The Aughts in Cocktails

Confronted regularly with so many new cocktail creations, as I have been over the past few years, I've often fell to musing, "Which of these libations are for the ages?" It's easy enough to decide if something is a good-tasting cocktail or not; that can be ascertained on the spot. But that doesn't necessarily equal staying power. Are we currently sipping, unknowingly, what will be considered by future generations to be our Martini, our Manhattan, our great contribution to the bar?

I had the opportunity to dwell on this matter in a very public way recently, writing a list of lasting libations for the Dec. 30 edition of the New York Times. Some of the entries—Audrey Saunders' Gin-Gin Mule, Don Lee's Benton's Old Fashioned, Phil Ward's Oaxaca Old Fashioned—were easy choices. I had long regarded them as modern classics which will have their place in coming histories of 21st-century drinking, not only because they are great drink in and of themselves, but because the embodied and/or kicked off significant mixology trends. Others I had originally thought to included—Salvatore Calabrese's Breakfast Martini and Julio Barmejo's Tommy's Margarita—I was forced to nix when I discovered from their authors that they were, in fact, created in the '90s, not the '00s. To back up my conclusions, I consulted with a couple dozen cocktails authorities on the East and West Coasts, as well as London.

Here's the article:

A Decade of Invention, and Reinvention

By ROBERT SIMONSON

WHEN you hoist a leg over a barstool these days, you’re as likely to find Tom Edison as a Tom Collins. Light bulbs have been popping up behind the bar, with more cocktails developed in the last 10 years than probably any decade since Prohibition. Some of them have emerged as modern classics, standing out not only as culinary creations, but also as signposts of the decade’s most significant mixology trends.

GIN-GIN MULE This Audrey Saunders invention is often the first thing that cocktail pros mention when asked about new classics. “Bartenders all over the world tend to know the Gin-Gin Mule,” said Gary Regan, author of several cocktail books, including the recent “Bartender’s Gin Compendium.” Ms. Saunders — a leading light in darkened bars — created it before founding her SoHo bar, Pegu Club. Essentially a gin-based version of the ginger-minty Moscow Mule — one of the few vodka cocktails still granted respect by the avant-garde — the drink was a symbol both of the cocktail crowd’s enthusiastic reclamation of gin and its curled-lip repudiation of vodka. (Gin is also the base of Ms. Sauders’s Earl Grey MarTEAni, an early and influential example of the tea-infusion trend.) By decade’s end, the Gin-Gin Mule could be found on cocktail menus across the country — as could gin.

BENTON’S OLD-FASHIONED Don Lee, formerly of PDT in the East Village, credits Eben Freeman, the mad-scientist mixologist of the recently demised Tailor, with opening his eyes to “fat washing” liquor. But it was this instantly cultish concoction, which infuses bourbon with Allan Benton’s Tennessee bacon, that revved up interest in that technique, which melds flesh and firewater. Created by Mr. Lee in 2007 at PDT, it perhaps best epitomizes the advent of savory cocktails, which draw herbs, spices and vegetables, including chilies, into the world within the glass.

OAXACA OLD-FASHIONED Tequila didn’t play much of a role in the early years of the cocktail renaissance. And mezcal, tequila’s rough-hewn relation, had none at all. Both are used instead of bourbon or rye in this south-of-the-border twist on the Old-Fashioned, with terroir-specific agave syrup instead of sugar. Invented in 2007 by the tequila specialist Philip Ward at Death & Co. in the East Village, this drink quickly appeared on menus across the country and became a harbinger of the Mexican spirits’ ascendancy. It’s now just one of many tequila- and mezcal-based drinks at Mr. Ward’s bar Mayahuel.

RED HOOK COCKTAIL Rye whiskey roared back in the last decade after decades in eclipse. With it came new homages to pre-Prohibition rye-based cocktails like the Manhattan and the Brooklyn. This mix of rye, sweet vermouth and maraschino liqueur, created by the former Milk & Honey bartender Enzo Errico, inspired at least a dozen more sub-riffs by other ardent cocktail classicists, with almost all the drinks named after Brooklyn neighborhoods, including the Greenpoint (which uses Chartreuse), the Cobble Hill (Amaro Montenegro and cucumber slices) and the Bensonhurst (maraschino liqueur and Cynar). New spins on the Old-Fashioned (see above) were nearly as common.

ST-GERMAIN COCKTAIL If you didn’t notice that, starting in 2007, St-Germain was in about half of the new drinks you were cradling, you just weren’t paying attention. The elderflower-based elixir with the sui generis floral flavor almost single-handedly invigorated the moribund liqueur category. Suddenly semi-forgotten potions like Drambuie, Cherry Heering and Chartreuse (the current mixer of the moment) were being dusted off and tarted up. And every new liqueur wanted to be as big as St-Germain when it grew up. A list of new St-Germain cocktails could fill a few columns, but the mix of the liqueur, Champagne and sparkling water known as the St-Germain cocktail was perhaps the most common, mixed by high-end watering holes like Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco and the Zig Zag Café in Seattle. Unusually, the recipe came not from a bartender’s brain, but the company’s marketing department. “It doesn’t happen that often that a drink that comes from a manufacturer gets so well received,” said Ann R. Tuennerman, founder of the Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans.

ABSINTHE DRIP When a liquor that has been unavailable for nine decades hits the shelves again, it creates a stir. For many cocktail mavens, absinthe, the Victorians’ embalmer of choice, was the missing piece to so many liquid puzzles. Bottles began reappearing on our shores in 2007, after it was realized that a nearly century-old ban had actually been overturned decades ago. By the end of the Bush administration, absinthe was even being made in America, like St. George from California and Trillium from Oregon. Soon, it was not unusual to find an absinthe water drip at the end of the bar, slowly clouding a glass of the green liquid with dissolved sugar, the classic way to drink absinthe. It would only be old hat if you happened to be Degas.

BARTENDER’S CHOICE Ten years ago, the suggestion that a barkeep name your poison would have been greeted with a withering fisheye. But “Bartender’s Choice” is an option seen on cocktail menus from the Varnish in Los Angeles to the Violet Hour in Chicago to any of Sasha Petraske’s joints in New York. Bartenders nationwide have raised their level of skill and scholarship. Customers have followed them with an increased sense of adventure and a willingness to swallow whatever they dish up.

The Sipping News

Gary Vaynerchuk, video blog wine reviewer with a 10-book deal and a million fans, had made his name one to remember. [NY Times]

Recession-time sales are down in Champagne land. [The Guardian]

Brian Miller at Death & Company is mixing up a melange of gins he calls "a gin Zombie." [Beachbum Berry]

Moonshine is back and Salon.com figured it out.

The Mai Tai is now Oakland's official cocktail. [Alcademics]

The New York Times examines the anatomy of the much talked-about "hard shake" and finds...it doesn't make much difference in the resultant cocktails. Eric Asimov, meanwhile, wonders how new this new shaking style is.

An Episode With Cynar

I was enjoying a drink at Milk & Honey's miniscule bar a month ago when I noticed a mural painting of the Cynar logo on the wall. It had been distressed so as to look decades old. Sasha Petraske, the owner, was on hand, so I asked him if he had painted the image because of his love of the Italian apertif. "God, no. I just have always loved the logo. I think Cynar is what they make you drink when you go to hell."

For those who don't know, Cynar is a bitter liqueur made from 13 herbs and plants. But nobody really cares about 12 of them. They only know the 13th: artichoke. Cynar makes sure you don't forget it's derived from artichokes by putting a big picture of the green vegetable on the label.

Sasha's comment made me wonder if Cynar could ever be a component of a successful cocktail. I got my answer this weekend at Death & Co., where I noticed a drink on the menu composer of Gin, Vermouth and Cynar calle "Cynartown." (I'm pretty sure that was the name.) I asked head bartender Phil Ward about it, and he seemed to have no reservations recommending it. He was the anti-Sasha. "I love Cynar," he said.

The potion was composed of two ounces Beefeater Gin, 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica, and 1/2 ounce Cynar. It was smooth and silky, a elegant mix of herbal flavors. It went down quick, as did the two cherries that came with it. There's hope for Cynar yet.

The Birth of the Cynarata

More on Death & Co.

In response to my recent item about the cocktail haven Death & Co., which cited The Villager as saying the bar was in danger of losing its liquor license, a helpful reader pointed me in the direction of new news at New York Magazine's Grub Street. It this latest edition of D&C's sage, owner David Kaplan meticulously explains the tavern's situation. Here it is in full:

In an article in The Villager this week, State Liquor Authority spokesman Bill Crowley claims that Death & Co. has lost its license to serve and could be closed for “illegally trafficking alcohol.” But partner David Kaplan disputes the story.

Kaplan tells us that he agreed to a $10,000 settlement with the SLA with the understanding that it would lead to a renewed liquor license. But the authority decided not to renew for the very reasons Kaplan was fined in the first place — namely, he was slow to let the SLA know that he had assumed principal ownership of the restaurant Raga (which was granted the liquor license) and was changing the name to Death & Co. But the law allows a venue to continue serving alcohol while the license is being disputed and, indeed, Kaplan said Crowley admitted after the Villager article was published that Death & Co. has the right to serve. “We have submitted a reconsideration to the SLA,” Kaplan writes us. “We anticipate they will grant this. If they deny the reconsideration we will then move to an Article 78 proceeding in a New York court of law.”

Documents filed to the SLA and reprinted here exclusively include the usual accounts of undercover visits to the bar (one visit found it operating about 30 minutes past its SLA-mandated bedtime of 2 a.m. on weekends), but the stuff that really shows the lengths to which operators have to go these days is found in the later pages. Remember accusations that the bar’s name and look invoked Nazism? A letter from a Jewish organization of which Kaplan is a board member assures the SLA, “David has traveled to Israel to meet Israeli families whose members were displaced due to the Holocaust.”

And then there’s a letter from chef Jacques Godin. We can only imagine his exasperation at allegations that Death is a bar and not a restaurant when he writes, “I do not understand what the polemic is about. D&C is a restaurant with a chef, a sous-chef, a line cook, a preparation clerc, a runner and dishwasher/busboy clerc. I don’t know about you but it seems a lot of people in the kitchen for a bar.” Oh snap!

OK, then. To repeat what I've stated before, I wish Death & Co. the best. It's a great place and I hope its lives to pour another day. I would only add to Godin's statements that the reason people probably continue to think of Death & Co. as a bar and not as a restaurant is because, quite frankly, the good food notwithstanding, its patrons go there primarily for the fantastic cocktails. I know I do

Whither Death & Co.

Death & Co, the swanky East Village faux-speakeasy, which has had its fair share of trouble with the locals and the Stage Liquor Authority, may be in its final days, reports The Villager.

The Greenwich Village paper said that on Dec. 21, "the State Liquor Authority notified the bar’s owners that it would not renew the place’s liquor license." (Nice Christmas present, huh?)

Some neighborhood folks have never really forgiven the place for originally representing itself as a restaurant that would close early. But it would be a sad thing if the joint closed down. It does what it does so well, and the bartenders are friendly and informative. I've never noticed a big hubbub outside the place, the way you do at other bars, and the patrons inside have always conducted themselves in a respectable fashion. (Of course, I've never been there past midnight. Who knows what goes on after that.)

I hope they'll be around at least a little while longer. I still haven't gotten my bowl of punch!

Death in the Early Evening

I finally made my way to Death & Co., the cocktail emporium on East 6th Street in the East Village. I almost got lost on my way there, however, as Death belongs to that precious group of cocktail dens that adores obscurity. The bar's facade is dim and not clearly marked, unless you look down at your feet and seen the name of the place on the sidewalk in front of the door. Why must all the new cocktail places breathlessly ape the aura of the speakeasy? Would it be so awful to advertise to the general public that you make good drinks?

The interior was dim, a long bar to the right, booths to the left. Deathheads could be spied in the decor if you looked for them. I took a seat at the far end of the bar, near the wall and began perusing the menu. An intriguing list, with ornate riffs on the Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Moscow Mule and Kir Royale. Specific liquors were identified. And there was a corner of the menu featuring cocktails created by "friends" such as Gary Regan, David Wondrich, James Meehan—the usual gang.

I can't say enough about the bartender (though, for the life of me, I can't remember his name; it was exotic and I was drinking). He was knowledgable, approachable, straightforward and friendly. We had edifying exchanges about Sazeracs, St. Germain, and more. I started with my usual: the Sazerac. Rittenhouse rye was chosen. The bartender took his time, stirring it plenty, and it came out well-integrated and rich and not too sweet. He said he "loved" the drink. Good man.

The girl sitting next to me had never heard of a Sazerac, so I let her have a taste. Oh, yes: there were two girls sitting next to me, two young girls, and they had been sitting there since 7 PM. They loved the joint and visited regularly, fascinated by the science of mixology. They had been drinking Pink Ladies pretty steadily and were on their sixth round. One later had a Ramos Giz Fizz, getting a head start on breakfast, I guess. They kept saying the current round would be the last, but then they'd go out for a smoke and return for another. "Sex and the City" was a favorite show of theirs. They could have been extras!

I turned to gin for my next round, trying the Elder Fashion, because I love St. Germain, one of its ingredients. It was a refreshing change of pace, what with the grapefruit twist and the huge freakin' piece of ice in the glass. I wanted to take it easy for my third and final drink, so I asked the barkeep to be my guide. He came back with a "riff" on a Brown Derby. Never would have thought of that one. But it did the trick, the smooth bourbon, grapefruit juice and honey keeping things easy.

I came away with wholly positive impression of the place. I plan to return around the holidays to partake of a bowl of genuine Fish House Punch and feel like a character in a Charles Dickens novel.