An informal survey of several bartenders on whether they use gloves or tongs when garnishing beer bottles was met with incredulity, ridicule and disdain. But when asked to perform this alien ritual, they did their best with the tongs, gripping the little wedges and guiding them into the bottles. Some fumbled, while others took to it like surgeons performing a transplant. None of them seemed happy with the thought of doing it every day.

The first stop was Smith & Wollensky, the revered brass-rail bar and steakhouse in Midtown where the staff wears sharp white coats. Patrick Ford, a bartender for 35 of his 53 years, was standing behind the polished bar amid gleaming bottles on a busy Tuesday night as he considered how to legally garnish a beer.

“I won’t wear gloves,” he said, his tall frame so thin it seemed his white coat was still on a hanger. “It’s not a doctor’s office. It’s a saloon.”

He fished out a Corona and looked around. “We don’t have tongs,” he said. “I’ll use a fork.”

He speared a little wedge of lime and walked past several amused regular customers, toward a waiting Corona. In his coat, holding the fruit before him, he looked like a mad scientist with a laboratory specimen. The lime addressed the lip of the beer bottle with uncertainty, but when Mr. Ford removed the fork, it stuck there. Men cheered.

“Hey, Patty,” one man bellowed. “Give me a Corona over here! Be sure to use a fork!”

The more experienced the bartender, the more ludicrous the rule sounded, as bizarre as using tongs to shake someone’s hand. Good bartenders flow behind the bar, with rhythm and economy of movement, and regulatory disruptions trip them up. Tongs are to a bartender what work boots would be on a ballerina.

Take Dale DeGroff, 59, a bartender since 1974 and the self-proclaimed “king of cocktails,” as well as the author of “The Craft of the Cocktail.” A former bartender at the Rainbow Room, among other New York establishments, he said he had never heard of tongs or gloves for limes in beer bottles until he was called for this article.

“It’s been accepted practice for 200 years in New York that a bartender will twist a lime in your gin and tonic,” he said. “Can you imagine bartenders wearing rubber gloves and how ridiculous that would be?”