The showman behind the bar

Sam Morris

Dorian Oldan works at Caesars Palace’s Shadow Bar. He’s also a competitor in flair bartending, having won the rookie division of a world championship at age 21. When he creates a routine, he starts practicing with plastic bottles, then moves on to glass, and then to working with wet hands and lights in his eyes.

By Brendan Buhler (contact)

Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

If you haven’t smashed a finger or cut yourself, Dorian Oldan says, you’re not working.

At least not at his job. Oldan is a flair bartender.

Yeah, flair bartending — juggling bottles, rolling glasses down your arm, slinging garnishes. It’s dangerous work.

“You’re gonna cut yourself sooner or later,” Oldan says.

When one of Oldan’s co-workers was practicing at home, two bottles collided in front of his face. He lost a tooth.

Home practice is important. Oldan practices in his garage, on top of a lot of rubber mats. When he’s training for a tournament, Oldan will practice five to eight hours a day, starting a couple of months in advance. When he’s creating a new routine, he starts with plastic bottles. As he gets closer to competition he switches to glass bottles, gets his hands wet and sets up lights to shine in his eyes.

“We try to practice as real as we can,” Oldan says.

He’s competed in Chicago and Phoenix, as far north as Canada and as far south as Costa Rica. At the Legends competition, he came in ninth in ’03 and fourth in ’04. In 2001, when the Argentina native was 21 and bartending for the first time in the United States, he won the world championship, rookie division.

But most nights, Tuesdays through Saturdays, he’s slinging (and tossing and twirling and rolling) drinks at Shadow Bar in Caesars Palace, where he competes for tourists’ attention with girls dancing behind screens. And if he’s not working, he might be hanging out there, anyway. He says he trusts the other bartenders to make a good drink for him, even a classic bitters drink such as an old fashioned.

Not that there’s a lot of call for those drinks from regular customers. More than anything, Oldan says, he ends up filling orders for vodka and Red Bull. You wouldn’t think anyone could dandify the mixing of that drink, but Oldan has a trick where he wets his palm and presses the soda can to his skin until it forms a seal. Than he flips his still-flat hand over and, with the can hanging from it, pours.

And what’s his favorite drink to make?

Well, if it’s for a hot woman, Oldan is happy to make a Long Island iced tea, a complicated drink that gives him lots of time to flirt. Or maybe an apple martini, because he has this trick where he puts a plastic cocktail sword between his teeth, point up, and uses it to catch maraschino cherries. “Sometimes,” Oldan says, “they want to take the cherries from your mouth.”

And what’s his least favorite drink to make?

The mojito, with all the time-consuming mint muddling. Worse, if the order is “from an English guy, because he’s not going to tip.”