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Was it worth the wait? Given that whatever else a cocktail is, it’s a small drink that tastes like boozy juice, I can’t say that it was. But more than the extended verbiage-to-enjoyment ratio, the problem seems rather to be a profound slippage in the understanding of what it is to drink.
A drink is a social experience. It should appear as if by magic to lubricate the interaction. It is an accomplice that should bring pleasure; it is not the diva-like, needy main event. But cocktail bores, and their many dimly lit meccas, don’t agree: they think a drink has some inherent interest and value beyond giving a tasty buzz, or in the case of good beer or wine, a deeper but still background appreciation. When drinking Serious Cocktails, though, the drink is more important than the drinker.
Perhaps it has to be, given the grandiose complexity of a typical upmarket cocktail menu. I long ago gave up trying to understand what New York mixologists were talking about. Even in lower-key settings, the cocktail has become a beast too complex for the ordinary drinker.
At Planter’s House in St. Louis, the Black Manhattan, we are told, contains an arduous combination of ‘Selection Elijah Craig Barrel Proof 131.8’, something called Amaro Averna (Google tells me it is a sickly Sicilian liqueur), Reagan’s orange bitters and Angostura bitters. At cultish 69 Colebrooke Row in London, the coup de grace of the house Bloody Mary (a gruesome drink at heart) is pepper distillate. Know what that is? Me neither. Care what it is? Quite.
Or take Colebrooke’s ‘Maestro Hi’ which contains rum (a frankly inappropriate spirit for grown-ups) with verjus, bergamot, candy ginger, gunpowder tea and soda. Like its name, none of it makes sense. It’s also highly unlikely that anyone knows what verjus is, let alone gunpowder tea, requiring exegesis from a self-important barman or waiter.
It’s all such hard work. As well as the basic willingness to Google obscure formulations and listen to their further elucidation, most cocktail menus now require strong analytic skills – the opposite of what the weary drinker wants after a long day. One I confronted recently was a sprawling rubric of several sections, divided into flavour profiles, each with honeycomb-shaped diagrams representing the proportion of influences in each cocktail. The cocktail menu had at least as many words as an undergraduate’s essay – and was no less exhausting to read.
Simpler cocktail menus can make one feel ill, if for different reasons: while ordering from the menu of Earnest Drinks at Gracie’s Ice Cream in Boston, my hometown, I felt distinctly queasy thanks to drinks such as the pandan and whiskey frappe, and a Red Bull vodka slushie. Unfortunately, the connoisseur culture around cocktails doesn’t seem to be dying out. Forget Prohibition. We live in the era of the overmarketed, oversweetened, overpriced and overexplained cocktail.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition.
Because you read about cocktails
Also by Zoe Strimpel
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