I don’t know what to order anymore. When I walk into a fancy cocktail bar—I should add right away that I absolutely love fancy cocktail bars and always have—and they slide me the menu, I feel like Elmer Fudd.
It used to be, 10 or 15 years ago, that when you studied the menu at one of the then-new craft cocktail bars, the odds were pretty good that you knew what to expect from each drink. There would be a benchmark house Daiquiri or Old-Fashioned or something like that, so you could see how they did things, a few carefully chosen drinks excavated from one or another old cocktail book and, finally, a clutch of original drinks.
One or two of those originals might have pushed things a bit, deploying an obscure ingredient or a novel technique—say, Peychaud’s bitters as a base, or bourbon that had bacon fat poured into it and strained out again. Most, however, were pretty restrained twists on the classics, relying on not much more than a judicious substitution or two.
Nowadays, though, I look at a menu and the dozen-odd drinks will all be new to me, which takes some doing: I’ve been writing about cocktails since 1999 and drinking them a lot longer still. If there’s a classic, it’ll have undergone a Shakespearean sea change. As for any original cocktails, they certainly are that. These will have five, six, seven or more ingredients, many of them obscure or house-concocted, and all combined in ways intended to startle. Say, marigold-blossom infused espadín mezcal mixed with Alsatian kirschwasser, Strega liqueur, house-roasted sweet-potato nectar, sercial Madeira and yuzu bitters. They’re built to say “hey, look at me!”
This isn’t automatically a bad thing. Some of these creations turn out to be truly delicious, and without a push toward the experimental, we would never have this spectacularly broad palette of ingredients, or fun things like ice diamonds and the so-called Coconut Blast. But balancing that many full-flavored ingredients has a high risk of failure. And, with that many variables in play in each drink, there’s no way of predicting whether my $20 is being advanced for something heady and delightful or something that tastes like water mopped up from a flower-shop floor.
So, what the hell happened? Clearly, a corner was turned, and somehow we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs, creating tricky, impossible-to-replicate works of culinary art—but when was that, and more importantly, why?
To answer that question, it’s worth noting that we’ve been through this kind of change before. In fact, the history of the American bar, from its very beginning in the lean years after the Revolution, is one of irregularly alternating cycles of classicism, let’s call it, and creativity. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, these things were pretty regular: There’d be 20-odd years of bartenders turning out all kinds of elaborate, occasionally unhinged drinks, followed by another 20-odd years of their successors tidying things up, like keeping the good drinks and bouncing out the ridiculous ones. Take, for example, the Mint Julep with three kinds of wine plus French brandy, Jamaican rum, lemon, pineapple and powdered sugar. It was followed by the simple Brandy Julep, which kept the rum as a float and ditched the rest.
“Somehow we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs.”
The 20th century broke that pattern. It began, for reasons we need not get into (think Prohibition, World Wars, the Depression), with everything freezing solid for a really long time. From 1910 or so until the early ’60s, cocktail bars barely changed what they offered. While the many drink books published during that stretch are full of new recipes, if you look at the surviving cocktail menus from the period—which give us a record of what was actually served—you find the same 40-odd drinks over and over. You’ve heard of them, drunk them, seen them printed in technicolor on suburban diner menus. Today we call them “classic cocktails.”
But by the time the mid-1960s hove into view, five long decades of deferred change burst out like a dam-break. When the baby boomers reached drinking age, they brought with them not only a wave of new drinks, but a tide that swept out most of the old ones. The young men and women (in unprecedented numbers) in bars weren’t there to acquire a taste for Scotch and rye or to appreciate a dry Martini made just so. They weren’t training to be grown-ups, like their parents had at their age, and there were enough of them to force the world to bend and meet them for a change.
So, in came easy, fun, youthful stuff like Harvey Wallbangers and Velvet Hammers, Godfathers, Pink Squirrels and Piña Coladas, and out went all but a few of the, dare I say, sluttier classics—the Sloe Gin Fizz, because it was sweet and pink; the Singapore Sling, because it sounded sexy; the Brandy Alexander, because it was sweet and creamy. (The Martini still survived, but only if you count the vodka Martini or the Martini on the rocks.) Dirt-simple was in. “Two ingredients to a drink seems to have become a golden imbibing rule,” the New York Times noted in 1966; use a light spirit like blended Scotch, splash in a little liqueur—Drambuie, amaretto, whatever—and done. Along with the stiff old drinks went the stiff old bartenders, the veterans who understood the traditional principles of mixology that guided how drinks were mixed, who knew the lore that made people want to drink them. Enter instead a mess of charismatic young college grads who knew how the kids thought and could be taught to bang out a few simple drinks. If they had career aspirations, they weren’t in bartending; they’d work the job for a while and then someone younger and, now, hipper would replace them. San Francisco’s pioneering fern bar, Henry Africa’s, placed an ad for bartenders in 1972 that said it all: “21-25 yrs., well proportioned 5’10” + … College degree required, experience not.”
By the 1970s, when everyone had gotten a little bored with this new mixology, bartenders didn’t back off, they doubled down. Once you establish that the game is novelty, it’s hard to stop that game. As the ’70s wore on, bartenders tried a bunch of things, including giving their simple drinks ever-smuttier names—e.g., Sloe Comfortable Screw, Screaming Orgasm—and whipping technicolor liqueurs, artificial fruit syrups and ice cream into an ecosystem of new, flamboyantly nonclassic, weakly alcoholized kiddie drinks. (The Mudslide is the main survivor from that cohort.) Some bartenders, on the other hand, leaned farther into the performance aspects of what they did. Dale Rosenberger of Edmonton, Alberta, took the cake by working the very busy bar at the Rex Motor Inn while hanging upside down from gravity boots.
By the late 1980s, Generation X, which followed the baby boomers the way the guy with the shovel and the wheelbarrow follows the elephant parade, had enough with these boomer shenanigans and started feeling its way back to something rather more traditional. It took a while, and a whole lot of Cosmopolitans and Apple Martinis, but by the late ’90s, forces were aligned to overthrow, or at least offer a widespread alternative to, the new mixology in all its branches.
“Once you establish that the game is novelty, it’s hard to stop that game.”
I’m not going to get into a blow-by-blow history of the cocktail revolution here, or whatever you want to call it. But by 2005, a loose group of assorted bartending traditionalists, culinary mixologists, cocktail archeologists and such had succeeded in making the ghost walk: For the first time in two generations, pretty much every major city had at least one bar where a nongeriatric bartender would gladly mix you up a proper Manhattan from rye, enough vermouth and bitters. You could even get a Jack Rose, a White Lady, a Pegu Club or—well, pretty much anything that would have been on the list of a good hotel bar in 1937.
For the most part, the bartenders made this look easy; for the most part, it was not. Resurrecting a cocktail at a time when many of the requisite ingredients were no longer imported was dark magic, far darker than the conjuring and prestidigitation practiced by the flair bartenders. It was necromancy, it was time travel, and it caught on quick. In the decade after the World Trade Center was attacked, escaping through time looked awfully good.
But the 2000s were not the 1930s. Bartenders and barflies both got a little itchy on a steady diet of classics and “forgotten classics” (which were basically also-rans excavated from old cocktail books and shown a little limelight, most of them for the first time ever). Once these various dead cocktails were sliding across bars on a regular basis, they became the living, and the living are just never as interesting as the dead.
Bartenders responded by tinkering with the old recipes, keeping the pattern and the attention to detail, but substituting one ingredient or another with something slightly more adventurous, then giving the result a new name. A Mojito with Champagne instead of soda water? Call it the Old Cuban. A Last Word with rye for the gin and lemon juice for the lime? That’s a Final Ward. Coming on the heels of such ’90s creations as the Red Headed Slut and the Irish Car Bomb, these non-shitty new drinks were a complete novelty—and many of them became modern classics.
Yet a bigger problem was looming, based on the rule of necromancy that you can only raise the dead once. The next wave of bartenders, the ones trained maybe not by Audrey Saunders or Murray Stenson, but by their protégés, found themselves in an awkward position. They knew everything, more or less, that their mentors knew, because their mentors weren’t your typical magicians: Their mentors revealed everything, how they did it, where to find their sources, everything. They told it in lectures and articles, in books, on TV and via the internet. That left little for the next wave, with fewer historical secrets, lost techniques and forgotten cocktails to reveal.
So the proteéges started their own informal, semisecret little cocktail revolution, right in the heart of the other one. Where the first one was concerned with revival and reestablishing traditions, this one didn’t really care so much about that stuff. Strip out the culture and the lore and just focus on the mixology, on the things that could be measured in ounces and milliliters.
“Once these various dead cocktails were sliding across bars on a regular basis, they became the living, and the living are just never as interesting as the dead. ”
If this minirevolution had a manifesto, it was the little book that Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak self-published in 2009. Rogue Cocktails was published, according to the authors, “as a validation of the experimental bartending community,” i.e., the (presumably young) bartenders responsible for the “amazing cocktails being stirred and shaken at bars across the country that don’t fit into a single pre-conceived notion of what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘classic’ cocktail.” They wanted fewer twists on classics and more cocktails with real individuality. Ironically, though, they also insisted that you had to know your classics in and out, and did not believe that those new drinks needed “complicated and time-consuming syrups, tinctures, infusions, or foams.” At their core, they thought, those new drinks should “taste good” and, crucially, be “replicatable.” Yet revolutions seldom unfold the way the people who thought them up would prefer, and that’s not how things played out.
At the beginning of 2014, the Dead Rabbit in New York, a cocktail bar then barely a year old, replaced the opening menu it had released with great fanfare with a new iteration. Where the first offered sensitive tweaks on 19 different categories of 19-century bar drinks, from Absinthe to Bishops to Possets, Punches and Smashes, the new menu was largely experimental drinks, divided into thematic categories from “Ambitious” to “Fresh” to “Strong.” The “Ambitious” Independence Day was pretty typical: Mordain Poitin, Pernod Absinthe, mint, vanilla, pistachio, eucalyptus, fresh cream. In 2016, the bar ranked first in the World’s 50 Best Bars. By then, experimental bartending was spreading like kudzu—which was, coincidentally, starting to turn up in cocktails.
That wasn’t the only oddity to be found. Back when Rogue Cocktails was gestating, there had been an attempt to pull the cocktail revolution into the modernist cuisine orbit, to invite the chemistry lab into the bar. Initially, that fizzled out. You didn’t need a centrifuge to make a perfect Singapore Sling, and a French 75 was not noticeably improved by having little boba-like pearls of Cointreau floating in it.
But now it was back to the novelty game. House-made ingredients and unusual liquors turned out to be handy pegs for journalists and influencers to hang coverage on, and a way to get your name and your bar’s name into the running for awards, which started popping up once the industry realized there was money to be made in craft cocktails.
First in London, and then in New York, San Francisco and other American cities (not to mention Mexico City, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo) new cocktail bars competed over the complexity of their housemade ingredients, and the techniques and technology that had initially looked corny began to look really useful. Hydrosols, fat-washes, spherifications, rotovapped thises and centrifuged thats began appearing on, and then practically devouring, cocktail menus.
“The techniques and technology that had initially looked corny began to look really useful.”
For its practitioners, experimental bartending works kind of like bebop did for jazz musicians: a music so technically complicated that few could tell what the basic chord changes or the structure of the song were, or if the musician was playing it right or wrong. It sounded impressive, made a lot of noise, attracted a lot of attention and took a lot of chops to execute. The bopper stock-in-trade was to reharmonize a well-known popular song such as Irving Berlin’s “I Got Rhythm,” substituting related chords for the ones in the song, and then improvise a (dazzlingly fast) new melody over the new chords. Only the cognoscenti would be able to recognize Berlin’s old warhorse under all the smoke and flames.
Similarly, an experimental bartender might take, say, a Sidecar—Cognac, Cointreau and lemon juice, optional sugar rim—and bebop it. A common first move is to start not with the classic itself, but with a known variation. So let’s say the Apple Car, with applejack for the Cognac. Then one might replace the apple brandy with, say, malaga-raisin infused Icelandic brennivin. “Brennivin” and “brandy” have the same etymology, although the Icelandic version is grain-based—the raisin infusion is an old blender’s trick to make grain spirits taste like grape. But we’ve left the apple out, so let’s replace the Cointreau with a cordial made in the rotovap from foraged Long Island crabapples. Bright, fresh, unpurchasable. Since that has in turn displaced the orange, why don’t we replace the lemon juice with acid-adjusted, centrifuged Sicilian blood-orange juice—the added citric acid will make it tart, and the spinning around in circles will leave it a bright, transparent red. Stir (to keep it clear), strain, pour into a chilled cocktail glass with the edge rimmed in molasses crystals and powdered apple peel, and call it an “Island Jitney” (all the ingredients have island origins, and you ride in a jitney like you do in a sidecar). Easy.
Of course, not all experimental drinks are this elaborate; most are content with finding a left-field flavor combination and leaving it at that. But drinks like this are the flagships. They’re fun, in a tricksy sort of way, and can be delicious. But, like bebop, they’re also—and this is a feature—polarizing, pulling in the geekier and, generally, younger consumers and pushing away the older ones with more conservative tastes. And, like bebop, their time will pass.
The level of manic energy—not to mention labor—it takes to come up with these drinks over and over is not sustainable. Most of these drinks, or the vast majority of them, will disappear; with all their unique ingredients and nonintuitive formulae, they’re not reproducible. That’s the goal behind them—you have to go to this bar, to this bartender, to get your Island Jitney. They get the credit for what you’re drinking, not some long-dead bartender who worked in Buenos Aires before you were born. All well and good, but if the original Martini had used a house-made hydrosol of fennel fronds and marigold leaf instead of vermouth, the only thing “Martini” would signify to us today is an Italian brand of vermouth.
If the drinks themselves sink under the weight of their complexity and over-the-top need for attention, a few of the simpler techniques will inevitably get incorporated into the general run of mixology (a cheap, reliable high-volume centrifuge would get a lot of play, I suspect). So will some of the flavor profiles, like bitter/umami or smoky/sour. But it will be in a less elaborate drink than the great majority of the ones I see. Some of the experimentalist bartenders will fall into nostalgia and do $20 Harvey Wallbangers and shooters, drinks from long before they were born (we’re seeing that already). Others will, with the distance of time, reclaim an interest in the classics and rediscover simpler pleasures. I’ll be there to meet them, I hope.
In the meanwhile, can we bring back the gravity boots?
