Milk & Honey Moves On, Reservation-Free

Speculation about the uptown move of ur-neo-speakeasy Milk & Honey has been so rampant for the past year, it was a particular pleasure to land the scoop on owner Sasha Petraske's plans for his Lower East Bar—not to mention the lowdown on longtime M&H bartenders Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy's designs on the old Eldridge Street space, which they will reinvent as Attaboy. (By the way, the Attaboy cocktail found in the Savoy cocktail book will not be on the men at Attaboy because, said McIlroy, "It's a disgusting drink.")

I learned a couple other mini-scoops from Petraske when I met with him, Ross and McIlroy recently. I politely agreed not to reveal these plans, as they might through various monkey wrenches into the barman's works. But keep your eye on Petraske and company. They have some surprises in store.

So, will the new 23rd Street Milk & Honey be the same without a secret entrance and a cryptic reservation policy? A better question would be, who ever went there for those reasons? I went for the atmosphere, the bartenders and the expertly made drinks.

Here's my Times article:

Sasha Petraske Founds a Cocktail Convention

Sasha Petraske—owner of Milk & Honey, Little Branch, Dutch Kills, and one of the Mount Rushmore faces of the neo-classic cocktail era—has founded his own cocktail convention. It's called the San Antonio Cocktail Conference, and the inaugural event will take place Jan. 26-29, 2012.

That Petraske would launch such a venture is somewhat surprising. Among the leading lights of the cocktail world, he is perhaps also the most elusive. He avoids talking to the press, and has only rarely presented seminars at other cocktail confabs, such as Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans and the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, where he sits on the founding advisory board.

Petraske said he decided to create the convention because he had become enamored of San Antonio during his various business visits to the Texas city. Moreover, the bash will not be for profit. Conference proceeds will benefit HeartGift San Antonio, "a group of surgeons, pediactric cardiologists, medical personnnel, volunteers, and host families dedicated to providing life-saving heart surgery to disadvantaged children living in developing countries where specialized treatment is scarce or nonexsistent."

Many seminars during the four-day event will be manned by an array of bartenders from the Petraske circle. Eric Alperin, a partner with Petraske in L.A. The Varnish, will present "Ice the Old Fashioned Way." Courtney Munch, another Varnish bartender, will teach "Yoga for Bartenders, Waitresses and Drinkers." Sam Ross, barman at Milk & Honey, will talk about bitters in "The Bitter Truth."  Lucinda Sterling, senior bartender at Little Branch, will talk about sweetening agents in "Not Too Sweet." And Abraham Hawkins of Dutch Kills will discuss "The Old-Fashion Cocktail."

Also presenting are Christy Pope, Chad Solomon, John Lermayer, Michael Madrusan, Lauren Schell, Toby Cecchini, Brian Miller, Don Lee and Theo Liebermann. 

Tickets and info are available at www.SACocktailConference.com. I

The Dutch Kills Crews Gets Into the Ice Business

The ice scene in New York should get pretty interesting in the next few months. Many cocktail bars have made quality ice an issue in recent years. But they've taken on the matter themselves, either finding and creating their own custom ice or buying a Kold Draft machine. But now Sasha Petraske and Richard Boccato and the gang at Dutch Kills have created their very own ice company, hoping to sell ice not just to themselves, but their friends and colleagues' bars. On top of this, I know of another entity, just as well connected in cocktail circles, which will be launching a custom ice company this summer. Ice War!

Here's my New York Times article:

Ice With a Pedigree

By Robert Simoson

Anyone who has patronized Dutch Kills, the cocktail bar in Long Island City, Queens, has probably noticed the showy supporting role ice plays in its drinks. Long frozen spears skewer highballs.
Paperweight-size cubes weigh down rocks glasses. For other drinks, bartenders hack away at microwave-oven-size blocks, hewing custom chunks perfectly suited to each cocktail. Now, the Dutch Kills team will be exporting their vision of frozen water beyond Queens.

Sasha Petraske, Richard Boccato and Ian Present, who own and operate Dutch Kills, along with Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, who has been a bartender since the saloon opened in May 2009, have together founded Hundredweight Ice and Cocktail Services, with Mr. Boccato, Mr. Present and Mr. Gelnaw-Rubin acting as the operational core of the outfit. Hundredweight will operate out of the same industrial building that Dutch Kills calls home.

“The other side of the building has been vacant since we moved in a couple years ago,” Mr. Boccato said. “We always had our eyes on those rooms.” The company has bought two pricey Clinebell CB300X2 Carving Block Ice Maker machines, with another one on the way. The machines produce two 300-pound blocks of pristine ice every three to four days through a slow-freezing cycle.

While companies that provide ice to bars are hardly a new idea, Hundredweight will focus specifically on high-end, custom ice beloved by the creators of craft cocktails. “I believe we are the first of our ilk in New York to say that this is our m.o.,” he said, “to make this kind of ice for cocktail bars.” Hundredweight’s first customer is, natch, Dutch Kills. The company is also in talks with Milk & Honey, Mr. Petraske’s neo-speakeasy on the Lower East Side, and has reached out to the prominent cocktail consultancies like Contemporary Cocktails and aka wine geek, as well as the mixed drink conventions Tales of the Cocktail, in New Orleans, and Manhattan Cocktail Classic. Mr. Boccato’s newly opened bar, Tribeca Weatherup, which he runs with Kathryn Weatherup and Matthew Maddy, will not be a client; last fall, Mr. Boccato made the bar ice self-sufficient by installing a Clinebell machine.

Without revealing specific numbers, Mr. Boccato said that the prices at Hundredweight would be “extremely reasonable,” and that the company would work with any bar to create ice that suits their purposes and glassware. Want to festoon your drinks with ice spheres or diamonds? It can be done. But if you are having a wedding or a bar mitzvah and are looking for a decorative sculpture, look elsewhere.

“No penguins,” Mr. Boccato said.

A Visit to the John Dory

That Sasha Petraske (Milk & Honey, Little Branch, Dutch Kills, etc.) is behind the cocktail program at the new opened reincarnation of April Bloomfield's fish palace John Dory would be obvious even if one didn't know the information walking in. The staff is clearly schooled in the Petraske method. The glasses are chilled. The measurements are precise, and the drinks built carefully. Most tellingly, the ice is tapped, chopped and hacked to order and by hand.

No question, Petraske brought his usual game to the restaurant, the second this season (after Lambs Club in Midtown) to stamp its drinks program with his imprimatur. But the menu itself is a bit of a departure. As I mentioned when it debuted, it's leans pretty heavy on the Prosecco and white liquors and is in general light and fruity in tone.

John Dory Cocktail Menu Prosecco Happy

Is John Dory chef April Bloomfield mad for Prosecco, or is it Sasha Petraske, who created the cocktail list for the newly opened oyster bar?

Either way, there's more of the tank-fermented, cheap Italian sparkler on this cocktail menu than perhaps any in town. It's there in the Negroni Sbagliato (substituting for the gin in a Negroni), in the Williams "75" (substituting for the gin and/or Cognac in a French "75"), and in the Veronicocktail (a kind of gingered Kir Royale, with pomegranate molasses instead of creme de cassis).

I suppose the general notion is sparkling wine goes well with seafood, and Prosecco is more cost effective than Champagne. Otherwise, there's a lot of gin, citrus juice and ginger in these drinks. A light-hearted and white-liquored list overall, made for light-bodied food. 

The menu:

More on the New Lambs Club

I stopped by the softly opening Lambs Club in the Chatwal Hotel yesterday and learned a bit more about the Sasha Petraske-created drinks program.

First of all, the space, while a bit garish, is also gorgeous, and reminds one of the glamour that was once associated with the theatre district. I suspect it will become catnip for theatre types, who are always looking for an attractive backdrop. The mezzanine bar (seen above in the rear of the picture) is long and luxurious, its top a warmly glowing red glass, Empire State Building-shaped silver light fixtures above, the barmen in white jackets, hands folded behind their backs when they're not working.

Sasha Petraske Keeps It Simple at Lambs Club

I must say I do appreciate cocktail man Sasah Petraske's unflagging classicism. When all others are dabbling in this trend and that new fad, he pretty much sticks to the pre-Prohibition playbook. The menu he's come up with for midtown's newly refurbishing Lambs Club, set inside the Chatwal Hotel, may be his starkest yet, a mere five selections long. In a nod or two to modernity, it makes room for vodka and St. Germain.

The Lambs is on W. 44th between Broadway and Sixth. It's location it no mistake. It was once a prominent theatrical club, with origins in London. It was founded in 1869, named after Charles and Mary Lamb, who apparently were the objects of much actor freeloading back in the 19th century. The American version came in 1874. Members included Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, Bert Lahr and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Lowe first met at the Club. 

I was unhappy to see the old interior ripped apart. But perhaps, how, it will become a theatrical hangout again.

Here's the lists:

Julie Reiner Christens SoHo Bar Lani Kai

Lani Kai will be the name of Julie Reiner's upcoming SoHo bar.

"It’s a beach in Kailua on Oahu," Reiner, a native Hawaiian, told me for an item recently posted in the New York Times' Diner's Journal. "It’s a beach I spent a lot of time at as a kid. It’s a beautiful spot. It’s means ‘heavenly waters.’ For me, the name refers to both the beauty of the island, which I’m trying to capture in this new space, but also to the liquid form itself, which I’m always about." 

The Sipping News

Sasha Petraske to open a cocktail-jazz joint at 39th and Lex. I've been saying Midtown needed a decent cocktail place for years. And, to tantalize me further, he mentioned the words "Mad Men." [Fork in the Road]

Eben Freeman is all about cocktail carts, saying the "future is tableside." [Fork in the Road]

Freeman also announced the line-up of his "Cocktail All-Stars" thing,  which runs Feb. 8-10. Evening will focus of Eastern influences to drink-making and there will be an "Old-Timers" night, just like, you know, they do for baseball. [Grub Street]


Ravi DeRossi's Carteles will have a Rum Bar upstairs, with Charlotte Voisey in charge of the menu. [Grub Street]


The Way of Tiki Bars in NYC, Back When. [Diner's Journal]

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.

A View of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic

I attended the two-day "preview" of the new Manhattan Cocktail Classic, a cocktail caucus that is now supposed to materialize in Manhattan every May. Or, rather, I attended half of it. My schedule only permitted me to hang about on Saturday. Luckily, that gave me the opportunity to attend a panel by Milk & Honey's Sasha Pestraske. Petraske doesn't do many public seminars; his appearances at events like Tales of the Cocktail have been few. (His eye-opening talk on ice, in 2007, is still talked about.) That's a shame, because his “Cocktails for Your Home Cocktail Party" at MCC was easily one of the best cocktail panels I've ever attended, well-organized, cogently delivered, full of wit and packed with useful insights and tips. He went well over the time limit, talking for two and a half hours, and the audience remained rapt until the end.

I wrote up an account of the convention for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog, including a run-down of Petraske's panel. Here it is:

It was nearly impossible not to be offered a drink within five minutes of entering the Manhattan Cocktail Classic at Astor Center on Saturday.

The convention’s first refreshments were served before noon, and they were not Bloody Marys. White Ladys (gin, Cointreau, lemon juice) were passed out in connection with one of the convention’s first seminars of the weekend, “Have Cocktail Shake, Will Travel,” an account of the fruits of the American bartender exodus that followed Prohibition.

Over at the event’s “official bar,” a dozen original creations with New York-oriented names (Little Brazil, NY Postal Road Julep, Bowery Smash) were built by a rotating teams of four bartenders. A camera crew filmed Misty Kalkofen, of the Boston bar Drink, as she delicately slapped both sides of a sage leaf—the garnish for a creation called the Botanical Garden—on the back of her hand before slipping it on top of the gin-based drink.

John Myers, a Portland, Me., bartender with a mustache of 19th-century thickness, had flown in specifically for the convention. He said his shift behind the bar was due to begin at 4:30, though he had only been given the recipes for the 12 new drinks on Thursday.

“New York is the cradle of bartending,” said Mr. Myers. “Historically, the way things are done was codified here. All the great cocktail manuals were published here. Masters like Jerry Thomas worked here.”

Lorna Wilkerson was one of the ticket-buying civilians at the convention. A Queens-raised, Boston-based obstetrician and gynecologist, Ms. Wilkerson said she would like to open a bar. “I think with the way health care is going, I don’t know how much choice I’ll have,” she said, only half-joking. Ms. Wilkerson said her interest in cocktails began when her father, returning from his first trip to Hawaii, built a tiki bar in the basement of their home.

“When I saw the event announced in July, I e-mailed immediately and said, ‘Is this for real? Because I have four c-sections in October. I’m going to move them if I can come in.’ They said it was real, so I booked my flight.”

Ms. Wilkerson has a bone to pick, however, with the higher echelon of New York bartenders. “I like the intimacy of your really good bartender, which, if you’re good, you connect on a one-to-one level. You do that as a doctor as well. That’s how it should be. I brought a friend of mine to New York two or three months ago, and she made the mistake of asking for something with vodka and basically got a tongue lashing. I think that’s unfortunate. I love cocktails. I like the history of it, the tradition of it, and I’d like to bring my friends in. I think if I opened a bar, it would be a be more egalitarian.”

She perhaps found a kindred spirit when she attended “Cocktails for Your Home Cocktail Party,” a panel led by bar owner Sasha Petraske. (All the Saturday panels were sold out except one.) Though Mr. Petraske owns Milk & Honey, arguably the most exclusive cocktail bar in New York, he is opposed to the over-intellectualization of the bartending profession. “Getting people their drinks is just as important as making them well,” he said. “No drink in the world is worth waiting 20 minutes for.”

“This is not wine,” he continued. “It’s incredibly different than wine. Cocktail are for drinking, and not thinking about. We don’t do what a winemaker does. Anybody can make a good daiquiri—but nobody does.” Ah, there’s the rub.

Among the other nuggets of wisdom to be culled from Mr. Petraske’s presentation: civilized people hold a rocks glass at the lowest point; “citrus to order is the height of service, cutting ice to order is an affectation”; don’t put Champagne or beer in a frozen glass; a home “party party” means five drinks per person, a “civilized party” three drinks per person; if you shake a drink and then fine-strain it, thus eliminating the bristling layer of ice shaving on top of the drink, “it’s like having a child and killing it”; and, if you overserve people at your party, it’s your fault.

“It’s your responsibility to not overserve,” he argued. “Your guest’s judgment is impaired; you’re sober. If they’re really aggressive about getting another drink, a way around that is to serve them a non-alcoholic drink. They probably won’t notice. If they come back to you and say, ‘Hey, you served me a non-alcoholic drink,’ then they’re probably sober enough. Serve them another drink.”

Stick to Swizzles

I can't tell you how sick my wife is of hearing me say, with utter seriousness, the word "Swizzle." For the past few weeks, I've been researching this category of West Indies cocktail—talking with bartenders about Swizzles, soliciting recipes for Swizzles, sampling Swizzles. Each time I mentioned a new tidbit of information on the topic, my better half would roll her eyes and walk into the other room.

You can't blame her. It's a funny word. And cocktail people can start to sound a little touched in the head when they start talking with deadly earnestness about things like garnishes and the right kind of ice. Still, she was impressed when she finally sat down and tried a properly made Queen's Park Swizzle.

I was fortunate enough to write about Swizzles for the New York Times Summer Drinks issue. Here's the piece.

It’s Not So Mysterious: The Secret Is in the Swizzle

By Robert Simonson

WHEN Katie Stipe, a bartender at the Clover Club in Boerum Hill, gets an order for a mojito, she recommends that the customer try a Queens Park Swizzle instead.

“We steer them to it as a far superior version of the same sort of drink,” she said. Indeed, the cocktails share many ingredients: rum, citrus, sugar, mint. So why bother converting a customer? What makes one different from the other? Well, the swizzling, of course.

A Queens Park Swizzle is the best-known representative of a crushed-ice-laden and slightly mysterious cocktail category. The genre was born in the West Indies, probably in the 19th century, but has become increasingly popular in New York bars of late. Among other noteworthy examples are the Bermuda Swizzle (still wildly popular on that island) and the Barbados Red Rum Swizzle, a onetime staple at Trader Vic’s.

These drinks are not shaken or stirred, but rather swizzled with a genuine swizzle stick. Now, if you’re picturing one of those colorful plastic doohickeys that bars and resorts stick into their drinks as a combination advertisement and souvenir, stop right there.

The implement in question is an actual stick. It is snapped off a tree native to the Caribbean. Botanists call it Quararibea turbinata, but it is known to locals as the swizzle stick tree. The sticks are about six inches, with small prongs sticking out at the end, like the spokes of a wheel without the rim, and they are used as a kind of natural, manually operated Mixmaster.

These are halcyon days for behind-the-bar theatrics, and nothing lends the bartender’s art a touch of razzmatazz like a deftly deployed swizzle stick. “It takes a little showmanship,” said Stephen Remsberg, a New Orleans lawyer known for his extensive rum collection (1,300 bottles) and knowledge of rum drinks. “You insert the swizzle stick in the drink. And with both hands moving in coordination, simultaneously backwards and forwards, you simply rotate the shaft of the swizzle stick between your palms as quickly as you can.”

It is believed by some that the success of any swizzle lies entirely in the mixing prowess of the bartender.

“There really isn’t any difference between a simple rum punch and a swizzle except the technique used for making them,” Mr. Remsberg said. All agree that one thing happens when the drink is prepared in this way — and has to happen, for it to be a swizzle. “With the ideal swizzle you get a nice frost on the outside of the glass,” Ms. Stipe said.

Beyond that, what the method contributes to the drink — aside from a lively sideshow — is somewhat open to debate. Wayne Curtis, a cocktail authority and the author of “And a Bottle of Rum,” suspects that the stick’s significance is mainly cultural and ritualistic. Not that that’s a bad thing. “Ritual is fine,” Mr. Curtis said. “There’s a lot of ritual in the cocktail world.”

Richard Boccato — who put the Queens Park Swizzle on the menu at Dutch Kills, a new bar in Long Island City, Queens, that he owns with Sasha Petraske — thinks there’s more at stake. “The act in the swizzling is what makes the drink aesthetically pleasing to the guest,” Mr. Boccato said. “They enjoy watching it, for sure, but it’s also something that integral to the preparation. It’s very much what brings the drink together.”

But Mr. Petraske regards swizzling as simply a more controlled way of stirring. “It’s a way of not disturbing the muddled stuff that’s at the bottom,” he said. “Aside from that, I can’t think of any difference it makes.”

The swizzle is just that kind of cocktail. The more you chase after its essence, the less you understand. The cocktail expert David Wondrich said, “Vague answers are all you’re going to get.” That’s perhaps just as well, because it seems a shame to invest too much analysis in a practice so pleasingly theatrical, and in a drink that’s so easygoing and refreshing. “It’s almost like an adult snow cone,” Ms. Stipe said.

There’s one additional mystery surrounding the swizzle. Despite the demands of the cocktail craze, a real swizzle stick is not easily found in New York. Nearly every bar that serves swizzles gets the needed tools through some Caribbean connection. Mr. Boccato brings some sticks back from Martinique every time he visits his father, who lives nearby on St. Lucia.

“I’m surprised no one’s come out with a plastic version,” Mr. Curtis said.

While you're at it, take a look at the other fine articles in the section, including a A to Z guide to home bartending and a look at the lives of sober bartenders. And Eric Asimov looks at the problems in New York's beer scene.

The Sipping News

Not every grape is suited for sparkling wine. [NY Times]

Time Out New York reviews Long Island City's new Dutch Kills.

Bittermans, the German bitters makers, is partnering with America's The Bitter Truth to bring their bitters Stateside. The official release is in July.

A bit of old style wine advertising from Sonoma. [Dr. Vino]

Burgundy house Joseph Drouhin is relaunching its Chablis wines under the Drouhin Vaudon banner. [Decanter]

Jamie Goode likes Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Artemis Cabernet Sauvignon. Well, don't we all?

The Mexican and the Dutch

New York City has seen two major cocktail bar openings in the the past month: Phil Ward's Mayahuel in the East Village and Sasha Petraske's Dutch Kills, in Long Island City. Both are excellent and merit a visit, and both trailblaze in their way. With Mayahuel, Ward brings the cocktail revolution to tequila, and, with Dutch Kills, Petraske brings the cocktail revolution to, well, Queens.

Both worlds had long been underserved by the minds of today's mixologists. Sure, bartenders respected tequila and all, but who was really going out of their way to create a new raft of cocktails using the South-of-the-Border liquor as their base? Few, really, aside from Ward, who made the Oaxaca Old Fashioned a staple over at his previous perch, Death & Co. Gin and whiskey were the ones getting the major workouts, with rum put to the task here and there.

Petraske, meanwhile, is a geographical frontiersman. The business formula he employs at Dutch Kills is basically the same one found at his Little Branch, Milk & Honey and White Star (Old World vibe, gentlemanly bartenders, classic cocktails), but it's set in Queens, which has been completely ignored by the mixed drinks renaissance until now. (The Bronx and Staten Island remain ignored, but that's another issue.)

Dutch Kills is located on Jackson Avenue, a lonely desolate boulevard in lonely, desolate (at least at night, but pretty much in the day, too) Long Island City, the westernmost nabe in Queens. The ugly, industrial facade has been untouched. There's a larger than usual (for Sasha) neon "Bar" sign outside, so kudos for visibility! Inside, there's room to spare. The high-ceilinged, dark-wood place goes back, back, back, past a multitude of booths, past the back, ended in a sawdust-strewn room with benches and a piano. It may be my favorite of Petraske's always beautifully designed spaces. It's pleasant to be in a bar large enough that not everybody in the place knows you're there.


For his opening menu, Petraske has kept it simple and straightforward, pushing cocktails with a Queens theme. These include libations only a cocktail geek would know have been around for 75 years: the Astoria (basically a Martini with orange bitters); the Flushing (a Manhattan with Cognac); and the Queens Park Swizzle (a beauty with rum, lime, mint, bitters and plenty of ice).


Mayahuel, names after an Aztec god, is a cozy place more typical of the cocktail dens of our time. It's in the thick of Cocktail Central—the East Village, that is—on E. 6th, and takes up two floors of a former Moroccan restaurant. The floors are quite different in character. The top is all cushions and luxury; perfect for executive types who like to spend money, and couples on dates. The bottom floor, which lies down a couple steps from the entrance, is more to my taste: a tight little bar, two inviting arches wooden booths, a couple hidden stools in back, and a cantina feel lent by a profusion of lovely tilework. I may like the space better than any other EV bar. It just feels right.

I'm treating my visits to Mayahuel as part of a continuing education course in tequila. It's a spirit I need to learn more about, and there are few who have more to teach that Ward. He's very specific about the kind of tequila he puts in each cocktail, from Blanco to Reposads to Anejo, as well as which brand of each category to use. Mezcal is put to work as well. Dozens of tequilas are also offered straight up—golden opportunities to try various liquors that are not usually available by the pour. And, for those who'd rather pass on tequila, there are sangrias, beer-based cocktails and the usual back bar. (As a perverse gesture, I'm tempted to order Martini here at some point.)