first of their kind in this large, exciting city and unlike most pioneers, they seem to have found exactly the right path. It’s time for the rest of the city-and maybe the rest of the world- to play catch-up.

from Killing Philly

There was this moment when I decided to kill Mr. Philadelphia. It was almost noon on a Monday morning after a long Columbus Day weekend. I celebrated Columbus with three days of drinking , cursing and pissing on my shoes. By Tuesday I was way past drunk and well into poisoned; if Congress had proclaimed Columbus Week instead of Columbus Day, I would have drunk myself to death.
On the Friday before the festivities, I turned in two restaurant reviews ahead of deadline. I wrote the foreword for somebody else’s book of recipes, sent out some queries about a winery in Graz, Austria and edited this week’s tasting notes. Then I put my work away and started drinking: whole cedary, scratchy, dirty bottles of dark red wine. By Sunday I was sure I was dying. Someplace in the sour-smelling little vestibule in front of drinking-yourself-to-death, I saw my mother’s face, pinched and staring. The face didn’t look at me or move its lips, but I heard her voice saying “You’re not the one who should die.” Then I heard my own voice saying the name of the one who should.
Deciding to kill Pifkie was the best thing I did all day. Oh sure, it was the same day I screamed obscenities at my oldest living relative and threw a wine bottle at a male prostitute. And I almost bit a fat lady on the saggy flesh at the back of her neck. Drooled all over her in fact. Good stuff, highlights film stuff. But none of it was half as satisfying as deciding that I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.

When I was a kid, Columbus Day was special. My father-Solomone Cardoso- came to this country one Columbus Day in the early 1950’s. My mother-a sweet Catholic girl who converted to Judaism to marry him- let him name me Emanuel. My dad never said he ‘immigrated’, he always said he ‘discovered America’. In our family, Thanksgiving was the Dry Bird Festival and Christmas was just a day off, but Columbus Day was our Easter, our day of Resurrection.
We always had a big family party and after dinner, my father would dance. When he danced, his face danced with him. The dances felt like little stories and you could feel the narrations in the vibrations of his feet, imagine the characters at whom he was smiling and frowning and clicking his tongue. His eyes fluttered and his lips took a hundred different poses below the wide ledge of his moustache. I was five years old when I began to memorize his little smiles and smirks and pouts and purses. He swirled and dipped and his eyebrows could make a wave of their own, like a string of corks on the ocean. He would stamp his foot just softly enough not to upset the phonograph needle or the neighbors. His jaw would go down and out, lip-smacking the air to fill in the sound his heel barely made as he brushed it along the wooden floor.
I was a few years older when I discovered the rest, learned that the stories were about confiscations and late-night escapes and heroes and sick goodbyes and death. But those were just details. Everything that mattered was there in his dancing, all the feelings and all the ghosts.
Sometimes he would jig a handkerchief at my red-haired, freckly mother and she would take the bait, pinching her end of the cloth and following him around the room. Her movements were as compact as his were expansive; her hand just outboard of her hip, fingers splayed out suggestively, elbow thrown back. Her dancing was economically lewd, frugal, not stingy. It gave the scratchy middle eastern music everything it deserved. When he danced with her, his story changed. In this chapter, he was playful, then macho, then silly then desperately wanting. Sometimes at the end of a dance, he would tremble and when I was little, I thought it meant he was cold.
My mother moved as if she were a seed blown on the wind. Her dance seemed to cost her no effort but that of willing it. My father perspired when he danced. It should have been grotesque and it was beautiful. To this day, I am not especially moved by the people they call charismatic - I was raised by a man who could dance in tongues.

Although the enlightened lover of wine and beer spends a lot of mental and
emotional energy on choreographing their intake and delectation, we are
sometimes faced-on the next morning, let’s say- with questions about
disposing of the pure alcohol fraction of what we drank.Fortunately, the
same body that took all that alcohol in is capable of hauling it out, mostly
by metabolizing it in the liver.
A small amount is expelled in the breath, saliva, urine, feces
and sweat. (A small amount is also excreted in breast milk, although
if you’re producing breast milk and drinking lots of alcohol,
perhaps you should be reading some other book.) Except for
the possible acceleration caused by jumping into a sauna or running
a marathon, most of us eliminate alcohol at a steady rate.
There is some variability among people in their ability to dilute and
get rid of what they paid to take in. The big differences are the water
content and fat content of the body. Practically, this means that:
• The less you weigh, the more you will be affected by a given
amount of alcohol. Bigger people have more blood and more
tissue and so the alcohol is diluted over a larger volume.
• The more muscular you are, the less affected you’ll be. Fat
doesn’t have much water (duh), and muscular souls have more
blood vessels and more water-absorbing tissue. Watch out for
the body builders at the beer tasting.
• Gender counts. Women have a triple whammy here. They tend
to have smaller bodies with higher body fat percentages, which
means less watery tissue. They also tend to process alcohol
through the liver more slowly because of a lower level of an
alcohol-digesting hormone.
• Age matters too. Older people eliminate alcohol more slowly,
although the effects of this may be mitigated by the so-called
“practice effect.” This is part of what’s behind the common
observation that old drunks can handle their liquor better.
• Food can slow the absorption of alcohol through several mechanisms.
Not only is alcohol slowed in its entrance to the small
intestine, but the lower concentrations that result speed up the
rate of elimination.
There’s more, of course. Arousal can slow the passage of alcohol
from the stomach to the intestine and the wound-up person looking for a predeterminedlevel of buzz may fail to reach it with the first few doses
and then overshoot. Anxiety can increase the rate of absorption and
so can carbonation and even artificial sweeteners. So, let’s lay off
the aspartame-enhanced malt liquor when we’re really really tense,
okay?

Adapted from The Short Course in Beer by Lynn Hoffman

To learn more about The Short Course in Beer check out:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601641915

Kunati Books, the publisher of bang BANG, was named Publisher of the Year at Book Expo America.

 ..probably as a result of their having the good judgment to publish and promote bang BANG.....