Serve Responsibly
Responsible Adult Beverage
Service….Who’s Responsible?
Manager Must Manage the Difficult Interactions
By Tim Johnson
Tim Johnson is pres-
ident of Tim John-
son & Associates, a
beverage training, operations,
marketing, purchasing and sales
consulting firm servicing hospi-
tality and supplier companies.
His 30 years of experience in
the on-premise industry includes
beverage management positions
with Houlihan’s, Applebee’s and
Champps Entertainment. He is
based in Larkspur, Colo. and can
be reached at tim@tjalls.com.
Whether we like it or not,
responsible adult beverage
service has become and will
remain, a necessary part of your beverage operations. We can argue about
the need for it; the costs associated with
it; the time allotted for the training of
it; and even whether to use an “off the
shelf” or “customized” training program
to implement it. All good augments to
have, but the fact will remain that all our
hostesses/hosts, servers, bartenders
and managers must be trained on how
to identify a guest that is, or soon will be,
over the limit and therefore needs to be
cut off. The tough part has always been
WHO is going to do it and HOW it‘s going
to be done.
The who part is simple; it has to be
the manager. This duty is above your
bartender’s and servers’ “pay grade”
and falls clearly within the managers’
area of responsibility. The manager will
of course be relying on the judgment of
his/her employees, but if we have trained
them all correctly and walked through the
program with them, then we can trust
their judgment. The key thing here is to
back up the staff. If we don’t, they will
never bring another situation to us again
and we risk never being told of a potential
problem until it’s too late. Let them know
we will back them up, every time!
So how do we do it? Some will argue
that the how depends on whether the
guest is a regular or a just-passing-
