Most people walk into a bar thinking they know exactly what to order. A classic, something trendy, maybe whatever the person next to them has. But after years of working behind the stick, watching hundreds of thousands of drinks get poured, certain orders keep coming up again and again as the ones that signal trouble – for you, for the quality of the drink, and sometimes for the whole bar’s rhythm.
This is not about being snobbish. Honestly, a great bartender wants every customer to have a fantastic experience. The drinks on this list are the ones that, more often than not, stand in the way of that. So let’s get into it.
Table of Contents
1. The Long Island Iced Tea – A Mess in a Glass
Let’s be real about this one. The Long Island Iced Tea is made up of vodka, tequila, light rum, triple sec, gin, and a splash of cola, making it one of the most chaotic things a bartender can be asked to produce, especially during a Friday night rush. It is less a cocktail and more a dare.
Lauren Lenihan, director of operations for Paris Café and Common Ground Bar in New York City, and a bartender with over 20 years of experience, flatly states that no bartenders ever order a Long Island Iced Tea. That says a lot, honestly. When the people who make the drinks won’t touch them, pay attention.
Bar manager Abraham Flota of Prospect in San Francisco put it this way: the Long Island Iced Tea is a drink that often sacrifices quality for potency, making it unbalanced and muddled, and it tends to appeal to those looking for a quick buzz. The result is a drink that somehow tastes worse than any of its individual parts.
Think of it like a stew where someone threw in five totally unrelated ingredients hoping for the best. Occasionally it works. More often, it really, really doesn’t. Save yourself the regret.
2. The Mojito at a Busy Bar – Fresh Mint, Ancient Regret
The mojito is one of the most notoriously disliked drinks for bartenders to make. It is a mess to produce, according to Jackson Strayer-Benton, Beverage Director for Hen of the Wood and Prohibition Pig in Vermont. There is nothing wrong with the drink itself. The problem is the context.
Mojitos are the classic example, but really the issue applies to any multi-step cocktail that takes a long time to prepare. At an upscale cocktail bar, you expect drinks like this. At an average bar, these drinks always seem to be ordered when the bartender is slammed, and they slow down the entire flow of service.
There is also a hygiene angle here that people rarely think about. Mojitos may seem like a harmless, refreshing order, but the drink could be carrying bacteria from spoiled mint leaves. The problem is that bars don’t serve too many mojitos, so it is rare they keep fresh mint on deck.
A mojito done right, at the right place and the right time, is genuinely wonderful. Ordered at a packed dive bar on a Saturday night? You are not getting that mojito. You are getting something that vaguely rhymes with it.
3. The Espresso Martini – Trendy, But Complicated
After making its way onto the list of the top 10 cocktails served on-premise in 2022, orders for the espresso martini nearly doubled in velocity by mid-2023, earning quarterly growth of 11% and overtaking Long Island Iced Tea to become the sixth most popular cocktail, according to NIQ CGA’s cocktail tracker. Its popularity is genuinely staggering. That is also precisely the problem.
The biggest challenge bartenders highlight tends to come down to one thing: espresso. The original spec calls for a freshly pulled shot, which is a logistical nightmare for most bars. Few have space for an espresso machine, and adding a piping hot shot to a shaker full of ice can lead to dilution issues.
Vinny Spatafore, bartender and beverage operations manager at Blue Bridge Hospitality, explained: “The strong, lingering espresso smell means bartenders have to wash the shaker extra carefully, which can be time-consuming.” Also, most bars don’t have a decent espresso machine and the coffee might be old and sitting for a long time behind the bar.
I think the espresso martini is a beautiful drink when done correctly. The issue is that only a fraction of bars can actually do it correctly. Ordering one without checking is a bit like ordering a soufflé from a hot dog stand.
4. Frozen Drinks at a Non-Beach Bar
There is a time and a place for frozen cocktails. That time is on a beach in the sun. That place is not your local neighborhood bar on a Tuesday night. Making drinks that require a blender isn’t among the top bartender favorites, as it often means more cleanup, and that’s precisely why most off-duty bartenders stay away from ordering frozen drinks.
Frozen cocktails are often sugar bombs in disguise. Whether it’s a daiquiri, colada, or frozen margarita, the recipe is usually built mostly from juice and syrup. That means loads of sugar and barely any real alcohol. The sweetness also masks how much you are drinking.
The main thing with a Piña Colada, for example, is that this drink needs to have its ingredients including rum, coconut cream, and pineapple juice blended up. Beverage expert at Ten Rooms, Zach Pace, has said: “Please don’t make the bartender fire up a blender in the middle of a crazy service.”
It is also worth noting the noise factor. A blender running during busy service is genuinely disruptive to everyone around. Unless you see a machine already spinning behind the bar, just skip it.
5. A Glass of Wine at the Wrong Kind of Bar
Here is the thing about wine at a bar that is not a wine bar or a proper restaurant: you have no idea what you are getting. Daniel Yeom, general manager of Esters Wine Shop & Bar in Santa Monica, says he will never order a glass of wine at a dive bar. As he explains, he doesn’t know how long that wine has been open, and the chances of whatever bottle has been sitting behind the bar making him happy is pretty close to zero.
It is hard to say for sure how long an opened bottle has been sitting there, but at a bar that does not specialize in wine, the answer is usually “too long.” Wine degrades rapidly once opened, often within a day or two, and some drinks are simply unlikely to come out well unless it is something the bar specializes in.
Think about it from a practical angle. A proper wine bar rotates its bottles constantly and serves them at the right temperature with the right glassware. A sports bar that happens to have a dusty bottle of Merlot on the shelf? That is a completely different story. Match your order to your environment.
6. Draft Beer at a Dive Bar – The Hidden Risk Nobody Talks About
This one surprises people. Draft beer feels safe, familiar, and trustworthy. The reality behind the tap, though, can be genuinely unsettling. You can’t know the last time the draft system got cleaned; it can be really nasty in there with fruit flies and gunk. That quote has stuck with bartenders and bar-goers alike for good reason.
All draft beer systems must be cleaned every two weeks, as mandated in the Brewers Association Draught Beer Quality Manual. The standard is clear. The compliance, however, is not. Investigations have found there is no federal law regulating the way tap lines are maintained or the frequency in which they’re cleaned. Liquor licenses in many states do not cover the cleaning of tap lines at all.
When lines are neglected, bacteria, yeast, and molds flourish in the beer lines and begin to impart an off-taste into all of the beers on tap. The off-flavor will be noticeable in the light lagers and wheat beers with subtle flavor profiles, while more robust ales and stouts will mask the off-taste. However, within a short amount of time, the flavor will be detected in all the beers on tap.
A well-run bar takes line hygiene seriously. The trick, as one experienced bartender once pointed out, is to check the bathrooms when you walk in. A bar that doesn’t clean what people can see is probably not cleaning what they can’t see either.
7. The Ramos Gin Fizz – A Full Workout Nobody Asked For
Most people have never heard of the Ramos Gin Fizz. Those who have either love it deeply or have never ordered it again after watching a bartender’s face change when they asked for one. Perhaps the most-loathed cocktail by bartenders, a Ramos Gin Fizz not only requires a lot of ingredients – gin, lemon, lime, cream, egg white, orange blossom water, sugar, and soda – but it takes a lot of time and elbow grease to make.
Mixologist and bar personality Elissa Dunn compares making it to cooking a delicate soufflé. As she says, you have to shake it for a really long time, let it set, and if you do not have a hand blender, it takes somewhere around 12 minutes. Twelve minutes. For one drink. During a rush, that is not just inconvenient, it is essentially asking the bartender to stop doing their job for everyone else.
Almost unanimously, bartenders across the country are staunchly opposed to subjecting a fellow bartender to the relative labor intensity of making a Ramos Gin Fizz. That speaks volumes. Still, if the bar has it on their menu, that changes things entirely – they are likely proud of it and have perfected the process.
The golden rule here is simple: if it is on the menu, order away. If you are asking a bartender to make something from scratch that they haven’t prepped for, maybe save that one for a quiet, slow night when time is on everyone’s side.
The Bigger Lesson Behind the List
As Daniel Yeom, general manager of Esters Wine Shop & Bar, puts it, the key is to “read the room.” A great order at a fancy cocktail lounge can be a terrible choice at a dive bar, and vice versa. Context is everything when it comes to what you order.
Bartenders most dislike drinks that are slow, inconsistent, risky, or create waste, especially when those drinks are low-profit or highly customized. It is rarely about the drink itself. It is about timing, environment, and the unspoken contract between a bartender and their customers.
The best bartenders in the world will tell you this: order something the bar can actually do well. Pay attention to what other people are drinking. Look at what’s on the menu. A confident, well-placed order based on where you are will always beat a trendy or complicated one that the bar simply isn’t equipped to handle.
Next time you walk up to the bar, take one quick look around before you speak. That single moment of awareness might save you from a disappointing drink and give your bartender a reason to actually enjoy making it. What would you have ordered before reading this?