Theater District club says pushy New Yorker forced waitress to pour scotch down his throat

The Boston Licensing Board decides Thursday what to do about an Oct. 17 incident at Bijou on Stuart Street, in which detectives watched a waitress at a VIP table tip a one-liter bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label into a patron's mouth as he gulped down the amber liquid.

Bijou attorney Karen Simao acknowledged that's what happened at a board hearing this morning.

But she pleaded for mercy on her client's behalf, saying "that is absolutely not a practice at Bijou" - since Boston regulations forbid customers at bottle-service tables from ever touching the bottles or drinking directly from them.

Simao said that what happened was that the customer in question was from New York, where "bottle service is run differently" and that he grew more and more adamant that the waitress assigned to his table pour the scotch right into his maw and that the waitress finally did so in an attempt to "calm down the patron."

Board Chairwoman Christine Pulgini, however, called that action "juvenile and unprofessional" and said she doubted that a place like Bijou wouldn't have enough security on hand to quickly quell the insistent New Yorker.

Simao acknowledged the waitress could have handled the situation differently and that she was issued a warning and briefly suspended for the incident.

In addition to breaching the ban on pouring alcohol into a customer's mouth, detectives also cited Bijou for violating a state ban on letting a customer have more than two drinks at once, based on the number of shots they saw him gulp down.

Simao argued that this was one area in which the waitress maintained control - that the amount of liquid the guy gulped was not more than the equivalent of two shot glasses of the stuff.