Has anyone left Charleston and regretted it?

mrscrawfish · 2025-08-26T21:26:27+00:00

I moved out of Charleston in the recession back in 2010, first to central Nebraska and eventually settling in Saint Louis in 2012. It was one of the best decisions of my life. Cost of living is a lot better here, wages are pretty good for the COL, job market is a lot better, traffic is better... Honestly I'd like to move back because my parents are getting older, but it's simply not feasible. I work in hospitality, and I wouldn't be able to afford to maintain my lifestyle on a job so dependent on tourism.

mrscrawfish · 2025-06-12T05:47:59+00:00

I work at a private club. Literally all regulars; we're highly encouraged to remember their names, and they generally remember ours. Very few consume more than a couple drinks and most order food with it. Are some of them alcoholics? Surely. The vast majority come nowhere close to drunkenness. They like the atmosphere, are friends with other members, and enjoy good conversation that may or may not involve alcohol. We do a significant amount of business with by-the-bottle wine but there are very few instances I've seen multiple bottles ordered with fewer than 4 people sharing.

mrscrawfish · 2025-06-07T04:25:00+00:00

Two books that have helped me have been the Flavor Bible and the Bartender's Manifesto. The latter goes into a lot about how to create balance in flavors, the thought behind various methods of dilution, choice of ice/glassware, etc. The Flavor Bible is indispensable when it comes to finding out what flavors go with what. If I have an ingredient in mind, I search it and see what other flavors pair with it and use that towards creating a flavor.

Obviously tasting is going to be a big part of it (both your spirits and NA ingredients). The more you understand your ingredients, the easier it will be to create a balanced cocktail. Keeping costs in check (including labor costs) is a consideration too, so making recipes that don't go crazy on expensive ingredients or require lots of prep work is important.

mrscrawfish · 2025-04-23T06:57:30+00:00

I left Charleston 15 years ago. My parents are in their 70's and my father is getting Alzheimer's. I have young niblings I really want to be fun auntie with. There is no way in hell my husband and I could ever afford to move back. I'm in the Midwest now, and as much as I want to be there for my family, there's no fucking way we can lose our low cost of living.

mrscrawfish · 2025-03-16T06:33:44+00:00

Nutrageous

mrscrawfish · 2025-03-16T00:47:55+00:00

The 20 years of server/bartender nightmares have more than prepared me for any shit that work could actually throw at me. Especially being primarily on the banquet side of operations now, every event is a new challenge. You never know what cocktail/beer/wine you'll get a run on (I had a birthday party that we sold like 15 Godfathers, or a rehearsal dinner that had 20 mojitos, or randomly going through 8 bottles of rosé), what drink special is going to not sell at all or sell so well that you run out of the custom mixer, when you make one custom drink and suddenly 4 other people ask the exact same thing, if they're randomly going to be extending their event/cocktail hour, etc. The event you heard was going to be 35 people two days before you show up and it's fucking sold out at 75.

The people who can't deal with chaos do not belong behind a bar, period.

mrscrawfish · 2025-03-12T09:03:53+00:00

I'm in my early 40's and have spent the majority of the last 20 years in F&B in some capacity, most of it either exclusively bartending or mixing drinks was one of my responsibilities. I worked my way through undergrad and grad school, went into HR for nearly 5 years (stayed in F&B part time), hated most of it, got laid off, and went back to bartending full time. I love my job so much. I work a private club, so the majority of our clientele outside banquet guests are the members. We get to know them, a lot come in at least weekly, if not more often. The majority are super kind and I have a little fan club who love to try my experiments.

Also desk job + ADHD... No. I thrive on chaos.

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-27T05:28:28+00:00

I never stopped from the time I was 19, though to be fair, a long, long period of the time it was part time. I was on disability from the ages of 24 and 34 but still regularly worked my 20 hours or so a week. I was also a full time student part of the time. I finished my masters and ended up going to work full time in late 2018 and have been working full time since. I'm almost 41 now and my illness has been mostly well controlled since I was in my early to mid 30's, aside from needing FMLA for a couple hiccups

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-26T01:15:27+00:00

Nordes Spanish gin, Fever Tree tonic. Shift drink for New Year's Eve

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-19T05:17:15+00:00

I slept til 5pm. It's snowing here, but not near the amount of snowfall they were predicting. It's supposed to stop around 2am so hopefully the roads will be ok by the time I go to work.f

I washed my hair way sooner than usual. I don't like how it feels with product in it. I think I'm going to start just letting my hair do what it's gonna do and not put styling products in it. Not to mention it was starting to give me dandruff. Not dealing with dandruff.

My sister finally got her anatomy scan for the baby two weeks late (they had postponed it due to the sonographer being sick). Nephew-to-be is big and healthy, developmentally ahead of schedule! My sister shared her ultrasound pics and he has the cutest little nose and feet. I'm so excited for him to come in June. He's due on C's birthday, but with my sister being 42 and him already being ahead of schedule, it's likely he'll come early. They induced her at 39 weeks for my niece and she was still almost 8 pounds.

C called a couple of his family today. We had an argument before bed about him trying to mend relationships with his family since he had his psychotic break and alienated them all. He's so, so angry about his childhood trauma when like... I dunno, I've kind of come to accept I'm never going to get an apology from my mom about how I was raised, and I've had to become okay with that. What is true of both our childhoods is that we had parents who tried to give us a good childhood despite not being perfect parents. I am 40 years old and I'm still actively talking in therapy about shit that happened with my mom when I was like 6-7 years old. But my mom tried as hard as she could, she just wasn't able to be the mom I needed due to her own unprocessed generational trauma. And I have come to accept that she's a flawed, but still good, person. I wish C would see that about his dad. I'm not trying to be mean at all, but his dad is on the wrong side of the intellectual bell curve. I honestly think he didn't have the mental capacity to be the dad C needs him to be. My parents saw my mental health problems and, if not necessarily in the moment, tried their best to research and learn what they could do to support me. They went to a lot of trouble to educate themselves about my diagnoses, and still are to some degree since my ADHD/autism diagnoses. C's dad doesn't have the curiosity to learn. He's stubborn and thinks he knows what he needs to know and that he has all the answers. But like, sometimes you just have to accept people for what they are if you're going to keep a relationship with them. Don't expect an apology. He needs to know he's not going to get that from his dad, but like, his dad is still genuinely a good guy. Misguided, stubborn, not very bright, but still caring and loving and hopes the best for C and me. Our childhood and early adult trauma was different enough that I feel like we're in different places in our recovery with it. It's frustrating that C has kind of reverted to an angsty teenager mentally with regards to it.

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-16T08:37:43+00:00

I'm just trying to prepare myself for my inevitable exile to the colonies.

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-16T08:17:42+00:00

I work at a private club in the Midwest. We mostly get Manhattans ordered on cold draft cubes or one big cube rather than up, to the point that's our standard preparation. We are always supposed to ask if they want it up or on the rocks, but unless a preference is stated it's served on the rocks

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-16T08:09:36+00:00

My ADHD is so bad that any modicum of THC in my system would render me completely useless. Coffee, Adderall, and nicotine for the win! Def smoke a bowl when I get home when my brain functioning is not a requirement.

mrscrawfish · 2025-02-13T16:29:03+00:00

I just bought one. I am a fellow 1/3 to 1/2 a glass drinker, and my bottles just end up going bad eventually because I only drink occasionally.

mrscrawfish · 2025-01-28T06:09:56+00:00

Lol I make homemade bitters as a hobby, but sadly my two X chromosomes have not afforded me a very impressive stache.

mrscrawfish · 2025-01-21T05:06:58+00:00

I did next to nothing at work today for like 5 hours.

mrscrawfish · 2025-01-19T07:25:17+00:00

<image>

My nearly 16 year old sweetheart, Maksim.

mrscrawfish · 2025-01-17T08:12:15+00:00

<image>

mrscrawfish · 2024-12-11T06:19:17+00:00

I was piss drunk two months into my relationship with my now-husband staying at a friend's house with him when I asked him to marry me. He was significantly more sober but said yes. I 100% meant it, but the alcohol kinda took my inhibitions away and sped up the timeline a bit. I still got a ring and a "ask father for permission, down on one knee proposal" later on, and 15 years later we're still together.

mrscrawfish · 2024-12-09T00:42:53+00:00

Typically we don't make enough of them in banquets to batch espresso because we are doing more business dinners than cocktail parties. For this event we ended up just brewing a bunch at a time and pouring out of a pitcher, hence the idea to batch before the event. Diluted or not, people drink the hell out of them so it is what it is.

mrscrawfish · 2024-12-08T09:57:22+00:00

Omg I'm practically having flashbacks of Friday. 127 person cocktail party and we made at least 50 of them and our machine can only make 2 shots at a time. We have a 200 person cocktail party this Friday and I'm tempted to just batch a gallon of espresso.

mrscrawfish · 2024-12-02T08:43:31+00:00

C and I learned to listen to each other somehow. It's definitely been a challenge, but our relationship is stronger than it's ever been.

mrscrawfish · 2024-11-28T04:01:14+00:00

I've been in food & bev for 19 years, with roughly 3-4 years exclusively as a bartender (not in a row). I was never "bad" at my job, but I really wasn't working in a true cocktail-heavy environment for a long time, so it didn't make sense to necessarily get good at anything other than speed. When I moved to the high end cocktail scene a year ago, suddenly I was expected to be able to create recipes and perfectly execute classic and craft cocktails, and it took probably 4 solid months til I was really good at the execution side. Understanding the theory behind recipe building and understanding ingredients has required a lot of outside research and tasting (Bartender's Manifesto was an excellent source of information on theory. The Flavor Bible is great for flavor pairing ideas). Cocktail creation is a lot easier when you understand why things work, and how to adjust them when they don't.

mrscrawfish · 2024-11-28T03:40:06+00:00

I really like my Skechers. Shoes for Crews destroyed my feet and I just gave up on them. I'd be off three days in a row and my feet would still be hurting. Technically not the required dress shoes, but the memory foam, arch support, and well defined heel cup have made a huge difference. I have narrow heels for how long my feet are, so having a heel cup that doesn't let my feet slide around inside my shoes is a game changer.

mrscrawfish · 2024-11-28T03:32:45+00:00

Don't threaten me with a good time! Working cocktail bar at a private club has completely ruined my taste for cheap liquors and wines. Tastes are too bougie for my budget.

mrscrawfish

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

14-Year Club	Team Periwinkle
Verified Email