Everybody has a Murray Stenson story. Robert Hess' goes like this:
John Keatley
Stenson is more revered for his customer service than for his encyclopedic knowledge of cocktails.
John Keatley
At Canon, Stenson (left) and his boss, Boudreau, form the bartending equivalent of Magic and Kareem.
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Watch Murray Stenson make--and talk about how to make--an absinthe julep in this exclusive video!
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A self-proclaimed "cocktail evangelist" who works for Microsoft, Hess had been prodded by his drinking buddies to visit Il Bistro, a restaurant in Pike Place Market. In particular, they wanted Hess to test the wiles of a bartender named Murray Stenson.
"I finally got around to ordering an Old Fashioned from Murray," says Hess of the experience, which occurred in the mid-'90s. "I'm halfway through my drink and my phone rings, and I have to leave. I didn't get the chance to tell Murray my name or talk to him at all. I didn't get back to Il Bistro for another year. When I ordered my second drink, Murray said, 'You must like that seat. That's the same seat you sat in last time.' He was right: It was the exact same seat. I could remember that, but to have a bartender remember that after thousands of customers, that's what Murray does."
Jamie Boudreau also has a Murray Stenson story. One of the best-known mixologists on the West Coast, Boudreau first stopped into the Zig Zag around the time he moved from his native Vancouver, B.C., to Seattle in 2006. Upon introducing himself to Stenson, who'd moved on from Il Bistro, the latter quoted verbatim a blog post Boudreau had recently written.
"He's all about hospitality," says Boudreau, who after stints at Vessel and Tini Bigs now owns Canon, undoubtedly the rookie of the year within Seattle's 2011 bar ecosystem. "And, of course, there's his memory."
There are great memories, and then there is Stenson's memory. To have any memory at all after 40 years in the bar biz is a feat unto itself. To boast one that features the eidetic attributes of Asperger's without the nasty side effects defies conventional wisdom.
In early October, Boudreau added Stenson to his crew at Canon, elevating what was already a standout roster of bartenders to the drink-pouring equivalent of Blind Faith. Upon hiring him, Boudreau, widely considered the city's most talented cocktail craftsman, offered to bar-back for Stenson, exempt him from measuring portions of liquor, and install "a second shit ice machine" to make him feel like he was back at Zig Zag, from which he parted company last spring after a decade-long tenure that put both the bar and Stenson on the must-sip maps of aficionados nationwide.
Three months into his stint at Canon, where the bar is literally painted with bitters, Stenson has made Boudreau second-guess himself. Not because Stenson has failed to live up to expectations, but because he's insisted upon conforming—measuring portions for the first time in 25 years and eschewing the familiar ice while working side-by-side, not front-to-back, with Boudreau every Sunday evening, when people regularly line up at Canon's nondescript front door to secure a seat at the bar, which often fills as soon as it opens. Hence, Boudreau is now considering unloading that second shit machine.
"I'm a team player," says Stenson of his refusal to exploit Boudreau's loopholes. "I want to learn."
Of Stenson's work ethic, Kacy Fitch, his former boss at Zig Zag, says, "He never took a vacation." When Fitch offered Stenson the opportunity to skip Friday-night shifts, which by the end of Stenson's tenure regularly attracted a headache-inducing mob of patrons, Stenson, 62, demurred. "He said, 'I can work as hard as any of these young guys,' " and kept right on working Fridays.
On a recent Sunday at Canon, Stenson is dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt, posing quite the casual contrast to Boudreau, a handsome block of a man whose retro finery harkens back to Repeal Day, which is memorialized in framed newspaper clippings on the regal bar's walls. For booze geeks, seeing this pair work a shift together is tantamount to having seen Hendrix and Jimmy Page jam in a basement club in London. The two couldn't be more different: While Stenson is heralded for his customer service, knowledge of classic cocktails, and efficiency, Boudreau is known as the dogmatic, cutting-edge mixologist who refused to pour frou-frou drinks while working at Vessel, a polarizing downtown hooch haven which enjoyed a short but groundbreaking run in the latter half of the aught-naughts (while the bar's been closed for more than a year, a reboot is in the offing).
"They are my two favorite bartenders in Seattle," says Paul Clarke, a regular contributor to Imbibe magazine who maintains a blog called The Cocktail Chronicles. "Jamie is a technical wizard and obsessively detail-oriented. Murray is a bartender—there's a certain flexibility. At Zig Zag, there was an improvisational factor to what he was doing. But neither of them imposes their will on the other. That's what makes it work."
At Canon, one might expect sonatas to dominate the sound system, but Boudreau has shrewdly programmed against type, blaring the likes of Zeppelin and the Stones. He has been somewhat schizophrenic in describing his vision for the bar, saying in one breath that he "just want[s] it to be a neighborhood bar," while in the next proclaiming that he's aspiring to make Canon "one of the nation's elite bars." He might ultimately achieve both objectives: The response thus far to Canon's opening has been "way beyond anything I thought it would be," says Boudreau, who's had to double his staff to keep up with demand in his 48-capacity space, which can endure up to seven nightly turns.
