Pick something for me

June 29

I asked the bartender at the rooftop party I went to last night what the cool people were drinking.
"What, here? In New York? In the World?" he asked. The tone was flip, but I think he really was trying to be helpful.
Obviously, cool people drink whatever they want, but I like to take suggestions from bartenders. I might discover a new drink that way, or I might get something the bartender likes, and thus probably makes well.
But the youngster at this particular bar suggested that perhaps I would like an Apple Martini or a Cosmopolitan.
For a bartender at a chic Midtown boutique hotel to recommend something that was trendy five years ago is, well, sad, especially at a press event attended by food and beverage writers whose tastes tend to veer toward the experimental.
I tried a different tack and asked for a refreshing glass of white wine.
He gave me a California Chardonnay, which is not refreshing. It's rich and sort of creamy, but on a hot summer day, something more acidic, a crisp Sauvignon Blanc, say, would have been the thing.
To be fair, it might not have been the young bartender's fault. Sometimes when you say: “Pick something for me,” even though you might mean, “I have confidence that you, as a professional, will use your best judgment in selecting something really good for me," they interpret it as, "I don’t care, just give me a drink!”