Aim: Studies of bartenders often focus on over-serving and bartenders’ role in venues with a lot of violence and disorderly patrons. The aim of this article is to show how bartenders in hip venues in downtown Oslo experience bartender culture and what activities they themselves emphasize as important and distinctive to the profession. Method: The article is based on 11 interviews with bartenders working at popular and hip nightlife venues in an area of Oslo typically characterized by a culturally conscious clientele. The analysis is inspired by an open coding where the most important trends in the material are identified and classified. Result: The informants pay particular attention to three important activities when describing the bartender profession: defining the visitors as guests, correcting the guests’ behaviour, and “being themselves”. These highlighted practices are often overlooked in other bartender studies. Conclusion: The sum of these practices gives both great authority over the guests and a great freedom in how the profession is to be exercised. While several previous studies have largely demonstrated that the freedom and ability of the bartender to influence the workplace is limited, this study shows how bartenders in hip venues in downtown Oslo distance themselves from the traditional understanding of bartenders since they strongly emphasize that they are in control over what goes on in the venues.
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