With three cocktail lounges, I am happily tied to New York City! The trick is catching me running between the three joints! I am in NYC about 98 percent of the time. Where and when can we find you in New York? Julie Reiner Clover Club, Flatiron Lounge, Lani Kai Photograph: Courtesy Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux.But I would not be disappointed at all if they would stop flavoring perfectly good spirits with artificial crap and trying to twist my arm into saying nice things about the results.
Cocktails are just drinks-the most worked up I'll ever get about them barely amounts to a feeling of mild disappointment. What pisses me off is the growing inequity between the richest Americans and the rest of us, the decay of our infrastructure, the decline of our education system, and the cheapening and vulgarization of our culture. Soapbox time: What pisses you off? What do we need to start or stop talking about? My monthly column for Esquire, cocktail columns for Imbibe magazine and the Malt Advocate, a monograph on Cuban bartending with Greg Boehm, translating The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into Lithuanian. Basically, a drinking tour of the world in the steamship age. Since Punch tried to tell the story of the birth of modern mixology and Imbibe! the story of how America came to dominate the craft, for my next one I'm going to try to tell the story of how the American cocktail went global in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Got another book in you? What topic would you love to explore? Imbibe! and Punch are practically textbooks for scholarly bartenders. Thomas, William Schmidt, Harry Johnson, George Kappeler, Hugo Ensslin, Jack Grohusko, Eddie Woelke and a hundred other old-time barkeepers who laid down the principles of the trade. And Orsamus Willard, Cato Alexander, Shed Sterling, Panama Joe Fernandez, Jerry P. To whom do New York City bartenders owe a debt of gratitude?ĭale DeGroff. "As soon as you pick up a chef's knife and approach food, you're already in debt to the French," wrote Anthony Bourdain in No Reservations. Too many drinks made with these things end up tasting like somebody boiled the sachet from your grandmother's coffee table in them. And if the "house-made" trend (house-made bitters, syrups, infusions, etc.) could not die, but at least catch mono and have to stay home for a while, I would not be displeased. Now if someone could just clone the jukebox from Hank's and put it in a cocktail bar.Ĭucumbers.
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I like places where good cocktails are a given and you're free to focus on the other parts of the bar experience. Some current favorites are Lani Kai in Soho, Dram and The Drink in Williamsburg, and the Rum House in midtown. There are a number of casual, pleasant new bars with excellent cocktails-places where you can converse with your friends, nibble on something and enjoy a well-crafted drink without having to worry that you might not be doing it right. Gin martini, straight up with an olive and a twist.ĭavid Wondrich, cocktail historian and writer, author of Imbibe! and Punch, and cofounder of Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR) I'd love to explore small plates and cocktails. You wrote The Essential Cocktail and The Craft of the Cocktail. Mediocrity, poor ingredients, lack of training as a craft profession. What cocktail trends would you like to see die?
I have been on the road more than in NYC, so what excites me is to see the blossoming of the cocktailian scene in cities around the country.around the world, in fact. What have you seen around New York lately that's excited you? When a person is not suited for this constant interaction with all sorts of people, cynicism and meanness can overcome their personality-and there is nothing as disheartening as an unhappy person in a happy place, like behind the bar of a good saloon. I want to share with as many young bartenders as I can the richness of opportunity the profession affords us an opportunity to touch perhaps more lives than many other professions permit. What does that responsibility mean to you? You began working with fresh juices and other quality ingredients at the Rainbow Room in the 1980s, and are often credited with being the godfather of the modern mixology movement. Dale DeGroff "King Cocktail" and cofounder of Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR), an educational course for bartenders and spirit professionals
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