After nine months behind the bar, I’ve officially hung up my apron. To put it mildly, it was surreal transitioning from government to the service industry (“the industry,” for short) during a highly turbulent period in DC. This essay is my attempt to make sense of that experience. Consider it both a love letter and permanent goodbye to the industry.
As the sun sets over Washington, local bars fill with political types seeking refuge from the day’s chaos. The lights are low, the music is loud, and the conversations float freely. People talk the way they do when they believe no one who matters is listening. In a city defined by its guardrails, the bar is one of the only places where the rails completely come off.
The evenings bring about the convergence of Washington’s two parallel universes. There’s the political industry that dominates the city’s identity. And then there’s the service industry—the bars, restaurants, and invisible infrastructure that literally feeds the machinery of the other world. They exist alongside each other but are governed by entirely different rules, personalities, and loyalties.
I’d bartended my way through grad school, but for the last six years I had been a dweller at the epicenter of the political realm. I worked in public service, inside the institutions that animate this city, and became fluent in their hierarchies and quirks. My repeated stints in the service industry felt like another life.
Then, during a dark and uncertain period after leaving government, I crossed back over. What started as a part-time job to pay the bills became a dramatic change in my vantage point, bordering on an out of body voyeuristic experience.
I started working behind the bar in April, a few months into the second Trump administration. Within days I started running into old friends and coworkers from the political world, and it dawned on me that I was serving drinks to the same ecosystem I had temporarily stepped away from. I couldn’t have anticipated how strange it would feel to stand behind a bar again, for the first time as a Washington “insider.”
The other bartenders could not have cared less about my previous world or how I had landed in this unusual situation. To put a finer point on it, they didn’t care where anyone worked, what committee they staffed, which administration they served, or what ideological trench they occupied. They had seen it all before and remained unmoved by Washington’s endless drama. To my fellow bartenders, they were the elites and insiders of their own industry. The city’s political chatter was background noise between clinking glassware and shouted orders. They were not impressed, and they did not listen.
I did. I was no better than a kid eavesdropping with their ear pressed against the door. I couldn’t help it. Behind the bar, I occupied a strange and uneasy position when I encountered people from my former world—and I encountered many of them. Journalists, private sector executives, senior government officials, and activists all came through. Few of them knew me, but I knew of many of them.
A reporter I had once given quotes to on Middle East policy showed up. Numerous colleagues from former lives stopped by, usually unexpectedly. At one point I hid in a walk-in freezer to avoid a former love interest who also worked in policy. The city folded in on me in almost absurd ways. When someone referenced an agency, a process, or a negotiation I recognized, my attention snapped to them involuntarily. I caught myself checking LinkedIn between orders, trying to decode who people were and what kind of influence they held. I listened closely while feigning disinterest.
Of course, Washington’s chatter took a new edge this year. Against the backdrop of the second Trump administration, the venting became more than just “shop talk.” It was a raw, unvarnished look at a city in shock. Hill staffers drifted in after long days, exhausted from fighting battles with an administration hell-bent on dismantling the U.S. foreign assistance apparatus. Professors read books about civil disobedience and the future of our country. Defense executives spoke about the Trump administration’s approach to contracts. Customers lamented being laid off or told me they were desperately trying to lay low in their government jobs while searching for an escape route. They spoke freely, either disinterested in my presence or assuming that my baseline of knowledge was low.
The more I heard, the more uncomfortable I became with my own position. I often felt that I wasn’t supposed to be there, hearing what I was hearing. What if someone said something not meant for me? What if a secret or half-formed opinion slipped out under the assumption that bartenders don’t belong to the same professional universe?
Every time someone spoke candidly near me, I felt like I was conducting a kind of surveillance. They thought they were talking to someone who didn’t understand or care much. They were wrong on both counts.
I tried to put on my best professional, indifferent bartender mask, which was actually just my government poker face. But internally, I mourned alongside my customers and fantasized about being back in government, working to change the headlines on the tv behind the bar.
Still, I kept my opinions to myself. Mostly.
I never raised politics at the bar unless the guest started the discussion but on the night of the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, I flipped the tv to election coverage and couldn’t tear my eyes away. As the bar filled, I observed who was equally glued to the tv and looked for cues of their preferences. That night my bar was almost all Democrats, minus one senior Republican operative I had already identified on a previous visit. I poured drinks while stealing glances at the tv all night.
When the election was finally called for Spanberger, I yelped excitedly before I could stop myself. My barback asked me what was happening and why I cared, but multiple guests joined me in my moment of excitement—and some didn’t, including the Republican operative. I watched him scan the bar for people’s reactions, scowl in my direction, and down his drink.
That moment, brief as it was, broke the fourth wall. I’d violated an unspoken rule that makes the whole system work. The bond between customers and bartenders in Washington hinges on an assumption that bartenders don’t have skin in the game, don’t belong to the same world as their customers, or simply don’t care. When people felt safe enough to speak freely at a bar, it was because they believed those assumptions held true.
In that, they were mostly right. Bartenders have their own ethos and their own loyalties. They serve everyone equally and do not trade in proximity to power. They collect your secrets but do not spend too much time dwelling on them. They’ve seen Washington’s self-importance up close and remain, somehow, unimpressed. In many ways, they are the only people in Washington immune to its pervasive narcissism. Power, from behind the bar, looks far less impressive than it does from within Washington’s political institutions…especially when your customer is on their fourth Old Fashioned.
You may be wondering whether I ever adjusted to the discomfort of occupying both worlds at once. The truth is, I didn’t. I spent months turning the question over in my head: was I exploiting people’s trust by performing as a bartender while remaining, at my core, a policy person?
Then again, Washington runs on strategic information gathering. I had simply found a loophole by working in a position that granted me access while stripping me of status. Still, I couldn’t reconcile the two identities, and eventually I stopped trying. The worlds of politics and service were never meant to merge in the way they did for me last year.
At the same time, stepping outside the formal structures of power gave me a clearer view of the city than I’d had in years. In some ways, I learned more about Washington during those nine months than I had in fourteen years working inside it. Stripped of institutional constraints and armed with a sense of anonymity, people spoke more honestly in my presence than they ever did in conference rooms.
I’ve since returned to working on policy, but I know now what Washington sounds like when it thinks no one in their world is listening. And I know firsthand that the person serving your drink might understand your world better than you think.
Or, more likely, they might not care at all. And in a city where everyone cares desperately about being seen, heard, and remembered, that indifference might be the most radical act of all.
Thank you for sharing Alia.
No reason for discomfort. You don’t owe anything to people who just assume that the people serving them are automatons who don’t have eyes or ears or brains.