OrlandoSentinel.com

In demand, bar spies eye bartenders' serving sizes

By Sandra Pedicini

| Sentinel Staff Writer

April 4, 2009

Dee Lindholm checks out a downtown Orlando bar. (ROBERTO GONZALEZ, ORLANDO SENTINEL / March 31, 2009)

MAITLAND - Dee Lindholm's work begins the minute she steps inside a Maitland restaurant's bar.She orders a rum and ginger ale and notes that the bartender doesn't suggest a higher-priced brand of alcohol. He does, however, carefullymeasure the rum, and he rings up the drink right away, earning two positive marks.Lindholm is a bar spotter, a spy sent in to uncover theft and other problems at bars. She works for Inside Hospitality, a St. Louis-basedcompany hired by bars, restaurants and hotels.

Business has been strong for companies that do bar spotting. In these tough economic times, bar and restaurant owners are especially anxiousto contain costs, and some are casting a suspicious eye toward cash-strapped bartenders struggling with fewer tips.Gwen Lennox's company, Maitland-based Keeping Tabs Inc., has seen rising demand for bar spotting during the past year. A year ago, abouta half-dozen requests per week were coming in for investigations. Now, there are nine or 10 per week."What bartenders and other service people are seeing is that people are tending to tip less," Lennox said. "They are going out less in general,and so ... we believe their personal economic pressure is leading [bartenders] to do things they might not do at some other times."Ray Foley, who worked behind a bar before founding New Jersey-based

Bartender

magazine, doesn't think theft is on the rise.Bartenders are "in no position to get caught stealing and be without a job," said Foley, who criticizes companies "selling fear." Managersshould focus more on hiring quality employees, instead of spying on bartenders, he said.

A valuable service

But Barry Gutin, who recently opened a Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar in Orlando, said he finds spotters valuable. He has used them atrestaurants and nightclubs to thwart not only theft but a wide variety of service problems. Occasionally, bartenders were caught drinking behind the bar or giving away drinks and were fired as a result."They typically give away a drink to earn a better tip," Gutin said.Bartenders also may try to curry favor with drinkers by being overly generous with the booze. One technique bar spotters use is to count howmany seconds bartenders take to pour a drink. They also watch to see whether bartenders ring up drink orders immediately, thus making suremoney goes into the cash register and not the bartender's pocket.Keeping Tabs and

Inside Hospitality

would not reveal names of the establishments they survey, and a reporter was allowed to watchLindholm work on the condition that the bar she visited would not be named.Lindholm saw no signs of theft on her assignment one recent Friday night, though she noted one potential problem: A partly open cash drawer that might have been broken.During the weekend, she filled out a checklist with more than 100 questions. Overall, the establishment earned a 92.2 percent rating. Bar security got a 94.1 percent, with the open cash-register drawer noted. Lindholm also noted the failure to "up-sell" to a high-end alcohol brand.The bar got the lowest score — 66.7percent — under management because a manager didn't visit with patrons and ask them whether everything was all right.