He’s a Winner at the Pour House

In an Anaheim restaurant crowded with some of the most hoity-toity bartender critics in the land, a newly famous drink maker paused to ponder a most weighty question.

Why a bartender? Why devote a life to mixing drinks?

Lee Williams, 47, shook his drink shaker and surveyed the room for so long it seemed as if he were thinking back to every cocktail he’d ever mixed, to every tongue-wagger who ever pulled up a stool to bend his ear.

And then Williams, who Thursday became the first Orange County barkeep inducted into the national Bartender Hall of Fame, finally offered his thoughts:

“I make drinks because I get to be part psychologist, part bartender, part friend all at the same time. I’m glad to try to make good drinks. [But] I look at my job as much more.”

Williams is a bartender first.

He has done it about 20 years and, to his colleagues and customers, he is one of the chosen few, a gifted man who possesses such liquor finesse that he knows how a drink will taste simply by looking at it.

Customers call him Dr. Lee because of the surgical touch he employs in making cocktails.

But beyond the drinks, he was chosen for the Hall of Fame because he is a well-rounded man who elevates the task of mixing drinks, said Raymond Foley, publisher of New Jersey-based Bartender, a trade magazine that created the Hall of Fame awards in 1989.

“Bartending is a profession that goes beyond the bar,” Foley said, adding that judges were impressed with Williams’ community service, the talks he gives at schools about safety and common sense.

“This has nothing to do with bartending,” Foley said.

And yet it does. Williams was one of eight selected for the hall this year out of thousands of contestants.

With the selection comes the honor of being a king drink maker. And with that comes the sterling silver plaque and a Super Bowl-esque ring for his pinky finger.

The showy ring, though, looks out of place.

Williams, who’s been married 19 years and has two children, is something of a throwback.

He wears a crisp white shirt every day under a crisp black vest, and his wire-rimmed spectacles add to his air of being a philosopher amid the bottles, the shakers and the clatter of ice cubes.

The bow tie is perfectly positioned. If a band were to strike up “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in the background, it would hardly seem out of place.

Customers said Williams is a man of manners. Never, they said, would he give you a crumpled dollar bill as change.

Williams’ full-time job is at Disneyland’s ever-so-private Club 33. He also works part-time down the road at Mr. Stox restaurant, where Thursday’s ceremony took place.

Over the years, he’s followed two personal guidelines that he feels have kept his bartending sharp.

He gives advice only when asked, and when he does, it is humbly offered.

And he doesn’t drink.

“I just make them,” he says, wiping the bar clean.