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Your immediate source of drink recipes is the Bartender's Guide
Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide -- a classic that holds true for today's generation (We have more bartender's guides to offer you, following this article) Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 20, 2004 by Gary Regan
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Customers sip on Mai Tais, Scorpions and Trader Vic Grog. Drinks are served in coconut shells, hollowed-out pineapples, plastic "skulls," or exotic bowls carved with erotica and filled with punches for two or more people.
And, yes, that kind of scenario is Trader Vic's legacy. Donn the Beachcomber, real name Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt, might have opened the world's first Polynesian-theme restaurant in the Hollywood of 1934, but it was Vic Bergeron, the Trader's given name, who took the concept nationwide and eventually overseas, too.
When I think of Trader Vic, though, my mind goes to a different place. I think of Bergeron as a sort of ordinary-Joe bartender.
Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide, first published in 1947 with a revised edition hit ting bookstores in 1972, contains lots of cocktail recipes, some of them embellished with stories about how they came to be created or who they are named for, but for me that's not the meat of the book.
The written recipes, for the most part, are there for reference--how many types of rum go into a Planter's Punch, for example. The recipes also stir the imagination by presenting new ways to combine familiar ingredients. One look at Bergeron's recipe for Nog of Raspberries and Galliano will convince you of that.
In the front of the book, though, Bergeron offers advice and observations on tending bar. "The bar could be Trader Vic's or Joe Blow's or a bar in anybody's home," he promises.
Bergeron divides his bar wisdom among three chapters. The first one, "The sour apple part of bartending, or the big dealers, phonies, and con artists," points out some of the tricks pulled at bars in an attempt to get free drinks or to beat the system monetarily.
Waving a 50-dollar bill in the air to get the bartender's attention and replacing it with a twenty when the drink is paid for is a swindle that was played on yours truly more than once when I was working behind the bar.
The customer then claims to have given the bartender a 50, the bartender remembers seeing a 50 and when confronted, unless the bartender is savvy, he or she ends up pulling an extra 30 dollars from the register. And the grifter is a happy man or woman.
In the chapter titled "People that bartenders don't like," Bergeron describes characters such as bar flies who want to talk to every other customer at the bar, sometimes boring them until they leave, and various and sundry other undesirable patrons. But it's the following chapter that I love best of all.
The
Bartender's Black Book
The
Ultimate Cocktail Book 2
Bartending
Inside-Out
The
Ultimate Little Blender Book
The
Pink Drink Book
The
Original Guide to Caribbean Rum and Drinks
The
Original Guide to Alcohol-Free Beverages and Drinks
The
Original Guide to Margaritas and Tequila
The
Ultimate Little Shooter Book II 
The
Ultimate Little Martini Book 
--- Featuring 200 concoctions with character, The Cocktail
shows readers the savoir faire of pairing drinks with occasions-
mixing up a Rum Runner for an afternoon spent in bare feet and
hammocks, or shaking up a 42 Flying Mules for a supercharged
late night of raw emotion.