Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes: Your Ultimate One-Stop Bar... at Chef2Chef

Packed full of fun illustrations, hints, tricks, tips and recipes, Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes is a one-stop reference for readers looking for a fun-filled, practical guide on how to tend bar full time, part time or party time!"

About The Author
Cheryl Charming has been tending bar for over 25 years in several locations including a cruise ship in the Caribbean and at Walt Disney World opening Pleasure Island and the Grand Floridian Beach Resort and Spa. She is the author of several bartending books and currently resides in Orlando, Florida where she tends bar part time at Walt Disney World and teaches bar tricks and bar magic in Disney's bartender course.

Reader Reviews
This review is, unfortunately, one of those good news/bad news affairs. The good news: This is a book well worth owning. It contains excellent guidance, stories (parables, really) both entertaining and subtly moving bartenders and home mixologists alike toward a greater grasp of the "beingness" of bartending - from an author who speaks eloquent Bartenderese. Cheryl Charming, beginning with her name, continuing with the cartoony light touch of her previous fare, and concluding with publishing deals that emphasized those characteristics, has rarely been taken seriously among the cocktail elite. Her advice to bartenders less seasoned than she is puts the lie to that appraisal in this book. Ask any attendee of the [...] forums if you doubt it. Cheryl Charming is wise. Nonetheless, that was the legacy Ms Charming was tarred with previous to this book. Here, the years of experience behind the mahogany are brought to bear. The book is packed with the aforementioned stories, charts, tables, and a plethora of useful aids to working bartenders and novices who want to grasp that distinctly social/functional headset. The up-to-date specific gravities of liqueurs (allowing the construction of numbers of perfect Pousse Cafés) and the unprecedented coverage of the largely ignored 1970s as relate to cocktails...these alone are worth the exceedingly affordable price of the book. Cheryl sent me an early draft of "Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes" for fact checking. I raved. It was a superb look at bartending from the trenches. It cast a broad light on the vastly neglected (even by me) 1970s-80s era of cocktails. It voiced its offerings in a magically odd combination of honesty, humor, cynicism, and energy that only comes of living the life. I was immediately fatuous. Much of this tone remains in the current work. It is still a tome well worth owning....no thanks to Cheryl Charming's editors and publishers. She was offered a hardback deal; a chance to visually transcend the past works that emphasized the playful frivolities of cocktails at the expense of their incredibly gourmet high end. In the final tally, (and for legal reasons here I must state it is an opinion...MY opinion) they screwed her. Crappy paper, soft-back, a vastly concatenated word count.....this was not, after all, the book that would show the world what an amazing point of view Ms Charming could offer. In short, they were nitwits, requiring massive text cuts, cutting singularly unique perspectives and marketing the book in exactly the same vein as any silly joke book. It is a shame. Note well....I only know this from the advantage I had in viewing an early draft and advising on factual elements. The book you are offered, as I indicated above, is entirely worth its price and worthy of any cocktail library. If publishing companies were not such dolts, though, it would've been a better book for which you would've (appropriately) paid substantially more money. Buy the book, it remains worth it, but be contemptuous of the publishing company for their lack of vision. Comment (1) | Permalink | (Report this)