Stuart Wolfendale

In a world which tries to steer the young away from addictive substances and does  backward somersaults not to offend on the grounds of religion or ‘ethnicity’ (try saying that if your Chinese or with a lisp), it really is time that the Virgin Mary was removed from bars and restaurants.

Sometime back in a pre- Second War US bar room, a vodka and tomato juice became known as a ‘Bloody Mary’. Theories over its naming abound, the favourite being that it was to honour a Chicago barman’s particularly truculent girlfriend. Down the historical drinks line somebody responsible for chalking up drinks specials on a blackboard, probably a fired copywriter, deduced that a spicy tomato juice without the vodka could be a ‘Virgin Mary’.This may be all very well in Chicago but it doesn’t fly in Hong Kong. There are squadrons of barmen and waiters getting it wrong. First of all, they don’t get the joke. Then they do not understand or hear the distinction. Even though entirely different parts of the mouth are used in pronouncing virgin and bloody, it must come out as ‘mumble, grumble Mary’ to them and in goes the vodka. Particularly if you are gwelio who looks like he has been round the world a couple of times, the idea that you would want a nancy tomato juice is absurd and in goes the vodka.I have heard it happen here so often. It’s a splutter and spit if the customer detects it before it reaches the throat and if not, “Oh, god!”  I have heard of alcoholics in recovery for years who have taken a hearty slug of a bloody ordered as a virgin and shot straight off the back of the wagon. It has been done to me so frequently that I have wearied of tomato juice altogether.There is another objection. Just because you take the vodka out of a Bloody Mary, it does not make it the Mother of God. Imagine asking a waiter, “Mother of God, please, extra spicy.” It is rather the same thing.  Extend the notion a little further. Imagine that for some reason which does not have to be too fanciful, given the corkscrew thinking put into naming cocktails, there came to be a concoction that just begged to be named after the Mother of The Prophet.Just consider yourself telling a barman, “A ‘Mohammed’s Mum’ , please, heavy on the vermouth.” Spare a thought for the bar manager, probably a lost European youth running an open fronted outfit by a Thai beach, who chalks that one up in the doorway as a happy hour special and consider how long the premises would go unexploded. All in all, those Christians have been very long suffering over this one. 

 

Posted in All, Eating generally, God