Serving Course Gives Bartenders Some Advice for a Change : Alcohol: ASK-L.A. teaches about the ethics and responsibilities of serving drinks, such as when and how to say no to intoxicated customers.

Among the many pastimes resurfacing from yesterday and yesteryear, cocktail lounging seems to be back vogue.

Los Angeles neighborhood bars may be a dying breed in these times of tougher drunk-driving regulations, but several local restaurants report that they are crammed with after-work and late-evening crowds of youthful imbibers delighting in their first taste of low lights, tinkling pianos and heady potions that slipped from favor years ago when vodka became the main ingredient in 80% of the hard-alcohol-based beverages served commercially in America.

As social drinking becomes trendy again and with more than one bartender scratching his head--uncertain as to what actually goes into a sidecar, much less which seven liqueurs make up a pousse cafe and in what order--ASK-L.A. couldn’t have made its debut at a better moment.

ASK-L.A. is the definitive Alcohol Server Knowledge course. Designed by the health and safety experts at the National Safety Council and implemented within the last year by 40 agencies around the country--including the Bartender Training Institute in Glendale--the course aims to educate bar and restaurant personnel in the art of responsible customer management, according to Al Lauersdorf, the council’s alcohol program manager.

The council’s frightening statistics make it appear that the course hasn’t arrived a moment too soon: About 25,000 people die and 700,000 more are injured in alcohol-related traffic accidents each year. Alcohol is a factor in more than half of all fatal motor vehicle crashes and half of all the intoxicated drivers on the road got that way in public drinking establishments. Add these numbers to our local barroom boom and the need for the safer serving of alcohol becomes even more urgent.

Oregon, Utah and Florida already require that any individual involved in the sale of alcohol complete a server’s course, and in Texas, the server is immune from the server’s liability law if he or she takes and passes such a course. Chicago has just passed legislation requiring applicants for new liquor licenses to attend an alcohol server’s program.

Scott Carlin, owner and director of the Bartender Training Institute in Glendale, the only venue at which the ASK-L.A. course is available locally, predicts that California will soon move onto the list of concerned states taking action.

“Some type of alcohol server training is likely to become mandatory nationwide in the not-distant future,” Carlin said. “This will not be an alcohol-prohibitive measure, it will be alcohol management, which has become a must in our society. Alcohol is a social lubricant and people are always going to drink, but it’s mind-altering and requires controls. In California, you need a license to cut hair or sell real estate, but as some sort of social pharmacist a bartender is allowed to dispense a powerful drug without ever being trained.

“Responsible service is good for the public,” Carlin said, “because it results in saved lives, and it’s good for business because knowledgeable servers can drastically reduce the threat of liability when a customer drives away in an intoxicated state, and can also help lower insurance rates.”

ASK-L.A. is a five-hour, $65 course taught at the Bartender Training Institute by instructors certified by the National Safety Council. Servers are trained to recognize signs of alcohol impairment in the customer who has been in an establishment for an evening as well as the one who has just walked in the door. They also are taught methods of politely discontinuing service.

“There are no set rules,” Carlin said. “It isn’t as simple as deciding that three drinks will make any person drunk; each individual reacts differently to alcohol. At what point a customer you’ve been serving drinks has reached his or her own personal limit depends on many things: whether the person has been just sitting or up moving around, also on whether the person has eaten during the evening. With a brand-new customer, you definitely need to know what to look for.”

An ASK-L.A. class has 10 to 15 students who also learn friendly, effective ways to discourage drinking and driving and who join fellow classmates in role-playing exercises to help find answers to “What if . . . ?” questions.

Such interaction is contrary to yet another feature of this, the oldest bartending school operating in the state. At the institute, there is no such thing as a bartending class. All instruction is done the old-fashioned way, one-on-one behind the bar.

Who goes to bartending school in times when the national salary average for this moveable skill is $100 a day in wages and tips? Nearly as many women as men of all ages attend the institute with goals ranging from a first job to a career change.

“One of my students had been a mechanical engineer for 15 years and wanted a new direction,” Carlin said. “A friend of his who owned two taverns in England had offered him a job if he’d learn the trade. He did and I later got a postcard from him; he was tending bar in London and happy as a clam.”

Scott himself is a 1975 graduate of the institute. “I was 24 years old and a ski bum. In October of 1974, I went up to Mammoth looking for work so I could spend the winter, but all I could find was one bartending job. I didn’t qualify, so I ended up in Park City, Utah, in food services, watching the bartenders work nights, ski all day and make good money. When the snow melted, I came back to L.A. and enrolled in the institute. I went there because I’d heard the training was good. Little did I know I’d end up owning the place.”

After Carlin graduated, he went to work in a restaurant, but when he found difficulty finding bartenders for private parties, he had business cards printed and became a one-man free-lance operation. His bartender-for-hire business took off slowly but surely and he went on to form Scotty’s Party Service, a company still going strong.

The Bartender Training Institute began in Hawaii in 1962 with owner Ed Hanna bringing the business to the Mainland four years later. Carlin always kept up his old school ties and in 1986, when Hanna was considering retirement, Carlin bought the business.

“I’ve never been sorry,” Carlin said. “Not about buying the school and not about becoming a bartender. Actually, I was just going to do it until I figured out what I wanted to do with my life and got a real job. I realize more and more, especially now that we’re an agency of the National Safety Council’s Alcohol Server Knowledge program, that this is a real job--a real important one. Of course, every once in a while I think about my childhood dream of being a fireman. But doesn’t everyone?”

The Bartender Training Institute--3843 San Fernando Road, (818) 247-9968--offers a 40-hour program in beverage preparation and service and a 16-hour course for cocktail waiters and waitresses that teaches drink names, appropriate garnishes, plus how to order and serve. Courses range in price from $300 to $1,380 for a 100-hour course that includes bar management, checkout training and the ASK-L.A. seminar.

The institute is approved as a post-secondary trade school by the State Board of Education; graduating students receive a certificate of completion.