Last year, just before the New Orleans "Tales of the Cocktail" convention was about to get underway, I was trolling the blogs of various well-known mixologists and liquor journalists to see what they were up to. I happened upon a post by a bartender respected as a talented craftsman in cocktail circles. He joyfully reported that he was doing Jägermeister shots with a highly regarded cocktail journalist in a French Quarter bar.
The French Quarter offers a myriad of fine drinking choices (among a lot of bad ones, of course), and they went for the kind of alcohol injection you can get in any dive on the planet. I scratched my head.
Last year, I was hanging out at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic's official bar at the Astor Center, watching some of the best mixologists in New York go to work assembling magic combinations of liquors for waiting customers. Suddenly, in the middle of the rush, a call came from the kitchen. The bartenders stopped what they were doing and hustled into the kitchen like football players going into a huddle. There, a circle of shots waited for them. They threw them back simultaneously and then hurried back to their stations.
Shots. What is it about them that even the most self-serious and artisanal bartenders find so alluring? The unofficial "bartender's handshake" used to be a shot of Fernet Branca. Now, it's been overtaken by the Pickleback, which is a shot of Jameson followed by a shot of pickle brine. At the recent opening of Painkiller on the Lower East Side, one of the owners christened the place by passing out shots of rum. It's a scene I've witnessed countless times before.
