MOJO Bar - Music for the people

It seems that the journey through 2012 is flying by at a dizzying pace. The bartenders’ lonely trek through the barren plains of January is a distant memory and the odd weekend oasis passed along the trail through February has reminded us of real work. Visible on the horizon is the sandstorm of St Patrick’s Day and past that, if we squint, we can almost make out the rich bounty of the first Bank Holidays.

Thinking about Paddy’s Day and the Easter weekend has got me musing on the massive amount of drinking some people are going to get down to over the next month or two. Folks are going to be ruining themselves in an alarming fashion and it seems that this is par for the course for a great number of drinkers on our fair isles. I am of course talking about Britain’s favourite pass time, binge drinking.

It seems that we Brits have a singular attitude to booze. Most other countries don’t seem to have the same pissed-up town centre troubles we have on a regular basis. Of course, there are countries that consume just as much booze as us but where they get a bottle of wine or beer with lunch, we save it up all week for those wonderful Saturday nights of shattered windows, fights and throwing up your own pelvis.

I think that this difference has something to do with the divide we have between boozing and eating here at home. In Europe especially, food is something that’s always there if you’re drinking, whereas we tend to stock up on mountains of food beforehand or crawl into a takeaway after a session to force down delicious fried goods that we insist will do something to combat the alien death-ray of a hangover that’s waiting for us in the morning.

At MOJO we sell some badass crisps, olives and nuts that go down really well, but a
few times in the past we’ve tried to introduce some actual substantial food, like what real people eat. When I first started at Mojo we had a small tapas style, finger food menu that was awesome. It’s a little known fact that bartenders survive solely on bar snacks so while we were doing this real food I noticed that the green tint my skin has due to years  of massive olive consumption had begun to fade. Then, alas, we realised that not many people were actually buying the food so we cut the menu back to our snack selection and my sickly pallor returned.

I’m sure we’ll try introducing something again because I think that bars like MOJO doing food is a step in the right direction for changing our collective attitude to drinking. If a bar is known for big, full on party nights and people see that they can eat there, it just might stop them for nailing multiple Jägers on an empty stomach. Plus it would mean that my diet could become a tiny bit more varied. So everyone wins.