The truth? You can’t handle the truth

“The girl at the front door told us we had 15 minutes to order,” said a woman I’ve never seen, 15 minutes after the kitchen had closed.

“Nobody told you that,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, indignity creeping into her voice.

“Our host left 15 minutes ago,” I replied. “He always leaves right when the kitchen closes, so there would be nobody there to have told you that. And furthermore, he even said goodbye to me when he left.”

This is not unusual. In my business, people lie to you all the time. Often, they lie in such an obvious way that it’s almost farcical, such as with the late-arriving woman.

Not only did she know we were closed, but she was giving herself an extra 15 minutes. Some people simply have no shame.

Here are the most common lies that I hear:

• “He (or she) is parking the car.”

• “We were here before them.”

• “I know the owner.”

Often when people are in the midst of a bar crowd, they lose track of the fact that the bartender is not a part of that crowd. We are actually removed from it. And that gives us a lot of perspective, both literally and figuratively. But quite a few people think that we can’t see their falsehoods.

“I can still get you something to eat, but it will have to be dessert, and it will have to be ordered now,” I said.

No matter who someone else is, or how they’re acting, you still have to be you. Meaning that if you are just waiting for someone else to be a jerk to you, so that you can then be a jerk to them, you were probably already a jerk in the first place.

She got over her miffiness when she realized that I was still engaged in helping her.

“Do you have anything with real cinnamon in it?” she asked.

“Our cinnamon cake is made with real cinnamon,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, it’s even organic,” I said. “It says so right on the label.”

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I went in back and grabbed the container, making sure to read the label as I was bringing it out; it’s a trick I learned from a sommelier that works great when bringing a bottle of wine up from the wine cellar. Take a moment and educate yourself.

“Ingredients: organic cinnamon” read the label.

“That’s cassia bark,” said the woman.

“It says cinnamon,” I replied, pointing.

“They can call cassia cinnamon,” replied the woman. “Which isn’t a big deal usually, but cassia contains higher amounts of coumarin, which is a toxin that can cause liver damage. And I have liver problems.”

I was going to chalk it all up to weirdness, lying, mistaken belief or even something else, because I was holding a jar that clearly labeled the ingredients on it, and it was organic, which in the alcohol world means a higher level of transparency. Organic booze is the only booze required to list all of its ingredients. Regular alcohol, unlike every other food product, doesn’t have to.

The Food and Drug Administration was founded at the beginning of the last century, in part to help regulate booze, whiskey in particular. In her 2018 book, “The Poison Squad,” author Deborah Blum outlines how whiskey makers in Kentucky were angry that people were calling their cheaper and often inferior products “whiskey” and undermining their so-called “real” whiskey in both price and volume. Food products at the time were often misrepresented or just outrightly falsely labeled, with one such egregious example being warehouse floor sweepings being labeled as “pepper.”

The FDA eventually came into being in 1927 and food became safer as a result. Ironically booze itself had been outlawed in 1919, and, when it was legalized again in 1933, it wasn’t subjected to the same labeling requirements as other food. Standards of identity for food came into being in 1939, but it would take until 1963 before a similar system was put into place for alcohol, which made my lying, late-arriving woman’s assertion particularly suspect. Later on, when I got home, I looked up cinnamon and its labeling requirements. It turns out she was completely right. Almost all labeled cinnamon sold in the United States is actually cassia bark (made from a different tree in the cinnamon family). In fact, only cinnamon labeled as “real,” or “Ceylon” is the real deal.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Even a liar can tell the truth sometimes.

• What good is labeling if the labeling itself is deceptive?

• There are 14 different classes of whiskey in the United States and that’s not even including the separate categories of Scotch, Irish, Canadian or Japanese whiskeys.

• “It wouldn’t sell if we called it cassia,” said a grocer at my local market.

• “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”