Travel, positive attitude at work is elixir for this bartender's life

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, October 15, 2009

He has a nine-year-old car, a one-bedroom apartment, an employer who understands his lifelong wanderlust — and he makes a mean Grey Goose martini. Not a bad life for Ed Frazier, a bartender at Eddie V's Arboretum location, who grew up in Marlin and now has close friends in exotic locales.

"The money goes in the bank," says Frazier, who offers his age as "somewhere between 29 and 50-plus-plus" (probably closer to the far end of that span). "I don't have a lot. But you know what? I'm happy. I travel a lot."

He's been working in this spot since it was Brio Vista, fall '96. He also worked in Paris for a while until '99, then New York, then back home.

"Austin's my base and what a great base it is," he says as he gets the bar prepped for afternoon opening. "If I'm going to live in Texas, this is it."

He went to school at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, where he also did his student teaching, as well as taking art and psychology at State University of New York at Albany. As a young man he returned home from backpacking across Europe with all of 36 cents in his pocket and is on his fourth passport.

He first tended bar as a summer job at the Roaring Brook Ranch Tennis Resort in Lake George, N.Y., and there it was — a job that he could do wherever he wanted.

He's been to — and sometimes worked on — four continents and something like 15 or 16 countries.

"Here's this kid from Marlin, Texas, sitting in Turkey," he says, adding that at the end of the road he'd rather have experiences to look back on than stuff.

But while he's here before a trip to India in November, he's willing to show his trick for making a perfect vodka martini: Freeze the glass, pour the vodka into the shaker with ice and shake until you see a layer of ice begin to form on the outside of the shaker.

But that's not the real secret to being a good bartender. It's this:

"Hanging your problems outside the door once you walk in. People are paying good money to be entertained, and they don't want to deal with someone who is rough with the public. I can be in a bad mood, and work turns me right around. I love working with people. People cheer me up."

Not only that, they remember him. When Frazier moved to town around 1993, some three years before landing where he is now, he says he knew maybe five people in Austin.

These days, "I can't go to H-E-B without seeing somebody looking at me like they know me and I just go, 'Eddie's V's.' "

The next trip on Frazier's itinerary won't be all fun and games. He's got osteoarthritis in both knees ("I've gotten so tired of the fact that first thing in the morning I have a glass of water and two pills") and plans to have one replaced as a medical tourist in Delhi, India. He'll convalesce in a sort of resort medical facility before setting out to sightsee, including a trip to the Taj Mahal.

He'll be back behind the bar soon enough. But he'll be gone again before too long.

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603