When a friend suggested on a recent night out that we order Pousse Cafés—a drink generally consisting of three to seven Technicolor liqueurs layered like a rainbow cookie—I had no choice but to demur. It was Friday night, the bar was busy and anyone who orders a Pousse Café in such a circumstance is, plainly, a dick.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence has accumulated over the years to support this notion. In one instance, recorded in The New York Times in 1903 under the heading, “A POUSSE CAFÉ SACRILEGE,” a customer with “an air of the provincial about him” ordered said drink at a Fifth Avenue bar. After laboring for a full 15 minutes on a multi-tiered masterpiece, the bartender presented the drink to the customer who promptly stirred it with a straw and downed the artless mixture.

Through a series of similar stories, the Pousse Café cemented its reputation as the universal emblem of terrible customers. But, before it became a punch line, the Pousse Café was a beloved 19th-century after-dinner drink (“Pousse Café” translates to “coffee pusher,” something to follow your late-night jolt). A French invention, it migrated to the U.S. as a fashionable example of continental drinking, appearing in Jerry Thomas’s How To Mix Drinks in 1862 under the unironic heading, “Fancy Drinks.”

Designed as a showpiece, the Pousse Café has always put the eye before the palate. Even the record-holding rendition, while impressive at a staggering 34 layers, is hardly inviting. Bartender and cocktail historian David Wondrich sums up the experience of drinking such a cocktail: “Oh, there’s the Cognac. Oh, there’s the maraschino.” In other words, he says, “Stupid.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Pousse Café has resisted its own bona fide craft revival. This is at least partially because its categorically unmixed nature stands in diametric opposition to the ethos of the craft cocktail movement, which, at its essence, strives to create drinks that are greater than the sum of their parts. The Pousse Café is literally the sum of its parts, nothing more, those parts all stacked one on top of another like some cartoon mockery of mixology.

However, for some drinkers, like Crosby Gaige, author of the 1941 Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion, the resolutely unmixed manner of the Pousse Café is the essence of its charm: “The successive sips give varying taste thrills.”

Likewise, Andrew Bohrer, a self-proclaimed fan of layered drinks, is one of the few modern craft cocktail bartenders—alongside Alex Negranza of Anvil and Eben Klemm of Rebelle—who appreciates the Pousse Café in all of its absurdist glory. In his days as bar manager at Mistral, Bohrer was known for his tradition of celebrating the 21st birthdays of externs by making “the biggest Pousse Café possible,” he explains.

Eben Klemm, a longtime bartender and cocktail consultant, takes a slightly different approach to the Pousse Café he created last year for the opening menu at Rebelle (it’s still available by request). Consisting of six layers—including housemade grenadine, Giffard Pamplemousse and green Chartreuse, each methodically striated—the meat of the drink comes in the form of housemade bourbon milk punch, “which itself is labor intensive,” explains Klemm. “It’s really all about wasted utility.”

Despite topping the pyramid of inefficiency, literally, a seven-layered Pousse Café has a loyal audience at Anvil, where Alex Negranza estimates he makes around 30 per week. “What initially started as a fun drink to have guests order from one of our bartenders quickly turned into a drink that people were coming in for,” says Negranza.

Caught somewhere between the dignified decorum of early 20th-century cocktailing and the vulgar reality of layered shots like the B-52 and Slippery Nipple, the Pousse Café may never make it back into the mainstream. But it’s nice to know that it lives on among the devoted few.

The post Who Orders a Pousse Café, Anyway? appeared first on PUNCH.

Earlier this month, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History announced that it was embarking on an epic three-year beer project, documenting American brewing history from roughly 1960 to today.

At the helm of this endeavor is Susan Evans McClure, the Smithsonian’s Director of Food History Programs. With a Master’s degree in arts education in from Harvard, several years as Marketing Manager at Vermont’s Magic Hat brewery and six years under her belt at the Smithsonian, McClure is uniquely positioned to head up the project.

For the past 20 years, the Smithsonian has been pursuing an ongoing study of the history of wine in the United States. Now, in collaboration with the Brewer’s Association, beer will get its chance in the spotlight, too. Here, McClure talks about the impact of agriculture on beer, how technology fits into the picture and how a grassroots home brewing movement has greatly improved brewing in America.

What historical objects related to beer or brewing does the Smithsonian already have in its collection?
We have the collection of a former brewmaster from Maryland [Walter Voigt] dating mostly from 1870 to 1960. He personally collected a lot of advertising material, glassware, patent papers, beer steins, bottle openers—and oh gosh, beer trays, beer trays all day.

Why do you, and the Smithsonian, think that the time is right for this project?
A lot of the changes that have been made since the 1960s in the brewing industry are changing again now. There’s enough to look back on in our rearview mirror… What we’re excited to do is really bring stories of brewing history into our collections so that they can help us tell a broader story of American history. So, we’ll be looking at advertising, agriculture, industry, business history, community and all of these strands that people might not even think are related to brewing. I’m particularly interested in the agriculture stories of brewing. How does the farmer who feeds spent grains to his cows relate to the fact that Americans are drinking more craft beer? That, to me, is a much more complex story of American history.

Where do you even start with a project of this magnitude?
That’s a great question that we are asking, too. We don’t go into it saying, “We want this thing.” We’re going into it saying, “What’s the most important part of this story? And what’s the object that tells that story for our audiences?” So, the first step is research; before we ever go out to talk to anyone or collect anything, we build a research base. What were those major changes from 1960s to today? What were the technological changes? What were the agricultural changes? We’ll lay that all out and then go into the field and interview people who have worked in the industry and document oral histories. We actually go into it with a very open perspective because it will become obvious in those conversations what material objects best represent the stories.

Who do you plan to talk with for these oral histories?
It will be brewers, but it will also be farmers and beer business people and consumers. One of the things that we’re interested in, from a community perspective, are these groups that grow up around brewing. Today, people are so committed to this brand identity around beer. How did that happen and what does that mean for American history? When I worked at a brewery, people used to send me pictures of their tattoos of our labels that they’d put on their bodies. So even way outside of food and drink, throughout American history, what is the thing that people have been that committed to that they’ll tattoo it on their body? Having it as a part of a broad American history story allows us to look at where else this is happening and where it came from.

[For example], in our food exhibition, we have a section about the Good Food movement, so post-1960s, back-to-the-land, farmers markets, food coops—that story. Being able to look at brewing in comparison to that is fascinating to us. Was that happening at the same time? How were the beer and food movement talking to each other—or not?

What role will current brewers play in this project?
We’re documenting history and history is happening every day, so we’ll be trying to find a good balance of people who were kind of the post-1960 beer revolutionaries up to the people who are doing the work today.

Others around the country are trying to document brewing history right now, too. Oregon State University has the Oregon Hops and Brewing archives and they’re doing really interesting work. We’re hoping to find other archives and museums around the country that are doing this and to see how we can collaborate. A lot of local areas look through a local lens, which is very important when we’re looking throughout all of the U.S.

Aside from breweries, who or what else will you be looking at?
We will definitely be looking at industry and how technology has impacted how beer has been made [from the 1960s to today]. The museum has what we call our Division of Work and Industry collection and that looks at how things are produced and the technology that goes into that. That’s a story about brewing that I don’t think most people who drink beer really think about. Even in the time since I started working in a brewery and in the four or five years that I was there, the whole process became automated. That’s a huge technological shift. So, when did that start? There are still people that are brewing on systems that are not digital—what does that mean?

You mentioned that agricultural history will be a big part of this. What, specifically, will you be investigating?
We’re really going to look at the impact that agricultural innovation and workers and production have had on brewing—and that brewing has had on production and agriculture. Hops production is a very interesting aspect, too, especially as hop farms are expanding beyond Washington State—you know, there are some in Virginia and Vermont… and so we’ll be looking at that.

How does advertising, or even political history, fit in?
The way Americans have used graphics and ads to sell product is a great American history story. And being able to include some of the brewery advertising, post 1950, will again help us tell a broader story of the world of American advertising.

The federal regulations piece is another thing. The impact of Prohibition on every alcoholic beverage industry today is still very strongly felt. Every state has different rules; there federal rules and state rules. We’re going to be looking at the impact that homebrewers had on craft beer industry—it was illegal to homebrew until not too long ago—and how changing laws and regulations have allowed brewing as an industry to change.

The impact of homebrewing on beer history is interesting. Is that something that you plan to delve into?
You can’t to talk about the craft brewing side of beer now without talking about the impact of homebrewers. A lot of the people who started the first craft breweries started as homebrewers. The homebrew community has been very supportive of the craft brewing community—and vice versa. We’ll look at that, first because we have to because it’s part of the story, but also because we want to. Our theme for the museum this year is America Participates—so we’re looking at how Americans shape their democracy through voting and community participation and civic organizations and clubs. If you look at it from that angle, homebrewers are participating everyday. There are homebrew clubs across the country and homebrewers have been working to change laws about brewing for a long time.

[A lot of this research will often take us] way beyond beer. You start out with beer and somehow end up in a field somewhere arguing with a senator.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Why Is the Smithsonian Collecting 50 Years’ Worth of Beer Artifacts? appeared first on PUNCH.

At some point over the last dozen or so years, the Bloody Mary lost its mind.

Across the country, you can now find Bloody Marys that are garnished with beef sliders, lamb sliders, fries, pickles, shrimp, cheese skewers, jalapeño poppers, hot dogs, bacon, chicken nuggets, pickled okra or a cinnamon roll; in Chicago, you can order an Asian-inspired riff that is overstuffed with lumpia, duck bao and Chinese broccoli; in Leland, Michigan, a bar has been known to serve a Bloody Mary that has a whole smoked fish sticking out of it. And one variation, seemingly in an attempt to stun competitors into silence, simply plopped an entire fried chicken on top.

“The drink is the ultimate world heavyweight championship belt of pro-wrestling,” says Brian Bartels, a bartender and the author of The Bloody Mary Book, which will be published by Ten Speed Press in spring 2017. “You don’t know what to expect next.”

You could argue that the Bloody Mary’s grasp on sanity was never very firm to begin with. Some mixology historians have traced its earliest origin back to what was known in the late 19th century as an “oyster cocktail”: an alcohol-free concoction of tomato juice, salt, Tabasco, lemon juice, horseradish, black pepper and seven small oysters, stirred together and served warm. The recipe was published in a London newspaper in 1892 along with the caveat that it was provided “for the benefit of those who may be possessed of suicidal intentions.”

That’s just one of the many narratives that populate the mythology of the Bloody Mary, which has about as many conflicting origin stories as there are recipes. In one version, the drink got its name from a bar maid who worked at a grisly Chicago dive called Buckets of Blood, where pailfuls of water were habitually thrown onto the floor and street outside to wash away blood from fights and the occasional homicide. In another version, the drink’s first recipe was discovered by the Jewish comedian George Jessel after partying until late the next morning. 

While arguments rage on about who invented the drink and how, there was in fact a period in the early 20th century when the make-up of the cocktail remained relatively static—even urbane. It was and still is served at New York City’s tony King Cole Bar in the St. Regis Hotel, where it was introduced by bartender Fernand Petiot as the Red Snapper and beloved by Manhattan elites. Before that, it was served (and likely partially invented) by Petiot at the legendary Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, frequented by regulars like Ernest Hemingway and Rita Hayworth, in its most elementary form: tomato juice, vodka, lemon, salt, black and cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce.

Into the midcentury in America, it continued to carry a kind of WASP-y cachet—the type of thing one sipped from a tulip glass after finishing a round of golf at the country club or at a Sunday ladies lunch. It eventually became established enough in the prep firmament to be featured and praised in 1980’s The Official Preppy Handbook as “perhaps, the #1 Prep mixed drink.” But a change began occurring around the late 1980s, accelerating significantly at the turn of the 21st century—the center could not hold, the falcon could no longer hear the falconer.

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Signaling that public perception had begun to shift to regard the cocktail as a kitchen-sink concoction into which almost anything could be thrown, in 1997, the New York Times reported that a number of drinking establishments had “added do-it-yourself Bloody Mary bars” that proffered “several tomato-based mixes prepared by the bartender plus an array of flavored vodkas and hot sauces, clam juice, beef broth, mango juice and garnishes from celery to pickles to shrimp.”

A few years later, East Village restaurant Prune launched an iconic variation, the Chicago Matchbox, which came with pickled green beans, Brussel sprouts, turnips, radishes and caper berries, presaging the Bloody Mary’s many reinventions that arrived with the cocktail renaissance in the early 2000s. These were the first stirrings that led the drink to become a palimpsest for the free-for-all millennial brunch craze, as well as a symbol for the Midwest’s fondness for bigness, taste and reason be damned.

But why the Bloody Mary, in particular? What exactly is it about the drink that seems to invite such unbridled tweaking and interpretation?

“It’s a cocktail that mimics food,” says Jack McGarry, co-owner of The Dead Rabbit and a drink historian who wrote a four-part investigation of the Bloody Mary for Difford’s Guide. “If you were to make a riff on a Sidecar or a Champs-Élysées or a Martini, they wouldn’t have that same depth, where [with the Bloody Mary] you can add so many ingredients. I think the versatility is what anchors the ferociousness in regards to all the different versions of the [drink].”

But it doesn’t seem that the Bloody Mary would have evolved to its gargantuan proportions solely because of the malleability of its flavors. The tradition of maximalism demands a cultural explanation as well. One possible inciting factor was the rise of brunch and the Bloody Mary’s unshakeable place in that weekend ritual. According to Farha Ternikar, author of Brunch: A History and a professor at Le Moyne College, from its earliest inception brunch was a space of excess and indulgence. At the turn of the 20th century, a college newspaper described it as a meal that affluent varsity college men got up to while hungover on Sundays—it went on to become a high society ritual in the 1920s.

In its very nature, brunch is about piling vice on vice—rewarding yourself for bad behavior the night before with yet another helping of reckless abandon. “There’s an idea that brunch is a place where people will eat as much as they want,” says Ternikar. It seems only inevitable that this same impulse would impose itself upon the Bloody Mary. But it needed one last ingredient to go fully berserk: The Midwest.

Middle America has always had an outsized love for the drink. Ron Faiola—a filmmaker, author of two books on Wisconsin supper clubs and an authority on Badger State eating and drinking—cites it as the second or third most popular drink in the region, usually second only to the Brandy Old-Fashioned. In this land of natural abundance and healthy appetites, a mere celery stick just wasn’t going to cut it. 

Enter Dave Sobelman. If you had to finger a single culprit for starting the Bloody Mary arms race, it’d be him. In 1999, he opened Sobelman’s Pub & Grill in Milwaukee, catering to the blue-collar workers in the neighborhood factories. The Bloody Mary he started out serving was relatively tame, accompanied by celery, asparagus and a shrimp. But after meeting with one of his neighbors in the area, a third-generation pickling factory owner, Sobelman came away with an idea for a Bloody Mary that would incorporate about as many of his neighbor’s products as could fit in a glass.

“I knew I was going to do something special here,” he says. “When it came to the Bloody Mary, I just thought, ‘Why don’t I take this as far as I can?’” Beginning with around a dozen garnishes, his Bloody Mary began taking on ever more outlandish ingredients: bacon-wrapped cheese balls, mushrooms, sausages. As the years passed, he grew bolder, and by 2012 he was ornamenting his Bloody Mary with a cheeseburger. When he put an image of it on Facebook, customers couldn’t get enough. It became a viral sensation and, as pictures of his creations began spreading via social media, bars and restaurants throughout Milwaukee—and then the nation—began trying to top the original with ever-more ostentatious arrangements.

“I’ve seen on TV or in movies, they’ll go, ‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary,’ and it’s a short little tulip glass and there’s maybe an olive in it, and you always have to laugh because its like, yeah, nobody from Wisconsin was around there for that,” says Faiola.

For Bartels, a fellow Wisconsinite, the Bloody Mary was the first drink he ever learned to make. “They treat the Bloody Mary in a very sacred way,” says Bartels. The Midwestern Bloody Mary has been best known for always being served with a beer chaser, which Faiola believes evolved from the Prohibition practice of mixing beer with tomato juice. But when you look at the kinds of things that tend to populate today’s Brobdingnagian Bloody Marys—burgers, cheese skewers, pickled vegetables—it’s hard to miss the culinary heritage of the region.

The heartland approach represents just one of the drink’s many contemporary identities. The Bloody Mary is not an “either/or” drink—it’s an “and” drink. It inspires multiplicity, whether in origin stories or ingredients, evolving with the times, taking a bit of this vogue, a little of that decade. Already, the garnish arms race seems to be slowing—after all, where do you really go after someone drops the mic with a four-pound fried chicken?

“I feel like, today, there’s a minimalism going on in terms of consumption, and food trends are following that,” says Ternikar. “Things are cyclical, like fashion. So there’s cycles where excess is good, and then you have a scaling back.”

Whether in the urbane ‘20s or the over-the-top aughts, the Bloody Mary appears to reflect those cycles. Like other American icons, it above all boasts a genius for reinvention. It, in the words of McGarry, is the “Madonna of cocktails.”

The post How the Bloody Mary Lost Its Mind appeared first on PUNCH.

There are few symbols in the drink world more powerful, more recognizable or more American than the Martini glass. An angular monument to Deco design, its characteristic V-shaped bowl and fine stem have long represented that most iconic of drinks, so much so that there is arguably no other image that better communicates the very notion of the cocktail.

There is also no glass more despised by today’s bartenders.

“It’s a problematic glass,” says Greg Boehm, founder of Cocktail Kingdom, which supplies some of today’s most popular bar tools, from bitters dashers to artisan syrups to, notably, glassware. “It’s incredibly impractical.”

Veteran bartender Toby Cecchini puts it even more bluntly: “Those glasses are odious. They’re horrible. They spill everything. They’re just miserable.”

But impracticality isn’t solely to blame for the glass falling out of favor; it’s equally a matter of what the Martini glass has come to represent. Today it is less Deco icon and more neon symbol of the cocktail’s dark ages—a glass overflowing with several decades of negative association, and Pucker.

To understand how that came to be, it’s important to consider how, and when, the glass became synonymous with the drink in the first place. Though it made its formal debut at the 1925 Paris Exhibition (by many accounts, as a modernist take on the coupe), it didn’t catch on immediately. And when it did, it wasn’t necessarily used for cocktails; as David Wondrich points out in Imbibe!, the glass as it appears in the films of the 1920s is depicted as being used much like the coupe—for Champagne.

Meanwhile, the Martini, as a drink, was growing swiftly in popularity. Having been invented in the mid-19th century, it was bolstered in the 20th by Prohibition, which had crowned gin as the country’s preferred spirit. Not only had the speakeasies of the era fashioned the drink into something both stylish and urbane, they had ushered in a new age of drinking, writes Max Rudin in “There’s Something About a Martini,” his deep-dive essay on the subject published in American Heritage in 1997.

“Outlawing liquor,” he explains, “had put the gentlemen-only saloon and hotel bar out of business,” and replaced it with “a new cocktail culture where women drank with men.” It would ultimately prompt a drinking-buddy camaraderie between the sexes, epitomized by characters like Nick and Nora Charles, the Martini-drinking crime solvers in the 1934 novel and film, The Thin Man. It also laid the groundwork for the rise of the cocktail party, a cultural institution that would become a fixture of American life for the next several decades.

Bringing the cocktail out of the bar and into the home had a twofold effect on the Martini as we know it today: Not only did the process of making the drink become ritualized (“In the 1930s, mixing cocktails at home became one of the manly arts, like carving a turkey,” writes Rudin), the approach to serving it did, too, as it spurred a new market for home barware. Sampling from the same modernist aesthetics that had similarly shaped the era’s architecture, interiors and furnishings, more geometric examples of glassware were suddenly in high demand.

“The symbolism of the drink and the new cultural perception of this particular glass shape come together in the 1940s,” explains Lowell Edmunds, author of Martini: Straight Up, “[because] it became culturally possible to see that particular glass design as au courant.” It was in that decade, too, that the glass first became known, at least colloquially, as the “Martini” glass, its outline, according to Rudin, “one of the few American designs to make a seamless transition from moderne to modern.” Before long, it had become so ubiquitous—and the drink so popular—that in 1958, a New York Times article would describe it as “the symbol of our civilization.”

But it was during that era, too, that the iconic drink would begin to change.

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“[J]ust as architecture moved in the direction of brutalism, so the Martini became excessively dry, flavorless vodka replaced gin, and the ritual of mixing was abandoned in favor of the Martini on the rocks,” writes Edmunds. “In both cases, the esthetic impulse of modernism was carried to a self-defeating extreme.”

What had once been, in effect, an emblem of the middle-class cocktail party was by the ‘60s being outwardly shunned as disagreeably dry, too spirituous and representative—both literally and metaphorically—of American corporate values as epitomized by the advertising culture of Madison Avenue.

“The purity, transparency, and lack of messiness of the perfect American cocktail now seemed to mirror a sterile lack of messiness in life and work,” explains Rudin, “won at the expense of emotional involvement and the realities of life.”

Following its nearly two decade-long decline, the Martini would fall out of vogue entirely by the early ‘70s. In 1973, Esquire derided it as “a bitter, medicinal-tasting beverage” that represented “everything from phony bourgeois values and social snobbery to jaded alcoholism and latent masochism.” By 1976, it earned a notable, albeit damning, mention in American politics when, in a debate with Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter famously suggested that the working class was subsidizing the “$50 Martini lunch,” solidifying the drink’s reputation as an unfortunate emblem of conservative America.

Still, however, the Martini glass remained fixed in the country’s imagination, consequently lending its glass—not to mention its name—to many of the oversized, fruit-infused vodka drinks of the 1980s and ‘90s.

That word “Martini,” before long, had become so overused that in a story written in 1998 by William Grimes for the New York Times Dining section, the Martini was described as having entered its “late-Elvis” phase, with Grimes lamenting the drink’s modern permutations and suggesting that a “modern Dante, if so inclined, could tour the many circles of this cocktail hell and come up with a truly compelling mixed-drink Inferno.”

Though today’s craft cocktail movement has helped the classic Gin Martini shed these decades-old associations, the glass remains, for many, one of the last remaining pillars of the Technicolor “‘tini” craze that gripped the country prior to the drink’s revival. Add to that the fact that today’s bartenders have famously looked beyond Prohibition to the age of Jerry Thomas—in which coupes were considered the vessel of choice for such a drink—and it’s no surprise that the Martini glass has been effectively usurped in favor of rounded, even more classic stemware. Ironically, that same element of symbolism that first propelled the Martini glass to fame is exactly the thing that’s lead to its ultimate demonization within the craft market.

Which begs the question: Is the Martini glass—admittedly still a prominent fixture in many parts of the country—primed to fall by the wayside? Or will it come back around? After all, there are plenty of more practical vessels whose burdens figure far less into the American bartender’s imagination.

But, then again, when conjuring up an image of a cocktail—neon sign, or otherwise—does anyone really think of a coupe?

The post The Life and Death of the Martini Glass appeared first on PUNCH.

Recently, I found myself sitting in the tasting lab at the Mount Gay distillery tucked away in the canefields of St. Lucy, Barbados, getting schooled in rum-making by master blender Allen Smith. In a conversation that delved into many obscure topics, it was a far more routine discussion that finally stumped him.

Why were all of the bottles of Mount Gay Eclipse I was seeing on store shelves labeled as being 43 percent alcohol by volume, while I was certain the bottles I had seen in America were labeled 40 percent? Smith had just added yet another wrinkle: In Australia, Eclipse is released at 37.5 percent.

“It’s diluted to whatever they say we are supposed to dilute to,” he said.

This is not a phenomenon relegated to just rum. Spirits across most categories vary by region and have even changed over time. Campari, for example, is sold in most parts of the world at 25 percent ABV. In the United States, however, it’s 24 percent, and in Brazil and elsewhere in South America it’s popped up to 28.5 percent. Or take Bombay Sapphire: In the U.S., drinkers get it at 47 percent, while in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean and New Zealand, it’s 40 percent, and in South Africa, it’s bottled at 43 percent.

Other spirits have simply dropped over the years: Jack Daniels was once bottled at 45 percent alcohol, before dropping to 43 percent, and then, again, down to 40 in the United States. And in the United Kingdom, Gordon’s gin followed a similar trajectory: Once bottled at 40 percent, today it’s sold at 37.5 percent, says Edgar Harden, a London-based vintage spirits dealer who tracks data across time and geography for the bottles he sells on his website, Old Spirits Company. Overall, he says, spirits have generally become weaker over the last few decades. And as proof decreases, so does flavor.

As it pertains to whiskey, the difference in the flavor of spirits bottled at today’s standard—40 percent ABV, or 80 proof—and the standard proof at the beginning of the century—100 proof—is significant.

“It certainly seems like a lot more than 20 [proof],” says John Little, the master distiller at Smooth Ambler, who frequently bottles liquors closer to 100 proof. “A lot of times I drink spirits that I know are really, really good and wonder, hey, where did all the flavor go?”

But, why? I wanted to know. Why did the proof of spirits vary so much around the world and through the ages? And why did America dictate as part of its “Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits” that whiskey, rum, gin, tequila, brandy and vodka be bottled at 80 proof when other places set their minimum proof at a different level?

For the most part, Smith was essentially right. In many countries, the ubiquitous proof is the lowest regulation a particular place will allow. (Or in the case of Barbados, tradition: Despite the law actually allowing producers to go as low as 40 percent, rums have almost always been bottled at 43 percent.) But that doesn’t tell us how we got to 80 proof.

When I put the question to some booze historians, to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the agency that’s responsible for administering those standards, none of them could tell me exactly why 80 was decided on as the minimum—and then, ultimately, the standard.

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It seems that America arrived at it in the wake of the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which gave the federal government the power to mandate that what a product said on the label actually matched what was inside. (And it takes only a cursory glance at the horrors of what was actually in products of the era, including booze, to realize how far those two things were from each other).

Following that legislation, bureaucrats spent a couple of years trying to figure out just what whiskey was. Among the standards they settled on was that it had to be bottled at 40 percent ABV, a provision that seems to have then been applied to other distilled spirits in America as well. But 80 proof was just the minimum—the lowest a bottle of whiskey could be sold and still be deemed worthy of being called whiskey.

Such a low proof, however, was not the vanguard. South Dakota chemistry professor James Henry Shepard, who helped set the law, wrote in his book The Constants of Whisky that 80 proof had traditionally been the hallmark of a whiskey that was “wholly factitious.” At the time, what connoisseurs were typically pouring was bottled at 100 proof.

To get from 80 proof being the minimum a whiskey could possibly be bottled at to being the ubiquitous proof took a number of different shifts in drinking culture. Newspaper reports suggest the 100 proof standard held through the first decades after Prohibition. But by the middle of the century, the Times noted that usual standard had fallen significantly, citing industry sources that estimated only about 15 percent of whiskey sold was still bottled at 100 proof, while 72 percent fell somewhere between 86 and 90 proof, and the remaining 13 percent was 80 proof.

The reason for that drop, says Noah Rothbaum, the author of The Art of American Whiskey and the food and drink editor at The Daily Beast, was likely related to two factors: the need to stretch whiskey stocks during wartime and the palates of returning American GIs who’d become accustomed to drinking lower-proof Scotch.

It would take another invasion of a different sort, however, to push whiskey down to its bare minimum: vodka, a spirit Harden has found to have been, unlike whiskey, unusually stable at 80 proof over the decades. As vodka stole drinkers away from whiskey in the 1970s, American whiskey makers decided to win them back by producing a lighter product. To do so, many cut to 80.

But producers also had another incentive to lower the alcohol content of a spirit—a motivation that has arguably had a greater influence on why spirits today are often weaker than spirits of 50 and 100 years ago: money.

Simply put, more dilute spirits are cheaper to produce. Not only does doing so allow distillers to get more bottles out of every drop of alcohol they produce (a drop in proof from 100 to 80 can create about a half-dozen extra cases per whiskey barrel for a distiller), but each of those bottles carries a lower tax burden, which, in the U.S., makes the federal taxes on an 80 proof bottle 53 cents lower than on a 100 proof one. In a competitive market, those extra two quarters, once magnified by distributor and retail markups and the addition of state taxes, can have a significant impact on the bottle’s apparent value.

Despite that disadvantage, many craft distillers have moved away from the 80 proof standard and are releasing spirits at a bevy of different, higher alcohol levels. As they do, they are finding that far from there being one proof that works for all products across all classes of spirits, each individual bottle often has a proof at which the distiller thinks it’s best. Moreover, it’s one that often varies based on how that spirit is likely to be consumed, whether via cocktails or on its own.

One of those distillers is Lance Winters, the master distiller at St. George Spirits. For him, the proper number is often arrived at only after tasting the spirit at numerous different alcohol levels.

For example, for their Baller whiskey (“a California spin on the Japanese take on Scotch whisky”), that process resulted in a bottling proof of 94, a point at which they felt it could cut through a bowl of ramen.

But proof isn’t determined by taste alone. Chemistry also has a say. Spirits with higher congener levels—such as aged spirits that haven’t been chill filtered, or anisette liquors—require more alcohol to keep those chemicals from falling out of suspension and becoming cloudy, as absinthe does every time you add a few drops of water into it. Moreover, for gins, where aroma is important, diluting the spirit too much increases the surface tension and prevents the aromatic chemicals from escaping and reaching the nose, says Winters.

While proof used to be a decision left largely to the producer, increasingly it’s becoming a topic that well-educated bartenders and spirits professionals are also commenting on, says Smooth Ambler master distiller John Little. When his company originally released their Greenbrier Gin, they did so at 80 proof. But feedback from consumers was that the gin got lost in cocktails. “It was the single biggest complaint we had on our gin, [and] the only thing we heard on a consistent basis,” he said of the proof. So they upped it to 90, in turn strengthening the flavor.

Whatever the future trends for proof, what seems clear is that the spirits aimed at drinkers who care more about what’s in a bottle than its price are likely the ones that will continue to deviate from the standard proofs. Which may be why, when I circled back to Mount Gay to confirm I’d scribbled down all those proofs correctly, they not only confirmed I had, but also added a gentle reminder: Unlike Eclipse, their higher-end varieties are sold at 43 percent worldwide.

The post Why One Spirit Can Have Many Different ABVs appeared first on PUNCH.

On cocktail menus across the country and overseas, drinks are popping up that appear to have fallen through a hole in time. At Canon in Seattle, you can order a Champs-Élysées made with Courvoisier and Chartreuse from 1935—a year when FDR was still president and Babe Ruth hit his final home run. At the Milk Room in Chicago, guests can order a Jasmine cocktail made with 1960s Campari, a burgundy-colored liqueur that bears little resemblance to today’s neon-red version. The Beaufort Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London serves a Hotel Nacional cocktail composed of apricot brandy from the 1960s and a rare Cuban Bacardi rum from the 1940s, predating the Cuban Revolution.

For years, bartenders have made a hobby of collecting rare and vintage spirits, doling out neat pours for favorite (or well-heeled) customers. Now, spurred by a growing market for historic booze, these spirits are showing up in cocktails as they might actually have been served decades ago—a development, critics say, that constitutes a waste of good liquor. But for proponents, cocktails made with vintage spirits offer a tantalizing, visceral brush with history, while opening up new and unexplored dimensions of flavor. They’ve also essentially introduced a new luxury category to the cocktail world: that Hotel Nacional at the Savoy goes for 250£ (roughly $315), and Canon’s Champs-Élysées will set you back $495.

“The same drink made with contemporary ingredients versus vintage spirits are as comparable to each other as a tricycle and a Ducati,” say Jamie Boudreau, the owner of Canon, a leader in the vintage spirits market. “If you’ve ever sipped a vintage spirit, you realize there’s a complexity and length of finish that just doesn’t exist in most modern-day spirits.”

For Boudreau, the appeal of stirring and shaking with vintage spirits is about getting as close as possible to historically recreating the drinks of yore. Like most bartenders who use antique spirits, he sticks with simple, mainly spirit-forward classics that allow the prized main ingredient to shine. His menu will soon feature ten cocktails made with vintage spirits, including drinks like a Pegu Club (1964 Booth’s gin, 1930s Cointreau, lime) for $205 and a Negroni (1971 Tanqueray, 1960 vermouth, 1970 Campari) for $195. These often taste both softer and more concentrated than contemporary versions.

The interest in and growing demand for vintage spirits across the U.S. and in other cities around the world has, in turn, generated a cottage industry of experts who source these hard-to-find, often scarce bottles. A little over a year ago, Alex Bachman—a former bartender at Chicago’s Billy Sunday—founded Sole Agent, a Windy City-based firm dedicated to locating and selling historic spirits. He relies on a small team of scouts who crisscross the globe, salvaging dusty back vintages from defunct restaurants and bars, auctions and shuttered distilleries and wholesalers. Recent finds include a bottle of the now-defunct gentian-based bitter Secrestat from the 1920s (called for in a number of esoteric classic cocktail recipes), vintages of Fernet from throughout the 20th century and Gordon’s Dry gin from the 1940s. Sole Agent works with over 30 bars and restaurants in Chicago, including acclaimed spots such as Lost Lake and Longman & Eagle, as well as a few venues in California, like the world-famous San Francisco tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove.

The genesis of Bachman’s interest in the field dates back to when he first started as a sommelier at Charlie Trotter’s, which boasted one of the finest restaurant wine cellars in the country. Poring over Trotter’s massive wine list, which included some vintages as old as a 150 years, Bachman began to wonder if a similarly rigorous classification could be applied to spirits dating back dozens of years.

“The vintage means something in every spirit,” says Bachman, though the differences don’t necessarily manifest themselves year to year like wine. Historic spirits with macerated ingredients or lots of botanicals are covetable because of how they age, resulting in rich complexity. Liquors like whiskey or gin, on the other hand, remain more static in the bottle, offering a frozen snapshot in liquid time.

Inside the Booming Market for Vintage Spirits

In the last half-decade, the market for vintage spirits and liqueurs has expanded, so much so that old and rare bottles of whiskey, Cognac and Chartreuse are setting record prices at auction—and becoming increasingly difficult to find. Bryce T. Bauer on the nostalgic appeal of these bottles and how collectors are sourcing them.

Read On →

Sole Agent’s biggest customer is Milk Room, a dimly lit, eight-seat hideaway in the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel that specializes in classic cocktails made with vintage spirits. It was in part the building itself, an 1890s Venetian Gothic landmark with stained glass windows and candelabras, that inspired the idea for a bar that would transport guests—and their palates—back into the past. Bartender Paul McGee oversees the menu, which currently features eight classic drinks, including a Daiquiri and an De La Louisiane, each made with at least one rare, vintage spirit. Alternately, guests can select something from the pages of historic brandies, whiskies, gins and amari to sub it into their favorite cocktail.

McGee also runs the bar programs at the hotel’s three other venues, but the Milk Room takes up the lion’s share of his time, despite having just a fraction of the seating of the other spots. That’s because regularly employing vintage spirits poses a number of challenges to bartenders.

For one thing, scarcity severely limits how much R&D a bartender can do to find the right balance of ingredients for a drink. The taste memory that enables a bartender to predict how a modern bottle of Buffalo Trace or Plymouth gin might play in a drink is useless when it comes to bottles whose flavor profiles or formulas haven’t been used in decades. And vastly complicating the process of ordering and planning menus is the fact that some of the spirits are irreplaceable. “When the bottle is gone, the chances are great that we will not get another bottle like that again,” says McGee. “It really heightens the experience.”

But not everyone gets behind the idea that historic spirits have a role to play in cocktails. Pablo Moix, a co-founder and owner of the bar Old Lightning in Los Angeles, boasts a highly curated library of vintage spirits worth a sizeable fortune, but he doesn’t encourage mixing them in cocktails. “Master distillers are like mixologists,” he says. “A well-made spirit is basically a cocktail in a bottle. The idea of having something that’s perfectly distilled is much more exciting to me than making a vintage Manhattan.” Moix also points to the relative difficulty of sourcing vintage bottles that have been preserved correctly and whose integrity hasn’t been compromised by exposure to light, oxidation or anomalies resulting from the use of corks.

For the bars that carefully vet vintage bottles and take the time to learn how to deploy them in ways that improve a drink, the rewards are clear enough. “I don’t think it’s wasteful,” says Leo Robitschek, the bar director of the NoMad Hotel’s decorated drinks program in New York City. “The comparison I give people is caviar. Caviar is amazing on its own, but it can also be an accent to a dish that makes that dish better.” Robitscheck dedicates a small but popular section of the menu to cocktails made with vintage spirits. It’s caught on to the extent that some customers have actually called ahead to see if the Jungle Bird is being made with 1960s or 1970s Campari, each resulting in a different expression and slightly tweaked recipe. The ’60s version of the liqueur is bright with notes of cooked strawberry, while the ’70s version has a fresh berry profile as well as an earthy bitterness. These kinds of variations, and how they change a drink, can be a revelation to guests as their stable, singular idea of what a brand tastes like unfolds into faceted multiples.

“Age mellows these spirits out in such a beautiful way. You’re getting a piece of history,” says Robitschek. And just as importantly, he adds: “They’re absolutely delicious.”

A Taste of the Past

Illustration: Ric Carrasquillo

A new, flourishing market for vintage spirits has afforded bartenders an unprecedented opportunity to recreate the flavors of the cocktails of the past with historical accuracy. From a $3,000 vintage Sidecar to a Mai Tai with ’60s-era rum, here are nine drinks that showcase how contemporary bars are serving up history in a glass.

Canon, Seattle | Champs-Élysées | Price: $495
Head bartender Jamie Boudreau broke out the deep cuts from his bar’s 4,000 bottle collection to create this singular FDR-era Champs-Élysées. Using both Courvoisier and Chartreuse from 1935, this is about as historically accurate as vintage cocktails get, since the drink itself was first recorded in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. Price: $495

The NoMad Bar, New York City | Tuxedo #2 | Price: $28
The key to the acclaimed hotel bar’s Tuxedo #2—made with Beefeater Burrough’s Reserve Gin, Noilly Prat dry vermouth and maraschino liqueur—is the vintage absinthe. A Pernod Fils from 1941, the spirit offers, “besides the licorice and anise qualities, all these other vegetal flavors you don’t usually have,” says bar director Leo Robitschek. “It’s like taking a Tuxedo and adding some age to it.”

The Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, New York | Sidecar | $3,000
This tony bar was, at one point, selling the most luxe Sidecar imaginable, composed of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Black Pearl Cognac—a blend that includes eaux-de-vie over 100 years old—and pre-Nazi-Germany Cointreau. At that time, the liqueur was actually made with oranges from the island of Curaçao, according to the bar’s consulting mixologist Brian Van Flandern.

Beaufort Bar at the Savoy, London | Hotel Nacional | Price: 250£ ($315)
The Hotel Nacional cocktail was created at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba and served to illustrious guests like Winston Churchill and Marlene Dietrich. The Beaufort recreates a version that resembles something like what those luminaries might have sipped, using a 1960s apricot brandy and a pre-Revolution Cuban Bacardi rum from the 1940s whose remaining stocks are incredibly rare.

Milk Room, Chicago | Old Pal | Price: $45
Paul McGee’s tiny, elegant bar boasts an outsized vintage spirits collection that can be combined in any number of ways to recreate rare historic classics. McGee’s personal go-to? An Old Pal. Made with rye and dry vermouth, the 1920s drink is one of the best vehicles for showcasing 1950s Campari, which he says offers “more depth of flavor, nuance and floral notes” than contemporary versions.

Jack Rose, Washington D.C. | Manhattan | Price: $300
Boasting one of the best vintage spirits collection in the country, Jack Rose mixes up a delectable Manhattan made with Cocchi di Torino vermouth and 1982 19-Year W.L. Weller whiskey, a bottle which can fetch thousands of dollars at auction. With this vintage, the brand was the first to substitute winter wheat for rye in the mash, making for a more rounded, fruited profile.

The Rivoli Bar at the Ritz London, London | Negroni | Price: 90£ ($113)
Ever wonder what a Negroni tasted like in the middle of the 20th century? The Rivoli Bar can help you out with that. One of their four vintage cocktails is the classic Italian drink featuring pours from bottles of Gordon’s Gin, Campari and Martini Rossi sweet vermouth—all dating back to the 1950s.

Queen Mary Tavern, Chicago | Martini | Price: $33
Choose from among a selection of vintage gins at this nautical Wicker Park watering hole to mix into a Martini. A 1970s Plymouth gin, says general manager and beverage director Daniel Smith, “is thick and heavy in the mouth, super rich, woodsy and earthy.”

Smuggler’s Cove, San Francisco | Mai Tai | Price: $150 – $720
At this tiki landmark, Martin Cate serves most of his collection of vintage rums neat, but if you ask nicely he might make you a Mai Tai with an authentic 1960s bottle of Trader Vic’s Mai Tai rum. The cocktail “is well-receptive to a full-bodied, long-aged rum,” says Cate. Price: Depending on the vintage rum used, a Mai Tai can run anywhere from $150 to $720.

The post What Would You Pay for a True Taste of Cocktail History? appeared first on PUNCH.

Even if you’ve never heard of Hop Louie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen pictures of it. The restaurant is located inside one of the most iconic buildings in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a baroque, five-tiered pagoda structure with each level slightly smaller than the one below it, like Russian nesting dolls stacked in reverse.

When it was constructed, in 1941, it was the tallest building in the neighborhood—a triumph of thematic Oriental architecture and the crown jewel of a recently debuted, tourist-friendly “New Chinatown.” For a few decades a Cantonese restaurant called the Golden Pagoda occupied the space, but sometime in the 1980s a man known as Uncle Hop Louie Woo (former Senior Vice President of Far East affairs at Caesars Palace Las Vegas) took ownership. The dining room, which served as a backdrop for such acclaimed films as Lethal Weapon 4 and Mystery Men, was heavy on red pleather and faux gold leaf.

The last time my wife and I were at Hop Louie, about a year ago, we’d shuffled over after drinks at a nearby cocktail spot called General Lee’s. We shared a “Special Dinner Combination Plate,” or something to that effect—a prix fixe assemblage of foil-wrapped chicken, wonton soup, BBQ pork chow mein and crispy lemon chicken soaked in a neon yellow sauce so sour it could have been made with powdered Country Time lemonade. Full and already buzzed, we agreed on a nightcap at Hop Louie’s downstairs cocktail lounge, a noir-era relic from the days when drinking dens were labeled as cocktail lounges without a hint of irony.

Nearly everyone in the bar—art school kids, mostly—were drinking either bottles of Tsingtao or Scorpion Bowls, that lethal built-for-two tiki drink that is as much a provocation as it is an alcoholic beverage. I asked for latter, of course, and my wife promptly shot me that you’re on your own look. I’d barely gotten through half before a sudden sting of heartburn hit my chest like a screeching air raid siren—a warning for the college-freshman hangover that awaited me the next morning.

By itself, a lackluster Scorpion Bowl made with bottled juice and bottom-shelf rum didn’t strike me as all that interesting. But blended-to-order inside an old Chinese restaurant, that lone tiki drink signaled a broader type of idiosyncrasy.

I. The Chinese-Tiki Connection

Hop Louie isn’t the only Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles where you’ll find Scorpion Bowls, Zombies and Mai Tais flowing freely. In the neighborhood of Pico-Robertson—often referred to as LA’s Kosher Korridor for its ample Jewish population—are two beacons of Cantonese-American cuisine, Twin Dragon and Fu’s Palace, located not more than a few blocks apart. Twin Dragon, which opened in 1962, was remodeled and revamped a few years back, and while it lost much of its retro luster, an illustrated cocktail menu still hangs behind the bar, next to a long illuminated fish tank filled with koi. Options include the Flaming Virgin (with a floating lemon garnish set aflame), Blue Hawaii, Navy Grog and Banana Daiquiri.

Fu’s Palace, by contrast, has retained its kitschy ‘60s splendor, complete with a faded-green thatched roof and paper Zodiac mats on every table. Once a grand and spacious restaurant in its glory days, Fu’s is now best known as home to an extra-potent Scorpion Bowl, which functions as a tropical Long Island Iced Tea for rowdy and occasionally lascivious UCLA kids. The place is sometimes referred to as “F.U. Palace,” short for “fucked up.”

As it turns out, Fu’s had actually replaced an even older Cantonese restaurant called Wan-Q sometime in the 1970s, which was owned by a man named Benny Eng and known for its flamboyant tropical cocktails. Wan-Q, too, had a rival located just a few blocks away, a now-closed Cantonese establishment called the Kowloon, which served Polynesian delights like pineapple Peking duck and a Tahitian Rum Punch. On a number of message boards and tiki fan sites users have chronicled long-forgotten Cantonese restaurants like these not only in Southern California—Yue’s Cantonese in Gardena, Edwin Tan’s Chinese Gardens in San Bernardino, China Inn in Pacific Beach, Mandarin Tiger in Tarzana—but all across the United States, including a few that had managed to survive over the decades.

There was the beloved King Yum in Queens, Lun Wah in New Jersey, Chef Shangri-La in the suburbs outside Chicago, Zom Hee Chinese in Florida, Shanghai Lounge in Oklahoma, Ho Kong in Rhode Island—the list stretched onward. It’s been estimated by Chinese Restaurant News that 80 percent of the 40,000 or so Chinese restaurants in America serve what is considered Chinese-American food (egg rolls, sweet and sour, chow mein, tomato beef, cashew chicken, etc.). If even a small percentage of those restaurants also served tiki drinks, it would easily dwarf the number of tiki bars and restaurants left in America by a wide margin. What wasn’t ready available was an answer as to why. How, exactly, had Chinese food and tiki drinks become so intertwined in America?

On a basic level, their marriage was one of commercial opportunism. “Tiki bars were having great success with serving [their own] version of Cantonese cooking in the 1950s,” says Martin Cate, author of the book Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. “Basically the Cantonese restaurants all started to say, Hey, they’re already serving our food, why don’t we serve their drinks? Many Chinese restaurants at that time had separate cocktail lounges attached, so they added some bamboo and thatch in there and started rolling out the tiki drink menus.”

But to write the pervasiveness of tiki in today’s Cantonese restaurants off as a remnant of a burnt-out fad would be to miss the larger parable. If I wanted to understand the full story behind their enduring relationship, Cate told me, I would have to start at the very beginning.

II. Just Mysterious Enough

Ernest Gantt—the man who would later be known as Don the Beachcomber, the founding father of the tiki movement—grew up, according to some sources, the son of a wealthy Texas oilman. When he turned 19, his father handed him a large sum of money, ostensibly to be spent on a college education. Gantt decide to pack his suitcase instead. He spent the next five years traveling the globe—the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii, Singapore, the Philippines.

After he had exhausted his inheritance, Gantt landed in Los Angeles, where he worked various odd jobs: dishwasher at Chinese restaurants; valet at celebrity-filled nightclubs; set designer and technical consultant for schlocky, low-budget “adventure” movies. By 1933, Gantt had scraped together enough money to open Don’s Beachcomber Café in Hollywood, a palm frond and bamboo-clad shack that showcased island knick-knacks picked up from his travels; he completed the 24-seat island paradise with his own brand of “Rum Rhapsodies”—intricate cocktails influenced by both Caribbean-style rum punches and tropical juice drinks popular in the Philippines—and would later legally change his name to Donn Beach, taking on a bohemian persona that fell somewhere between Paul Gauguin and Jimmy Buffett. In an era when themed bars ruled LA, Don’s quickly emerged as a rollicking hotspot for Hollywood high society.

While Beach was busy planting the flag for exotic cocktails, Americanized Chinese food (cooked by mostly Cantonese immigrants) was breaking into the mainstream. Over the past few decades, Cantonese cooking had slowly expanded beyond the confines of Chinatowns, developing, as Andrew Coe puts in his book Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, a broad appeal as food that was “cheap, filling, and just mysterious enough.”

In 1937, Beach and his new wife, Cora “Sunny” Sund—a former Minnesota school teacher turned LA waitress—decided to expand their wildly successful bar (now renamed Don the Beachcomber) across the street into a much roomier space with a full kitchen. Beach, though a visionary in many ways, wasn’t know for being a particularly shrewd businessman. It took the foresight of Sund to realize that serving Cantonese food, tweaked with just enough Polynesian flair (read: pineapple) to label as their own, would be exotic enough to entice, but not intimidate.

“Among [Sunny’s] first moves was the hiring of a Chinese chef. With Don and the chef, she set to work to devise a South Seas-Cantonese cuisine to outdo any cuisine ever tasted in the South Seas or Canton,” wrote the author of a (rather condescending) 1948 profile of Don the Beachcomber in the Saturday Evening Post. “The usual victual Chinatown dishes up for Americans are composed largely of celery and bean sprouts, both inexpensive. Don and Sunny decided to use chicken, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots with a lavish hand… They also began to import oyster sauce, wild-plum sauce, lichee nuts and lotus nuts from China, an issued an ukase that there would be no chop suey and chow mein on their menus.”

At the new restaurant, large portholes were installed in the dining room so diners could peer into the brightly lit kitchen while immaculately dressed Chinese waiters were on hand to supply explanations for any dish that seemed unusual. Menu prices, while still relatively cheap (profits were supplemented by the high-margin rum drinks), were elevated just enough to distinguish them from the bargain chop suey joints across town.

It would be easy to dismiss Don the Beachcomber’s approach to Chinese food as unabashed cultural appropriation by two enterprising white folks—which it most certainly was—but in a broader sense, the restaurant marked an early shift toward legitimizing Chinese cooking as an elevated and distinguished cuisine in the eyes of many non-Chinese Americans. At that point in the country’s dining culture, if you were a restaurant that wanted to attract celebrities and other stylish segments of society, you generally served steaks or French cuisine. Not only did Don the Beachcomber serve something altogether foreign, but it was able to convince customers to actually pay more for it.

That same year, 1937, another budding entrepreneur in Oakland named Vic Bergeron added Chinese food to his tropical-themed bar, Hinky Dink’s, and renamed it Trader Vic’s. Bergeron was a world traveler with a taste for the island life, but unlike his rival he proved to be much more astute about growing a national empire. Bergeron realized that most of his customers would be turned off by actual Polynesian food (“Who wants to eat poi?,” he once quipped, according to Cate) and so created faux-Polynesian hits like the pupu platter, a combination of Cantonese-ish appetizers like shrimp toast, egg rolls and sticky-sweet pork ribs arranged over a flaming bowl. For the most part, what Americans soon came to identify as Polynesian food was in reality a carefully curated strain of rich Cantonese food, adorned with pineapple and copious amounts of rum.

Although tiki pioneers like Beach and Bergeron were, on some level, culinary carpetbaggers, they were also extremely earnest in their passion for other cultures. Both were known for treating and paying their staff well in an era when discrimination against Asians was still rampant. Both were exceptionally knowledgeable about global cuisine—especially Bergeron, who became a sort of proto-authenticity advocate and later expanded his menu to encompass food that no one else was serving at the time, including Malaysian curries, Thai satay and even sushi decades before they were well-known. As actual Chinese chefs like Cecilia Chiang began to expose the country to a more authentic genre of regional Chinese cooking in the 1950s, Bergeron would go on to borrow from her style as well, even going as far as to have traditional Chinese ovens installed in Trader Vic’s kitchens.

The Twin Dragon

It was only natural, then, that the growing number of Cantonese restaurant owners across the country would capitalize on the appropriation of Chinese food by the tiki movement, retrofitting their own existing cocktail lounges with palm thatching and elaborate exotic drinks to attract thirsty customers. 

By the 1950s, the tiki fad had gone mainstream. There were tiki bowling alleys, tiki apartment complexes and tiki furniture stores. The tiki aesthetic soon seeped outward from cities into the booming suburbs, and in the process had become democratized and commercialized. Restaurants could order everything from tiki mugs to bamboo table skirts to carved totems through mail-order catalogues, or from exotica-themed restaurant supply companies like Orchids of Hawaii and Dynasty Wholesale (which explains why so many tiki bars across the country use the same ceramic bowls for Scorpions).

Drink recipes, once closely guarded secrets, became widely available as former bartenders, waiters and managers at chains like Trader Vic’s or Kon Tiki—many of them Chinese-American—left to work at other restaurants, took over for their retiring bosses or, in some cases, opened their own establishments. Like a giant game of telephone, tiki culture became looser in interpretation as it expanded into Cantonese restaurants. The Dr. Funk, a rare tiki drink actually invented in the South Pacific (by Robert Louis Stevenson’s personal physician no less) was often renamed the Dr. Fong, and served in Fu Manchu mug. Bamboo wallpaper mingled with hanging red lanterns. And Polynesian dishes like crab rangoon (a Trader Vic invention) became firmly planted in the Chinese-American canon.

Once the trend had reached peak saturation, however, its devolution was inevitable. As Sven Kirsten, the accomplished author and historian behind Tiki Pop and Tiki Modern told me, “the mythology behind Polynesian restaurants was never about authenticity, but rather presenting these unknown flavors and sensations in ways that seemed exotic.” As Americans began to view the now ubiquitous Cantonese-American cooking as lowbrow—greasy chow mein, fried stuff in sticky sauce—it lost much of its allure for the thrill-seeker. As quickly as “Polynesian” cuisine had leapfrogged into the national consciousness, it began to fade from relevance.

III. The Post-Polynesian Era

During the dark ages of tiki—a period which, and this is open to interpretation, stretched from the late 1970s until the early 2000s—the most reliable place to find a tropical cocktail across the country was almost certainly at a Chinese restaurant.

Nowhere was this Sino-Polynesian alliance more impervious to change than areas like suburban Massachusetts—and the greater Northeast in general—which isn’t surprising given the affection Boston still holds for lovably bastardized dishes like Peking Ravioli and American Chop Suey. Brother Cleve, a musician, bar consultant and tiki enthusiast widely considered the paterfamilias of Boston’s cocktail scene, recalls being given free Scorpion Bowls and pupu platters after playing a show at a local Chinese joint called the Kowloon (established 1950) in his early touring days. When fellow tiki pioneer Otto Von Stroheim flew out from LA to visit in 1997, Cleve says that Von Stroheim was astounded that “you could walk out the front door and within five minutes find yourself a Scorpion Bowl, Fog Cutter, Mai Tai or Suffering Bastard, all at Chinese restaurants.”

In her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee describes Chinese restaurant culture as fundamentally “open-source,” to borrow a term from the tech world. “Good ideas have historically rippled quickly through the Chinese-restaurant system, carried by word of mouth, and by the experiences of dispersing immigrants,” she explains.

If something proves successful—General Tso’s chicken, for instance—it gets duplicated everywhere, a theory that explains why tiki drinks continued to find a home in Chinese restaurants even as the Polynesian trend began to wane in the late 1960s. According to Lee, Chinese food—especially when found outside of China—is above all else, malleable: “A driving force behind Chinese cooking is the desire to adapt and incorporate indigenous ingredients and utilize Chinese cooking techniques… Chinese cooking is a not a set of dishes. It is a philosophy that serves local tastes.”

If there are any glimmers of an update in the world of Chinese-tiki, it might be best personified in part by a decorated Boston bartender named Ran Duan. Duan’s parents own a Chinese restaurant, called Sichuan Garden II, located in the suburban city of Woburn. Back in 2009, the restaurant served bad tiki drinks.“We had all the classic Chinese tiki recipes, which basically meant that nothing was done properly… It was all sour mix, well booze—which can still be great. It’s become America’s Chinese classic now, you know, but it wasn’t really what I wanted,” Duan told Bevvy.co in an interview last August.

The self-taught bartender picked up cocktail books by Trader Vic and Beachbum Berry and crafted a menu based around quality tiki drinks, one that also pays homage to the Chinese restaurant his parents created. “It’s weird when you walk in and you see a Sichuan restaurant in an old, colonial-style house and now it has two tiki-centric cocktail bars,” Duan said. “But it works.”

Back in Los Angeles, there are further hints of a reimagined connection. Bryant Ng, chef and co-owner at Santa Monica’s wildly successful Cassia, is the grandson of two Cantonese immigrants who emigrated from Hong Kong to Santa Monica in the 1950s. Ng’s family manufactured and sold laundry detergent in China, but decided to open a Polynesian restaurant called the Bali Hai when they moved to the U.S.

“They served typical Polynesian foods like pupu platters and crab rangoon, but also Chinese-American staples like egg rolls, barbecued honey ribs, silver-wrapped chicken, pork chow mein, sweet and sour pork, egg foo young, Peking duck,” Ng told me. “I love looking through the old menus.” Cocktails included the Doctor Wong, the Tonga Cooler, the Mr. Chan and, of course, a flaming Scorpion Bowl built for four and served with 20-inch straws. Bali Hai closed in 1968, around the time the popularity of both tiki and Cantonese food were beginning their decline.

Ng is now a third-generation restaurant owner, one that deals in a more au courant style of Asian fusion, but there are still nods to the past, in dishes like a classic Cantonese fried rice tossed with cured Chinese sausage (lap cheong), salt pork and preserved fish, and an evocative pineapple-coconut Lava Flow—the favorite drink of Ng’s wife, Kim—topped off with a swirl of strawberry-balsamic gastrique.

While Cassia and Sichuan Garden II pay homage to the now timeless connection between tiki and Chinese restaurants in America, there won’t ever be a way to replicate places like Hop Louie or Twin Dragon. They were born from a mixture of commercial opportunism, exotic fantasies and ethnic distortion, all thrown together into the whirling blender of pop culture. We’re probably too obsessed with culinary authenticity these days to get swept up in such blissful ignorance again.

Last September, after nearly 76 years in operation, the family behind Hop Louie decided to close their long-tenured restaurant. Running the place required too much work of its aging owners, I was told. To the relief of many, though, they decided to keep the cocktail lounge downstairs open, albeit only for the time being. There’s comfort in knowing that until the final day comes, that Scorpion Bowl will be on the menu, unchanged, like a rum-soaked fossil preserved in amber.

The post A Match Made in Paradise: The Story of Chinese-Tiki appeared first on PUNCH.

Old Monongahela is back. This is thrilling news for whiskey lovers, but it also raises a reasonable question: What the hell is Old Monongahela?

The short answer: Monongahela (MO-non-gah-HEEL-a) is a rye whiskey distilled in and around southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern Maryland, typically within barging distance of the Monongahela River. (Geography refresher: the Monongahela flows northward from Virginia and, via tributaries, from Maryland into Pittsburgh, where it merges with the Allegheny to become the Ohio River.) The rye made in this region long had a reputation for being bigger, spicier and “chewier” than other, softer ryes historically made elsewhere, and was certainly more assertive than the corn whiskey associated with distilleries that cropped up as settlers moved west.

Old Monongahela has also, until recently, had the reputation of being non-existent. Chasing after it was like chasing after a ghost: A few descendants of original producers persisted (Rittenhouse, Old Overholt, Hochstadter’s), but all had been acquired by bigger producers and production uprooted to outside the region. You could call these “Nongahela” ryes—the same in name but not necessarily in style or flavor.

The fact that this category of whiskey had all but disappeared is surprising, historically speaking, given the dominance of Monongahela in the early days of the republic. Pioneering farmers had pushed west over the Alleghenies and Appalachians and cleared dense forest, where they found fertile soils ideal for growing grain. But they had no way to economically ship bulky grains to coastal cities. (Canal and rail networks wouldn’t arise until the 1830s.) But, thanks to the know-how of German and Scots-Irish immigrants, they were able to distill what they grew into whiskey, which could be put in a barrel and shipped more practically.

Thus, rye whiskey became a thriving industry in this part of the Mid-Atlantic in the 18th century. Today, the region is perhaps best known for being home to the Whiskey Rebellion, which came to a head in 1794 after the new federal government imposed taxes on liquor to pay off debts incurred during the revolution. This did not go over well with the farmer-distillers; federal troops had to be sent in to put down the foment, and the tax remained.

As the 19th century progressed, distilleries moved off farms and into centralized areas with better access to transportation, and distilling centers like Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania became known for the quality of its whiskey, much as Kentucky would later become famed for its bourbon. (Not coincidentally, both regions are noted for their limestone deposits and thus high levels of calcium bicarbonate in spring water, which raises the pH and aids fermentation, as well as adding other desirable minerals.)

But then came Prohibition. Hundreds of distilleries shuttered in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Kentucky. Other industries (such as steel and glass) took over factory locations in the east; rural Kentucky had few competing industries and so many of the distilleries were simply boarded up. When Repeal came around, Kentucky fired up the stills again, and went on to dominate the whiskey world. Pennsylvania and Maryland, meanwhile, had few stills to resurrect and, for decades, their whiskey roots were more or less lost to history.

With the rise of craft spirits, however, many curious bartenders and distillers—especially those endlessly intrigued by the ghosts of spirits past—clamored to bring it back. Just one problem: few could agree as to what actually defined a Pennsylvania or Maryland rye, other than that they were made in one of those two states.

Some evidence has cropped up that distillers in the east used different methods than Kentucky bourbon makers. Notably, they employed a sweet mash rather than supplementing with the leftover wash known as sour mash, which yields a sharper-tasting product. They also appeared to invest more in stout rickhouses, in which they could better control the environment and speed of barrel aging.

The Rebirth of Truly Local American Craft Whiskey

Until recently, American distillers had largely forgotten the art of malting their own local and heritage grains. Kara Newman on the rebirth of proprietary malting floors and how it's changing the character of American craft whiskey.

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Some in the position to know, including spirits historian David Wondrich, have argued that the distilling technology in the east was also fundamentally different than in the west. A few years ago, Todd Leopold, of Leopold Brothers distillery in Denver, came upon a 1910 diagram of a unique three-chamber still that had been used in Peoria, Ill. He had never seen anything like it, and believed it to be linked to traditional ryes. Since none existed, in 2015 he wrote a check for more than six figures and had Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville make one for him, despite the fact that Vendome wouldn’t guarantee that it would work. It did. He’s since been cranking out rye, which he plans to begin releasing once it’s spent five years in barrel. (He also makes a traditionally distilled “Maryland-style” rye, which he defines as a sweeter rye than the Pennsylvania style; he achieves this via careful yeast selection.)

Today, the style is more typically defined as whiskey made from local rye grains, whether grown in eastern or western Pennsylvania, or Maryland. Meredith Grelli, who with her husband, Alex, founded Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh, argues that the definition is cultural, and begins with Monongahela rye in Western Pennsylvania. “Monongahela was born out of our earlier settlement patterns, with the Germans and the Scots-Irish. The rest of the state then expanded on that tradition, with Pennsylvania rye,” she says. “I do think there’s something about regionality, whether with grain or culture or who was distilling and where, along with what they were able to grow.”

She admits that a clear definition of an eastern rye will be elusive. She sees these more like “Old Tom gin” or “Philly cheesesteak”—terms that acknowledge tradition and history rather than narrow definition. “We have to be okay with living in the gray area with this one,” she says.

As eastern ryes start to reemerge from their century-plus slumber, expect these old flavor profiles to make incursions in new markets, offering newer, more distinctive ryes. “Rye should be young, rye should be vibrant,” says Herman Mihalich of Dad’s Hat Rye in Pennsylvania, “and rye should smack you in the face a little bit.”

The post America’s Oldest Rye Whiskey Is Back from Extinction appeared first on PUNCH.

The swim-up bar is pretty much clickbait incarnate. Just ask your browser: “Coolest Swim-Up Bars in the World” (Travel + Leisure) “18 Resorts and Hotels With the Most Amazing Swim-Up Bars” (Trips to Discover), “12 Best Swim-Up Bars Around the World” (Travel Channel), “The World’s Most Enticing Swim-Up Bars” (Paste).

“It says something about a hotel and casino when the pool is one of its sickest, most sought after attractions,” Thrillist notes in their entry into the crowded field of swim-up bar reporting. Yet, for all of the “coolest,” “most incredible,” “sexiest” slideshows of swim-up bars the world over, it’s a lot harder to figure out where the hell they originated.

When exactly did people decide they wanted to sip frozen Margaritas on a submerged bar stool?

Like most seemingly misguided drinking trends, the swim-up bar was born in—you know it—Las Vegas. As architect Stefan Al explains in his recent book The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, the initial goal of Las Vegas developers was “to seep gambling into a suburban vacation.” Swimming pools grew tenfold in the U.S. during the early-1950s, becoming a requisite hotel attraction. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to mash up legalized gambling and pool-going.

Just after opening, in 1952, The Sands Hotel and Casino launched floating craps and blackjack tables, as well as poolside slot machines, as a gimmicky way to garner press coverage. It worked: in 1954 the casino landed a spread in Life magazine. Other hotels took note. When the Tropicana opened at the other end of the strip, in 1957, the pool area quickly added “swim-up” blackjack tables and tiki drinks in an attempt to combat the loss of summer revenue from guests hanging out in the pool as opposed to the casino floor. It turned out to be a match made in paradise.

“These days in Las Vegas, the bar and the pool have truly become a hybrid,” Al told me over email, “with entire pool clubs, such as XS in Encore, among the top 10 world’s highest-grossing nightclubs, because they can get revenue during the day as well as the night.” In actuality, buoyed by frequent poolside “nightswim” performances by musicians such as Laidback Luke, XS has been the number one highest-grossing bar in the entire world the last five years running.

However, today’s more archetypal swim-up bars—with their signature submerged stools and comically-named drinks—are more closely associated with Mexican and Caribbean resorts, favored by the same folks who enjoy Carnival cruises and the ring of “all-inclusive.” Credit for this breed of swim-up boozing goes to the Jamaica-based Sandals Resorts.

Originally, Sandals’ Montego Bay flagship location (which opened in 1981) only served beachside cocktails to guests who didn’t want to leave the ocean. But when a new block of rooms was added away from the beachfront in 1984, management decided to build something that might attract guests to that end of the property. Architect Evan Williams casually remarked to Sandals chairman Gordon “Butch” Stewart that he “never understood why you couldn’t have bars in pools.” Recognizing a potentially lucrative idea, Stewart promptly gave Williams the go-ahead to build the Caribbean’s first swim-up pool bar. It was an immediate hit; today, all 16 Sandals resorts sport swim-up bars serving drinks like the rum cream-backed Hummingbird and the Dirty Banana.

“Guests love these bars because they are a novelty,” claims Paul Bauer, Sandals group manager of F&B standards. “Plus, it’s virtually instantaneous cocktail service without having to move a muscle.”

Less a trend than a resort necessity, swim-up bars have become an indelible part of relaxation culture, spreading beyond well-trodden vacation spots.

Des Moines, Iowa, has a swim-up bar. Last summer, Nebraska got the state’s first at the Fun-Plex Waterpark. The famed Wisconsin Dells (“The Waterpark Capital of the World!”) has two: Margarita’s Swim-Up Bar at the Wilderness Resort and Mud Hut Swim-Up Bar at the Kalahari Resort  (with both places serving 42-ounce “monster” drinks in souvenir cups). And you’d better believe the Jersey Shore has a swim-up tiki hut.

So does Manhattan, it turns out. Located in Times Square’s Hotel Room Mate Grace, the pink-lit swim-up bar is located in a side room of their indoor nightclub. The 3’ 9”-deep pool abuts a 40-foot bar, hosts DJs and synchronized swimming performances and offers guests disposable bikinis and swim trunks. As a goggle-clad drinker told Travel Channel earlier this year, “Having a cocktail in the pool just can’t be beat. You’re not gonna find that at the Y.”

Unsurprisingly, the swim-up bar has also been co-opted by private citizens looking for a snazzy McMansion amenity. For the less financially-solvent among us, there are a few inflatable swim-up bars out there, which are probably more fun than a few twenties should buy you.

But nothing really beats drinking Mudslides in lukewarm water alongside middle-American moms and dudes with barbed wire tattoos. It has its risks, though. While Tropicana’s pool bar was shut down in 2015 for a litany of predictable health hazards, there is a more benign, but ubiquitous issue, according to Bauer.

“Well, we do have to increase the amount of chlorine in the pool,” he says. “Many guests either won’t—or can’t—leave.”

The post The Surprising History of the Swim-Up Bar appeared first on PUNCH.

It’s hard to imagine a drink that is equally as loathed and enduring as the Dirty Martini.

“The classic Martini is so beautifully balanced,” says David Wondrich, cocktail historian and author of Imbibe!. “It’s focused like a laser beam—cold, refreshing, incisive—and once you put olive brine in it, it kind of spoils all of that stuff.”

Yet hoards of people—people like me—continue to order it, savoring the guilty pleasure of cold vodka or gin sloshed together with suspect brine. It is a flawed drink with a remarkable fan base. Which is why many of the country’s bartender-critics are (however begrudgingly) trying to fix it.

According to Wondrich, the un-fairer Martini’s history begins in 1901, when John E. O’Connor served a Martini with muddled olives at the Waldorf Astoria. But a dash of brine doesn’t appear, at least in writing, until 1930, in G.H. Steele’s My New Cocktail Book. The drink, dubbed the Perfect, à la Hyland, consisted of half gin, half vodka, dry vermouth, three types of bitters and one teaspoon of olive brine. It appears again, in the years following World War II, sans bitters, perhaps most notably by way of FDR, whose Martini call was two parts gin, one part vermouth and a teaspoon of olive brine.

This brine-dashed variation remained an anomaly during the 1950s and 1960s, when the bone-dry gin Martini served as a stand in for post-war values: pure, strong and homegrown in the U.S. By the 1970s, however, vodka was outselling gin, and the cocktail aesthetic was skewing (much) sweeter. Fast forward even further, to the late-1990s, and the classic Martini had been sullied six ways from Sunday, making plenty of room for its dirty sibling to dig in.

“Nobody knew anything. Everything was bad,” says TJ Lynch, co-owner and bartender at New York’s Mother’s Ruin. “I’m sure there were some people doing the right things, but I made a lot of Dirty Martinis in the ‘90s, and it was literally just vodka and crappy olive juice.” (Today, he prefers a 50/50 gin Martini with a dash of Alfonso olive brine.)

With the rise of craft cocktails in the early aughts, the Dirty Martini went underground, but it never quite faded away. In fact, today, as bartenders seek to upgrade even the most un-loved cocktails, the drink has reemerged in the same bars that sought to estrange a generation from vodka ‘tinis.

Much of the new dialogue around the drink centers on the freshness and quality of the brine, and the method of employing it. For Josh Goldman, who consults on the bar program at Santa Monica’s Belcampo, the answer came in a teabag, which he first witnessed used in a drink (in horror) during the mid-2000s, when D.C. bartenders were making “Nicotinis”: nicotine-infused cocktails meant to placate smokers in the days following the city’s ban.

His method begins with a sachet of six ingredients, which he blanches in hot water—long enough to prime the aromatics but not unduly raise the temperature—before placing it in the glass. He then adds Aylesbury Duck vodka (which has been stirred to chill), alongside a finishing spritz of concentrated olive brine. Let it steep for 20 seconds if you like your Martini slightly dirty, he says, and a whole minute if you like it filthy. While Goldman won’t reveal his exact blend, I could detect olives, dried herbs and a hit of miso.

Lynnette Marrero, the bar director at Llama Inn, has taken a more post-modern approach. She is currently workshopping a riff that calls for thickening olive brine by adding modified tapioca starch and then painting it along the inside of a Martini glass—a perhaps unintentional but wholly appropriate ‘90s throwback move. (She hasn’t quite nailed the texture and flavor—an early attempt with Kalamata olive brine was unsuccessful—but, she says, “I’m going to keep pursuing it.”)

At Petit Trois in Los Angeles, beverage manager Courtney Rose is also taking a modern approach to the drink, by way of fat-washing. She makes use of the herb-studded oil the kitchen routinely tosses out by Cryovacing it with gin, then tossing the mixture in a sous-vide machine for an hour. She then freezes it, strains off the solids and pairs it with sweet vermouth and lemon oil for a “dirty” take on the Martinez, a precursor to the Martini.

In Search of the Ultimate Martini

We asked 27 of today's top bartenders to submit their finest recipe for the Martini—then blind-tasted them all to find the best of the best. Robert Simonson on the search for the perfect take on the classic, and what we learned about the drink along the way.

Read On →

The award for the most obsessive take on the drink may well go to New York’s Naren Young. During his tenure at Saxon & Parole, Young, an outspoken critic of the Dirty Martini, spent two years creating his Olives 7 Ways, which calls on a custom olive bitters by Bitters, Old Men and an olive distillate Young co-crafted with Allen Katz of New York Distilling Company. For the latter, they distilled a small batch of neutral spirit with Cerignola olives and used it as a replacement for brine. Robert Simonson, writing about the drink for the New York Times, described it as “more elegant than any offspring of the dirty martini deserves to be.”

While this kind of innovation on the bar side certainly has elevated the drink, it’s the advent of premium bottled brine that has had the biggest impact on the quality of the Dirty Martini nationwide.

Consider Dirty Sue. The brainchild of Eric Tecosky, Dirty Sue was founded in 2004 after a particularly rough service behind the bar at the Jones Hollywood. Aggravated by having to strain gallon jugs of olives during service, he found himself googling “pre-bottled olive juice.” It yielded zero results.

He eventually took to making phone calls to farms in California and connected with a grower who was also importing olives from Spain. From there, he formulated a product using the mother brine (the original brine that the olives are shipped in rather than the salt water and lactic acid they are distributed in) and, by 2005, began hand-delivering samples to his friends and colleagues in the industry.

Two years later, in 2007, brothers Daniel and Marc Singer came up with a similar idea in Florida. They noticed that bartenders were replacing pre-bottled mixes with fresh juices and adding herbs to the bar, but olives were still coming in from distributors in the same gallon jugs that they were using in the ‘90s.

“Everybody hated their olives,” Daniel Singer recalls. They were oily and salty, and no bar would cycle through them quickly enough to avoid oxidization, which made the liquid especially bitter.

The Singers looked at 200 types of olives around the world and settled on a coastal Greek variety that was less oily, with fleshy fruit. Rather than adopting the industrial method of curing olives in lye, they persuaded a family to naturally ferment the olives in salt water, changing the water every two days over four months to slowly draw the bitter glucoside out of the fruit. By comparison, the same process using lye takes only four days, but, according to Singer, lye “shuts down the pores and strips the fruit of all that woodiness and nuttiness.” To compensate, producers add a ton of salt and oil to return flavor to those gallon jugs of olives.

In 2009, the brothers launched Filthy Food, a line of artisanal cocktail garnishes that includes Filthy olive brine, which is made from their Greek olive brine and filtered five times before it is packaged in squeeze bottles and distributed around the country. Today, both Filthy Food and Dirty Sue ship to thousands of restaurants and bars nationwide, from P.F. Chang’s to Pegu Club. In fact, order a regular Dirty Martini at Dante, and Young will make it with Filthy olive brine.

Yet, despite cleaning up its act, the Dirty Martini’s dirty-pleasure status remains gleefully intact. And those of us who order it wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like to make them for myself where nobody can see,” says Petit Trois’s Rose, who tips the brine from habanero-stuffed olives into her gin Martini at home. “A lot of people I know drink them on the hush-hush.”

The post The Dirty Martini Cleans Up Its Act appeared first on PUNCH.

Who was the first to add ice cream to an alcoholic beverage? While there might not be a definitive ice cream cocktail Patient Zero, we do know that by the late 19th century the two were already well-acquainted bedfellows. 

I Scream, You Scream

White Cargo

This proto-ice cream cocktail from 1927 boasts a method that’s dangerously easy to commit to memory—equal parts gin and vanilla ice cream, shaken (without ice!) until incorporated.

The Glorious Fourth

Despite its patriotic moniker, this recipe doesn't read particularly American: the juice of one lime, brandy, a dash of Jamaican rum and a large tablespoon of ice cream, shaken "exceedingly well" and strained into "a fancy glass."

Pink Squirrel

Built upon a sweet split of crème de noyaux and crème de cacao that produces a pleasantly rosy hue, the Squirrel might be the rare cream-based cocktail that was originally made with ice cream in lieu of heavy cream.

More Recipes →

The German-born barman William Schmidt’s 1892 The Flowing Bowl includes ice cream in more than 20 recipes, both as an edible garnish and an actual ingredient. Examples of the latter approach include the Reverie, which features vanilla ice cream shaken with brandy, maraschino liqueur and Curaçao, and The Glorious Fourth, where a large tablespoonful of the same commingles with brandy and Jamaican rum.

By the 1920s and 1930s the combinations were typically more straightforward. Here’s How!, a drinks manual first published in 1927, offers recipes built around gin and vanilla ice cream, like the White Cargo, which also curiously calls on white wine, and the Silver Stallion Fizz, both of which also make it into Harry Craddock’s contemporaneous Savoy Cocktail Book. Their inclusion in the latter, a seminal cocktail text, suggests the relevance of ice cream cocktails amid a formative stretch of drinking history.

This same period saw Wisconsinites establish their lasting dominance in the stateside ice cream cocktail arena. In 1884, a Racine-based inventor named James Tufts patented a device called the Lightning Shaker, a crank-operated mixer designed to produce milkshakes. Associated promotional material released by his company offers a simple recipe by which to test out his hardware: milk, ice and flavored syrup, with port as an optional addition.

In 1922, a Polish-American engineer named Stephen Poplawski, also based in Racine, received a patent for a comparable milkshake-making prototype, this one electric-powered. A few years later, a third Racine businessman, Frederick Osius, would acquire Poplawski’s IP, eventually introducing a prototype known as the Cyclone Drink Mixer. Two of his employees, Louis Hamilton and Chester Beach, lent their last names to his manufacturing business: Hamilton Beach, the first company to popularize what we now know as the blender.

“[It] was three things coming together at once,” says Wisconsin native Robert Simonson, the New York Times drinks columnist and PUNCH contributing editor. “One, you have a state that loves to drink. Wisconsin has a great thirst. Two, it’s America’s dairy land. If they can find a way to shove milk, cheese or ice cream into something else, they will do it. Third, the blender was invented there. It’s only natural that ice cream drinks are going to come out of that.”

Supper clubs, a nostalgic style of family-friendly restaurant native to Wisconsin, are particularly integral to the preservation and proliferation of ice cream cocktails, residents are quick to disclose. “Supper club culture is about lingering, socializing and generally enjoying life,” says Lori Fredrich, a food and drink writer for OnMilwaukee.com. “The idea of an after-dinner ice cream cocktail is pretty much a no-brainer.”

Though ice cream cocktails are prepared and enjoyed throughout the state, Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous city, boasts a number of landmark destinations. The bar At Random, which has been around since 1964, began serving them in big numbers sometime in the ‘80s, according to co-owner Shirley Zeller. “I don’t know where they started,” she says. “But they don’t make them like we do.” Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, which opened in 1938, serves somewhere around 50 massive 16-ounce varieties, its barroom soundtracked by the constant whirring of half a dozen blenders.

Bryant’s specializes in classic cream-based drinks with ice cream swapped in, like the Grasshopper, Brandy Alexander or Golden Cadillac. They also offer contemporary drinks, with names like the Persian Ice, the Cherry Benjamin, and the peanut butter-and-chocolate E.T. But the bar is perhaps best-known as the purported birthplace of the Pink Squirrel, a combination of crème de cacao, crème de noyaux and vanilla ice cream. John Dye, Bryant’s current proprietor, doesn’t actually use the cacao in his, believing his locally made Cedar Crest ice cream already delivers the requisite flavor.

Beloved as they may be in the Upper Midwest, not everyone is crazy about the ice cream cocktail category. When PDT founder Jim Meehan was a student at the University of Wisconsin, he spent years mixing them up at Paul’s Club, an iconic bar in hard-drinking Madison. The place didn’t have a functioning blender, so every ice cream drink was hand-stirred with a wooden spoon, a wrist-wrenching process writer and beverage director Brian Bartels, a native Wisconsite and fellow Paul’s alum, describes as “an absolute motherfucker.”

These days, Meehan might add a little ice cream to a Piña Colada to improve its consistency, but that’s about it. “Ice cream drinks stress me out,” he says. “It’s a massive sugar, calorie and fat delivery vehicle that just compounds the deleterious effects of the alcohol.”

You’re not going to find much support for that take on ice cream cocktails within Wisconsin’s borders, though. “Sometimes people don’t finish them,” says Dye, the owner of Bryant’s. “And sometimes people have three.”

The post About Those Classic Ice Cream Cocktails appeared first on PUNCH.

Without Pimm’s No. 1, there would be no Pimm’s Cup. Or, for that matter, any other number of drinks that rely on the ruddy gin-based liqueur. Often shortened to just “Pimm’s,” it might come as a shock to learn that the ubiquitous No. 1 does not stand alone; that designation isn’t just a formality or a claim to top honors: In it’s wake, Pimm’s Cup Nos. 2 through 5 have quietly come and gone.

Pimm’s was created by James Pimm, a London fishmonger who, in the 1840s, established a chain of popular oyster houses called the Pimm’s Oyster Warehouse. The No. 1 Cup was originally designed to be sold on-premise in pewter tankards—part of an effort to stand out from the many other oyster houses around London. In 1865, the first bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 was sold, for just three shillings.

What, precisely, is in the bottle is kept close to the vest. Supposedly, the Pimm’s recipe is known to only six people. What is better known, however, is that the original No. 1 was based on gin (and still is) and, as with many other herbal liqueurs, was intended to serve as a tonic to aid in digestion. To that end, it was laced with a mix of fruit peels, herbs and other botanicals, including quinine.

In 1870, entrepreneur Sir Horatio David Davies (and later, Lord Mayor of London from 1897 to 1898), purchased the Pimm’s restaurants and started merchandising Pimm’s, selling it throughout the UK and the colonial outposts of the British Empire. One of the first recorded exports is to the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It was sent up the Nile to forces in the Sudan in 1898, and was also exported as far south as Cape Town. Under his watch, Pimm’s became a Limited Company in 1906, as well as a registered trademark in 1912.

By then, the brand was world renowned, and Davies saw an opportunity to expand the product range. The 1930s brought Pimm’s No 2. Cup, made with Scotch, and No. 3 Cup, made with brandy. In 1935, a rum-based No. 4 Cup was introduced as a winter-friendly alternative to Pimm’s No. 1, which was already seen as a summertime crowd pleaser. (It was launched with the advertisement “Winter brings its own delights.” Where, exactly, Scotch and brandy played into this seasonal balance is unclear.) Meanwhile, the No. 5 Cup, built on rye, was introduced in Canada. When sales rapidly increased after World War II, Pimm’s brought the No. 5 Cup to the UK and introduced the No. 6 Cup, starring vodka.

So what happened to all these Pimm’s Cups?

In 1969, Diageo (then known as the Distillers Company Ltd.) bought the line and, in 1970, discontinued Nos. 2 through 5. No one, not even Diageo archivist Alia Campbell, seems to know the rationale behind that decision. It’s worth noting, however, that the 1970s were the heyday of “disco drinks,” when vodka started to make its ascent and brown spirits were on the decline. Of course, in England, gin was the country’s native spirit, making it a no-brainer to keep No. 1.

Since then, two of the lost Pimm’s Cups have made a comeback, at least in the UK. In 2004, in the first brand extension in decades, No. 4 and No. 6 were re-introduced under new names: “Winter Cup” and “Vodka Cup,” respectively. The latter was again pulled from production in 2014, only to be swiftly reinstated a year later.

“We take consumer feedback to heart, and we have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for Pimm’s No. 6 Vodka Cup,” stated Joanna Segesser, then Pimm’s senior brand manager, in a press release at the time. It returned as “Vodka Cup,” and is still produced in limited quantities.

Not everyone is willing to let the rest of those missing numbers go. Vintage bottles still show up occasionally in high-end spirits auctions or in the collections of rare dusty-hunters. In 2015, at London’s American Bar at The Savoy Hotel, former head bartender Erik Lorincz procured vintage Pimm’s bottlings and served a menu of Pimm’s Cup cocktails until the bottles ran dry. (Supposedly, another former bartender there tried to re-formulate the flavor profiles of the long-lost Pimm’s Cups using modern ingredients, but there’s no word on where those recipes went.)

For others, even dedicated fans of the No. 1 bottling, there’s a sense that bringing back these extinct products wouldn’t necessarily fill a perceived gap on the backbar. At Brooklyn’s Maison Premiere, for example, bar director William Elliott has managed to work Pimm’s No. 1 into a staggering number of Pimm’s Cup variations—32 in all—but what he likes about it, namely its low proof and ability to play well with other ingredients, might not ring true for other expressions. “The fun thing about Pimm’s is dressing it up,” he says, “It’s just kind of a nice, flexible base to dress up with another spirit and some modifiers.”

So, with the ever-widening array of bottles and drink combinations out there, is there even really a need to bring back the lost Pimm’s bottles?

“Beyond historic resurrectionist curiosity? No,” says Elliott. “But still, I would love to see it.”

The post The Lost Pimm’s Cups appeared first on PUNCH.

Almost always, we’d come late and stay late. In those days, the bar didn’t even open until 8 p.m. But the path was always the same: Walk down East 9th Street, find the “ON AIR” sign glowing above a flight of stairs, descend and ring the buzzer next to an otherwise unmarked, locked door.

Eventually, someone would open it with a wary look, not because the place wanted to keep a low profile—often there was a line up the stairs—but because back then the East Village went bad pretty quickly east of 3rd Avenue. Inside, you would supplicate before a thin rope and eventually, hopefully, be ushered to a seat in a small back room with dim light, a few booths, a low bar with a maneki-neko (the ubiquitous beckoning cat) statue behind it, a tatami screen or two and graffiti on every wall.

Decibel, which quietly celebrated its 25th birthday last year, proclaimed itself to be New York’s first sake bar. But it was far more than that, at least to a generation of thirsty and often disillusioned New Yorkers. Sake Bar Decibel, as it’s officially known, was a last stand of sorts before the East Village went the way of Whole Foods—and just as important, it was the place where many of the city’s professional eaters and drinkers learned about sake.

In the mid-1990s, I’d go there on a date, or a would-be date, or with hacker friends who wanted to discreetly talk about how technology could make the world a better place (spoiler: it didn’t) or about the dystopian undercarriage of the dot-com era (spoiler: there was one). But many of the customers were Japanese punks or art kids—as were most of the servers—and on occasion when it grew late you’d notice men there in what I’ll call transactional arrangements. You could still smoke in bars in those days, and Decibel’s darkness always had a perceptible haze that added to the overall grunge. The soundtrack would rev with punk and trance and the precursors of emo.

While you could order shochu or a saketini, if you were serious about drinks, you came to Decibel for sake. The space may have been stygian, but its sake selection was more extensive than probably anywhere in the country at the time. Its list was filled with 60 or more of some of the best sakes being exported from Japan, denoted by terms like daiginjo and yamahai, that were as yet unfamiliar not only to newbies like me but to many Japanese as well. You’d soak them up with rudimentary snacks, prepared in the microwave up front.

Decibel is improbably, remarkably, as busy as it ever was—maybe more so. The stickers and graffiti that always graced the walls seem to cover nearly every inch of every surface today; the bathrooms are cleaner, and “they use a computer now,” says Miki Kanematsu, one of Decibel’s early managers. But the experience of drinking there has remained very much the same for a quarter-century—and that’s hardly supposition. I’ve been going there since its beginning, when I was as many of its customers are today: barely out of college, dreaming of a future of creative bliss while accepting a more sobering reality in a mundane corner of tech, in my case as an early employee of one of the first online ad firms. (Oh, for the days when the font of evil was spelled A-O-L.)

Of course, that was a totally different New York. Unemployment, just 4 percent today, was over 13 percent. Tompkins Square Park, a couple blocks away, had recently reopened after riots and attempts to empty its homeless encampments, although you still didn’t walk its perimeter at night if you had any sense. The East Village was a melting pot of Ukranian emigrés, smack addicts and post-punk burnouts, whereas today it has become a haven for Urban Outfitters, fancy hotels and four Starbucks. Veselka wasn’t yet a tourist attraction, just a coffee shop with Slavic accents. But somehow, of all places, it’s Decibel that has remained largely unbowed through the years.

I realized not long ago that I really knew nothing about Decibel’s history, despite its seminal spot in my drinking history.

At the surface, its longevity tells  a tale of survival in New York’s brutally unforgiving restaurant economy. Its 25th birthday quietly passed last year with nary a mention, but any establishment that keeps its doors open so long earns an enviable status. Its origins in the last stretch of 20th-century New York puts it in company with stalwarts like Tribeca Grill (1990), Gramercy Tavern (1994) and Balthazar (1997). Much like its neighbor, the equally pioneering Angel’s Share (which opened the same year and similarly endures), Decibel predated by nearly a decade most of the city’s recently important bars, even Milk & Honey. Indeed, most great 1980s and ’90s bars, including the epic I.M. Pei–designed Fifty Seven Fifty Seven, in the Four Seasons Hotel, have vanished. (So have most of the shitty ones, like Decibel’s neighbor Continental, which helped at least two generations of college kids make bad decisions before closing, largely unmourned, late last year.)

Arguably, the sheer improbability of its aesthetic was what helped it to survive. A Japanese punk speakeasy, but with great sake? It’s the sort of combination that, if you conceived of it today, would feel utterly contrived, as though you’d drunk too much cough syrup and were dreaming up hotel-bar concepts with Ian Schrager. Yet even its sillier cocktail offerings, like the Lychee Martini, were benchmarks in their own way. “It was the first place in New York that had that drink,” recalls Takahiro Okada, another former manager.

I can’t quite say Decibel’s creation was entirely uncalculated, but it was calculated in a relatively innocent way, in that it mirrored its neighborhood’s growth. By 1990 that part of the East Village was morphing from its Ukrainian roots into a miniature Japantown. It had become a sanctuary for Japanese expats who had escaped to New York to pursue careers in art or fashion or music, described by the New York Times as the early-1990s equivalent of “the young Americans who flocked to Paris in the years after World War I.” And they frequented the passel of Japanese restaurants and bars that had opened along 9th Street.

Several of those were run by a man named Shuji Bon Yagi. In 1984, he opened his first Japanese restaurant there, the Edo-style sushi spot Hasaki, to compete with tonier joints uptown that he couldn’t afford. (Hasaki remains open today, just up the street from Decibel.) By the mid-1980s, Bon Yagi had the lease on an underground bar space at 240 East 9th Street. And in 1989, he opened Candy B1, a karaoke joint that was notable for its live band (technically making it a namaoke joint). Four years later, he refitted the space as Decibel, although initially it served whisky and beer.

But good sake had finally started to arrive in the United States, and Yagi was ever more taken with it, in particular after he tried one called Koshi No Kanbai from the mountainous Niigata prefecture. True, it was early to induce Americans to drink sake, but Yagi took an essential long view. Before long, the bar found a steady clientele—mostly Japanese at first, then increasingly mixed. “When I opened Decibel, it didn’t take off right away,” he tells me. “Most people, when it doesn’t take off right away, they decide to change.”

The punk aesthetic was partly a segue from the space’s former karaoke days. But it also was a reflection of the East Village, and those young Japanese who were busy rejecting the conservatism of the culture back home while embracing nearly everything foreign: music, tattoos, radical art, you name it. Shonen Knife, one of the seminal female punk bands, was already famous. In 1996, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, the trip-hop duo known as Cibo Matto, released their debut album, Viva! La Woman, which intertwined that New York expat culture with their love of eating and drinking. (Extra sugar, extra salt / Extra oil and MSG!) More than a few of these expats ended up working at Decibel, which helped to explain why its staff typically looked they’d stepped off a stage at an underground Tokyo club.

But that would have quickly grown tiresome, if not for how dead-serious Yagi and his managers took their sake selections. Even if most of the staff wasn’t particularly versed in the nuances of various styles—things aren’t much different today, candidly—you could point to just about anything on the list and taste something far better than any sake you’d had before.

This wasn’t just curation. Yagi had the good fortune to open Decibel at a transformative moment for the sake industry. During much of the century, sake was graded on a tax-based system that forced most brewers to downgrade their best products, making low-grade sake the norm. But as of 1992, a new scale was enforced, based in part on the degree of rice polishing. It catalyzed a preference for more refined sakes, including the highly polished junmai daiginjo style, whose muted style and clarity were considered—especially among the finance types who did business with Japanese counterparts—to represent the same “purity” that the neutrality of Grey Goose would a decade later. As ever more high-quality sake began arriving in the country, shipped in refrigerated containers, Yagi bought all he could. Many of these were revelations not only for Americans, but also for many of Decibel’s Japanese customers and staff, who’d grown up drinking the cheap stuff.

“Even when I was in Japan,” says Kanematsu, who came to New York as a tourist from Kochi prefecture and began working at Decibel in 1996, “I hadn’t really had sake like that before.”

On the one hand, Decibel oozed its punkish cool with a Tokyo twist, an extension of the fascination many Americans had with anything Japanese during the 1980s: Benihana, Nintendo, Comme des Garçons. The food—now as then—wasn’t meant to be particularly notable; it was a combination of the familiar, like shumai, and the traditional but unfamiliar, like the wasabi-doused raw octopus known as takowasa. But the drinking was always serious, or could be. That unique mix drew a growing cadre of industry types and budding writers, such that most people who were serious about food and drink in New York during the 1990s have a Decibel story.

“These aloof, insanely attractive punk-rock Japanese kids seemed to be running the place,” recalls Besha Rodell, a longtime restaurant critic who now covers Australian dining for the New York Times and frequented Decibel during her college years. “It was that hospitality-kid fantasy of someone just opening the exact thing they wanted to do and having it work.”

By the time he opened Decibel, Yagi had been in the neighborhood for nearly two decades. He had arrived in the United States in 1968 and came to New York in 1976, hanging out in the East Village through those darker days, which helps to explain the framed picture of him, lounging on a couch with a full pre-hipster beard, that hangs above his desk. Among his endeavors: running a diner, 103 Second Ave., one of the late-night 1980s hangouts for an increasingly arty downtown crowd—including, in his telling, a patron who would provide inspiration for the graffiti on Decibel’s walls. “Keith Haring would come in, and he’d write in my bathroom,” says Yagi. “And being Japanese and believing in cleanliness, I’d scrape it off.”

As time went on, Yagi became a sort of Keith McNally of New York’s Japanese food community, an unofficial mayor of 9th Street. Today, his company, T.I.C. Group, essentially controls most of the block on which Decibel sits, encompassing a mini-empire of 15 restaurants and bars. That includes Rai Rai Ken, which helped to introduce New Yorkers to ramen years before a guy named David Chang opened his noodle bar around the corner; Soba-Ya, one of the city’s seminal spots for buckwheat noodles; the teahouse Cha-An; the Japanese coffee shop Hi-Collar; and another basement sake bar, Sakagura, which opened in midtown shortly after Decibel, with an even more extensive sake list—now up to 250 selections—for those who might not vibe the punk thing. “The midtown salaryman, Japanese office workers, they didn’t want to come downtown,” recalls Yagi. (A second location of Sakagura recently opened across the street from Decibel.)

If Yagi’s empire has become relatively corporate, that hardly seems to have dented Decibel’s rebel yell. Music was always at the bar’s core—the “ON AIR” sign was quite intentional—and that remains as such. The current manager, Ken Arii, who started working there 12 years ago, still sports a Mohawk and plays in an electronic noise band called Coput. Each night’s bartender selects a playlist from a selection of around 10,000 songs, with a tacit understanding about standards. “I got really angry one time because I went into Decibel and Top 40 was playing,” says Sakura Yagi, Bon Yagi’s daughter and the restaurant group’s COO. “And I said, ‘This is not Decibel.’” (On a recent visit, the soundtrack veered from Beta Librae’s “Skyla” to Nelly Furtado’s “Afraid,” indicating the pop-hating may have relaxed of late.)

That culture was designed to be self-sustaining. The staff still evaluates each new hire, less for hospitality than to ensure they’re appropriately offbeat. If today’s servers trend a bit more skate-kid and emo than overtly punk, they haven’t lost the attitude—including a certain apathy toward the Gen X gaijin who’s seated before them—their predecessors espoused two decades ago. Now, as then, they’re likely to be artists or musicians who came to New York for that expat life. In a way it reminds me of how David Schomer, whose Espresso Vivace in Seattle pioneered latte art in this country, sought out artists to be his baristas, proposing that it was a job where they could “make a living without being degraded.”

And if the staff aren’t really trained in the nuances of sake, that’s actually more feature than bug. Courtney Kaplan, who now co-owns the Los Angeles izakaya Tsubaki, built a career around the sake knowledge she learned at Decibel. But she was first drawn there as a student at Columbia in the late 1990s, when she was spending time in the East Village, going to hardcore shows. Primarily interested in a job where she could maintain the Japanese she’d learned while studying abroad, she called the bar, was told to come in and spent the evening over cups of sake, being peppered with questions about her taste in music. (The manager at the time was partial to Todd Rundgren.) As she discovered, it was the sense of belonging, rather than any expertise, that catalyzed the staff. “The bar closed at 4, and then somebody would usually make a second family meal, and we’d drink sake and hang out until the morning,” she recalls. “Because what else are you going to do at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday?”

Yet Decibel became a training ground for sake knowledge, perhaps in spite of itself, imbuing its servers with a serious interest many brought along to other restaurants. It also maintained a very Japanese view of the continuity of tradition—which I find to be the most reassuring part of its story. After all, so much of the East Village’s defining culture has been wiped away. Yagi’s 103 Second would eventually become the site of Vandaag and now the barbecue spot Mighty Quinn’s. The original location of the 2nd Avenue Deli is now a Chase branch. Holiday Cocktail Lounge, once a hole-in-the-wall selling $3.75 Dewars, is now a boîte with $16 drinks. But Decibel rages on, much as it always did.

Even today, I still get carded before the rope is lifted, gray hairs be damned. And its patrons carry on as we once did—ranting about the perils of tech, settling farther into a booth as the night wears on. Most are unaware of how unlikely it is that Decibel is still here after all these years, and how such a place almost surely could never come into existence again. The New York of 2019, the eminently predictable one that has birthed a place like Hudson Yards, simply would not allow it.

The post The Quiet Defiance of Decibel appeared first on PUNCH.

The most influential bar of the current century opened 20 years ago, on December 31, 1999, inside a forbidding former mahjong parlor on a dark, dangerous block of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There was no sign, no menu, no published phone number. Its owner, creator, sole bartender and in-house visionary was Sasha Petraske. The iconoclastic offspring of a Greenwich Village Communist household and a former Army ranger with a taste for jazz, vintage clothing and etiquette, he had certain ideas about what a cocktail bar could be and should be. Those ideas—including an infamous list of behavioral rules that hung in the bathroom—were strong enough to inspire a new way of making, consuming and thinking about cocktails, much of it drawn from the old ways. That movement continues today, years after his untimely passing in 2015 at the age of 42.

To paint a portrait of Milk & Honey’s origins, early days and legacy we talked to several early figures in the bar’s history, including Petraske’s childhood friend and early supporter, TJ Siegal; Kelvin Perez, the bar’s first, and longest-serving, employee; Toby Maloney, the bar’s first additional bartender; early bartenders Joseph Schwartz, Elizabeth Sun, Christy Pope and Chad Solomon; and famed bartender Dale DeGroff, who discovered the hidden bar early on. Here’s what they had to say about the bar’s early days, how its staff and clientele slowly came together and the unique nature of the inimitable idealist that was Petraske.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Sasha Petraske was a New York–born iconoclast with a dream to open the perfect café. It took years to realize that dream; along the way, that café became a bar on a then-gritty block of New York’s Lower East Side.

Kelvin Perez (barback, 1999-2012): “I was born and raised in the building of 132 Eldridge Street. The neighborhood was known for drugs, prostitution, gangs, fights and theft. I remember looking out the window and personally seeing people get mugged, shot and stabbed.”
TJ Siegal (lifelong friend of Petraske and an early benefactor of the bar): “Sash had plans to open a café in ’89 or ’90. He wanted to build a better mousetrap. He kept updating his model for the perfect café.”
Perez: “Before Milk & Honey took over, the store at 134 Eldridge Street was first a tailor shop from the 1980s to the ’90s. Then in the early to mid-’90s it became a TV repair shop, but it only lasted about three years or so. Lastly it was taken over by the Chinese who made it an illegal gambling location.”
Dale DeGroff (famed New York bartender and figurehead in the cocktail revival): “This is a joint where old Chinese gentlemen gathered to gamble. The whole street was and still is predominantly Chinese.”
Perez: “One day I remember walking towards 134 Eldridge and seeing people walking inside with wood material and the door being open. Sasha came out to greet me—this tall guy had suspenders which made me think of my grandfather at first. Sasha had the most warming smile I could remember. He talked about wanted to own a small café, I remember him saying, but was going to make this a bar.”

THE EARLY DAYS

Petraske opened his unknown, unseen, unlisted bar a few hours before the year 2000, with one employee, a few guests and certainly no idea how much it would influence the bars of the coming decade.

Siegel: “The space looked a little unfinished, but it looked great. I had never been aware of a bar that looked like that before. The original floors were wood planks and beautiful. They didn’t last, due to flooding. I originally thought the space behind the bar was too small to work in but I was wrong. Sash’s specs on how to build the bar itself were extraordinarily exact. It turned out to be perfect. ‘Perfect’ is a word that almost never leaves my lips.”
Perez: “The first night at M&H was more about friends coming in and experiencing what this bar was going to be about. There was no sign outside. It was word of mouth. Sasha killed it behind the bar, explaining drinks and giving people some history behind each cocktail.”
Siegal: “Sash had been popular as a bartender at Von and knew a lot of people in downtown Manhattan. Before the bar had been officially open, he threw a few of what he called ‘rent parties.’ The people who then came in the first few months were his friends, his previous clientele, and people from those parties who liked the place. It was tough and there were a lot of very empty nights. Most people didn’t know there was a bar there.”
DeGroff: “My friend Joe Cifarelli lived across the street from Milk & Honey in a loft building and he walked his dog nightly along Eldridge Street. One night he saw a bunch of young white kids come out of the mahjong parlor across the street. When he asked, they said it was a bar now.”
Siegal: “I remember a story Sash told where a group of six thick-necked men came up to the door. They turned out to be police who had come straight from the precinct after work to settle a bet. One cop said there was a bar at 134 Eldridge and nobody else at the station would believe him.”
Perez: “In the early days Sasha was behind the bar making drinks that were new to many. Sasha was perfect in measurements with his jiggers, his pours, tasted all his cocktails with straws to perfect them and held the glass as far away from the top as possible, so no fingerprints were seen. He told stories and always had people learning. He made Old-Fashioneds, Manhattans, Queen’s Park Swizzles, Bee’s Knees, Tom Collinses, Fitzgeralds, Negronis, Sazeracs, Mojitos.”
Joseph Schwartz (Milk & Honey barback and bartender, 2000-05): “In the early days, the bar, though not swamped, enjoyed a steady business: mostly friends, friends of friends, and a great deal of the service industry.”
Toby Maloney (Milk & Honey bartender, 2000-05): “I loved those early days, before I worked there and was still a patron, when Sasha and I would talk theory, run experiments, and try to figure out better and better ways of making cocktails. The way that he was able to think laterally, but also with rigid structure, was fascinating.”

FIRST IMPRESSIONS      

Milk & Honey was not an immediate success. Creative advances were countered by empty nights and unruly patrons. But those who encountered the bar knew they were witnessing something special.

Elizabeth Sun (Milk & Honey bartender, 2001-03): “I still remember the first time walking through those heavy velvet curtains and walking into a whole different dimension. I always equated it to the feeling of going through the wardrobe and ending up in Narnia.”
Christy Pope (Milk & Honey server and bartender, 2001-07): “My first impression was exciting and enthralling. The calling, waiting, secretive entrance. Sasha in his vintage attire, shepherding the experience. It was otherworldly and charming. The drinks themselves were a revelation. Cold glassware, big ice, silver straws, attention to detail and care of service.”
Chad Solomon (Milk & Honey customer from 2002; bartender, 2005-07): “Christy took me to Milk & Honey for the first time in early 2002. There really wasn’t anything else like it at the time. Sasha may have been influenced by Angel’s Share, but stepping into Milk & Honey was far more immersive and transportive.”

THE STAFF & CLIENTELE

Petraske chose his initial hires carefully, looking for people he could mold in Milk & Honey’s image. In so doing, he produced many future leaders of the craft cocktail movement.

Perez: “I was Sasha’s first hired employee [in 1999]. It was Sasha at the bar and I was the barback. A few months after we opened, Sasha asked if I wanted to bartend. I said no. I was happy where I was. So he got the first hired bartender, Toby Maloney.”
Pope: “He mentioned that he was going to need some additional help and I said I’d love to work there. He liked my style (vintage) and asked if I had any experience and I said not really. He said, ‘Perfect.’”
Perez: “He wanted someone with little to no experience because this way he can shape them to work the way he wanted them to be.”
Pope: “We’d be fully booked for our initial seating with a huge wait list, and then people would keep showing up without calling. It could get quite mad trying to handle all the pop-ins and explaining the policy, while managing the ringing phone, and taking elaborate orders at tables because everything was by suggestion. I remember a few times having a quick cry in the bathroom over how stressful it could be.”
Perez: “At one point [during the first year] a man got drunk and went over to sit down on a table that two ladies were seated. Sasha didn’t like what was going on and escorted the man out. He apologized to the ladies and bought them their drinks. He then began to write down eight rules for this bar.”
Maloney: “People would become very amorous. We had issues with the table right below the window up front. It had a nickname.”
Perez: “If you looked in the direction of the bar, there were Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6—later on to be changed by me as Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Sex.”
Pope: “Everyone would say, ‘I know Sasha.’ That became such a thing that Toby made a T-shirt that said, ‘I know Sasha’ as a gag.”
Perez: “A man walked in with no reservations, went up to Sasha and said that he was a friend of Sasha’s and that he was coming in for a drink. Sasha kept in character, asking the man ‘How is Sasha doing?’ They both had a drink, which Sasha bought for him, never revealing who he was.”

THE PRESS

The press loved to write about Petraske’s secretive, idiosyncratic bar; its love was not reciprocated.

Pope: “Sasha was not a fan of media. He framed the bad review of the bar given to him as a badge of honor.”
Solomon: “He was press-shy as he felt that the bar was misunderstood and he had been misrepresented when he’d dealt with press in the early days of Milk & Honey, so he preferred to keep a safe distance. He was also cautious not to encourage any coverage that would create more popular demand on M&H that could be disruptive to the neighbors.”
Schwartz: “He did not seem the least concerned with whether coverage was negative or positive, but rather the accuracy of the coverage and his general displeasure with the focus of coverage being on himself, the bar or its mystique, rather than the cocktails, which he fervently believed was the only thing deserving discussion.”
Maloney: “Some reporter had once told him that the general public had a ‘right to know’ about the bar. He almost lost his mind with that.”

WORKING WITH SASHA

Idealists are not always the easiest people to work with, but they are usually inspiring. Petraske was no exception.

Siegal: “A person who thinks and acts and talks like Sash isn’t quite like other people in the world. He worked himself to the bone in the first year. More hours per week than I’ve seen most people ever do. Daytime and night. Then he released most of the bartending itself to a growing staff and spent his ongoing time training them.”
Pope: “Sasha’s ideas were always thoughtful and of the purest intentions. He thought a lot about process, was obsessed with how to do it better. It was great to see this in action on a cerebral level, but on a practical level, when M&H was cranking, it was hard to have him in service. He would stop everything to get one thing right, even if it meant delaying everything else.”
Solomon: “There was a constant dialogue and a drive to continue to do things better. There was always a running debate on a manner of drinks-related issues up until our last conversation.”
Perez: “Sasha taught me how to toast mixed nuts, shuck oysters, make strawberry and mascarpone plates with honey, and make pancakes for when we stayed open way past the closing time.”
Schwartz: “I admired his conscientious belief in treating everyone exceedingly fair—staff and clientele alike. That included a $15-an-hour wage for bartenders and barbacks in 2000.” [Minimum wage in New York State was $5.15 at the time.]
Solomon: “There were tough nights. There [were] times that bills weren’t paid to the liquor distributor and we’d have to go to the liquor store to get product, or wait for Sasha to come drop off bottles.”
Siegal: “He was the most naturally generous person I had ever met. Most material things didn’t matter too much to him—easy come, easy go.”
Solomon: “Sasha set a Champagne policy that if we had an open bottle at the end of the night, to call him and he’d come and finish it.”

THE LEGACY

Milk & Honey is gone, but the revolution it helped ignite lives on.

Pope: “We would not have the modern craft cocktail movement, or bars, as we know it, if M&H had not existed. Many of the modern philosophies and techniques that define the craft movement were born out of Milk & Honey: the use of jiggers, economy of motion and building by the round techniques, ice-last bartending, the entire big-ice movement, the standards of chilled glassware, stainless steel straws, fresh juices and ingredients.”
Solomon: “For me, Milk & Honey’s legacy is the power and influence of a bartender-owned bar. Sasha had the freedom to create an establishment that was holistically consistent with his philosophies of service, product, hospitality and aesthetic. He would never have been able to have been as influential working for someone else.”
DeGroff: “I believe that his imitators took things way too far down the road in controlling the ambiance and the flow of guests, in some cases taking a lot of the fun and spontaneity out of the bar experience for the guests. But it was a new movement and that awkwardness slowly has disappeared for the most part.”
Maloney: “Ultimately it will always be Sasha who made Milk & Honey what it was, and the last thing he wanted was attention. But I’d like to think he’d be proud of what he helped start, in NYC and all over the world.”
Siegal: “Some time ago, Jack Nicholson did a string of mushy, flimsy movies in which he played a grouchy old man who eventually comes to terms with the world around him. In the commercial for one of them is the quote, ‘You make me want to be a better man.’ Milk & Honey’s legacy is of the bar that made everyone want to be better.”
Maloney: “And keep your goddamned shirt tucked in.”

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Better known as Don the Beachcomber, the godfather of tiki contributed more to cocktail culture than just tropical escapism.

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On the night of November 26, 1900, 1412 Pennsylvania Avenue NW was the only place to be in Washington, D.C. Three weeks earlier, President William McKinley had secured a second term in office, but the ball taking place at Grand Army Hall, five minutes from the White House, was not in his honor. The venue instead played host to a blowout organized by the Mixologist Club, an elite guild of the finest Black bartenders in the District.

Paying 35 cents for admission, well-heeled attendees enjoyed dinner and drinks before reporting to the dance floor; the “strains of sweet music” provided by Professor Charles Hamilton’s Monumental Orchestra, according to a recap in The Colored American, “attracted a select number who came to trip the light fantastic.” The evening’s entertainment also included a people’s choice contest to crown the city’s best barman. Sometime after midnight, Edward Matthews, who’d risen from errand boy to head mixologist in his decade on staff at the nearby Philadelphia House, was announced as the winner, receiving a gold watch as his prize. “[One] of the most congenial men in the city,” The Washington Bee would later note. “Ed. knows how to treat his patrons when they call.”

At the turn of the 20th century, the officers of the Mixologist Club, founded in 1898, were fussed-over figures in D.C.’s Black periodicals, whether they were executing an elaborate fête or crafting a flawless Rickey, their town’s native highball. A common knack for preparing cocktails, however, was only one of several factors leading to the guild’s formation.

D.C.’s segregation laws necessitated the creation of the Black-owned bars, restaurants, hotels and clubs that employed these men, including the Philadelphia House, the Academy Restaurant, Gray and Costley and the Sparta Buffet. As admired in their orbit as the ballyhooed white bartenders outside it, the Mixologist Club unified as a declaration of Black agency within the profession, in an era when the race’s proximity to liquor was frequently—and unjustly—associated with lawlessness and vice. “The art of mixing liquors has come to be a highly respectable and profitable calling and men of excellent repute are found in its ranks,” The Colored American wrote in 1900. “To protect the better grade of workmen from the shiftless and unreliable, and to stimulate a broader spirit of fraternity, an organization was found necessary.”

Today, Black industry professionals in Washington, D.C., are gleaning inspiration from their predecessors, developing new methods of support on both sides of the bar. Indeed, collaboration has been a hallmark of the Black bartending community in D.C. since the turn of the century, when it was the best and often only recourse amid legislated oppression.

In 1830, a majority of Black residents in D.C. were free, and in the 16 years spanning the Civil War and Reconstruction, upward of 25,000 more free Black people settled in the city. By 1930, this number had reached more than 132,000—then America’s second-largest Black community after New York, and its most economically prosperous, according to Garrett Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t. Early Black Washingtonians, barred from most white spaces by Jim Crow laws, laid the framework for the 20th-century emergence of D.C. as “Chocolate City,” a majority-Black town that nurtured African-American excellence in academia, art, entrepreneurship and politics. Out of necessity, they introduced the District’s first Black churches, schools and small businesses—as well as private clubs and societies for the politically engaged.

Robert R. Bowie and J. Burke Edelin, the Mixologist Club’s president and VP, poured drinks for D.C.’s 5,500 person–strong National Colored Personal Liberty League, an anti-temperance lobby with some 600,000 members across the country. Complimented in the papers for his “manly bearing and dignified mien,” Bowie made regular public endorsements for municipal positions and judgeships; Edelin, in 1908, served as the president of Colored Voters for Taft. There was also the Metropole Club, run by Mixologist Club secretary C. Washington Wood, whom The Colored American noted “dispenses refreshments with dexterity and a smile as mellow as a June apple.”

According to Andra Johnson, managing partner of the Latin American cocktail bar Serenata and a co-founder of DMV Black Restaurant Week, the District of Columbia “was one of the first places that Black people had spaces to experience the hospitality that they had been giving for so long. You could be served, be welcomed and be treated like you’re special.” This past December, Johnson took over downtown’s bar Allegory for a talk on the origins of D.C.’s Black drinking culture, complete with a historically informed cocktail list.

Programming such as this actively combats the legacy of erasure that has plagued the contributions of the Mixologist Club, victims of racism and unfortunate timing alike. These bartenders rose to prominence alongside the temperance movement—in fact, the Anti-Saloon League, which became a national organization in Northwest D.C. in 1895, was founded at a church within walking distance of their bars. The onset of Prohibition, which lasted longer in the District than anywhere else in the country, had a doubly deleterious effect on their standing in cocktail history.

“I would have loved to see what they may have been able to accomplish for their profession, had it not been ruled illegal,” says Duane Sylvestre, a spirits specialist for Gruppo Campari. In 2013, he teamed up with Bacardi ambassador Colin Asare-Appiah, local bar owner Derek Brown and others to organize a party celebrating Black cocktail heritage in D.C. and beyond. In 2017, Sylvestre and drinks historian David Wondrich presented on the Mixologist Club and other pre-Prohibition African-American bartenders at BevCon in Charleston, South Carolina, contextualizing their contributions within the wider cocktail discourse.

Johnson’s and Sylvestre’s scholarly efforts are just a few examples of the unified vision shared by Washington, D.C.’s Black bar professionals today. Though it looks and sounds much different than it did in 1900, the grassroots solidarity at the core of the Mixologist Club’s efforts is still palpable. “The people of color that I came up with in my career always find ways to collaborate, educate each other and uphold a standard of quality,” says Glendon Hartley, co-owner of Service Bar on U Street and former president of the D.C. branch of the United States Bartenders’ Guild.

In 2018, Kapri Robinson of Reliable Tavern in Petworth, launched Chocolate City’s Best, a cocktail competition for BIPOC talent in the D.C. region. Robinson and her partners have since expanded that contest into a wider-reaching nonprofit, with a focus on identifying and creating opportunities for growth and advancement within the industry. “I hope that Black people and people of color learn empowerment from our programming,” says Robinson, the organization’s president and engagement ambassador. “I believe in pulling people up the ladder with me, and in turn, them doing the same.”

Johnson, of Serenata, draws another direct line between the city’s past and present with the R.R. Bowie Cocktail Competition, an event she launched two years ago as part of DMV Black Restaurant Week. Named in honor of the Mixologist Club’s president, it brings together bartenders of color who have not had the opportunity to participate in mainstream competitions, while paying homage to their industry forebears through thematic prompts and challenges. “The idea was to build the confidence for younger or newer bartenders, but also pay homage to the fact that we’re not new to this,” she says. “We’ve been here.”

The post The Century-Old Mixologist Club, Revisited appeared first on PUNCH.

Even if you’ve never heard of Hop Louie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen pictures of it. The restaurant is located inside one of the most iconic buildings in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a baroque, five-tiered pagoda structure with each level slightly smaller than the one below it, like Russian nesting dolls stacked in reverse.

When it was constructed, in 1941, it was the tallest building in the neighborhood—a triumph of thematic Oriental architecture and the crown jewel of a recently debuted, tourist-friendly “New Chinatown.” For a few decades a Cantonese restaurant called the Golden Pagoda occupied the space, but sometime in the 1980s a man known as Uncle Hop Louie Woo (former Senior Vice President of Far East affairs at Caesars Palace Las Vegas) took ownership. The dining room, which served as a backdrop for such acclaimed films as Lethal Weapon 4 and Mystery Men, was heavy on red pleather and faux gold leaf.

The last time my wife and I were at Hop Louie, about a year ago, we’d shuffled over after drinks at a nearby cocktail spot called General Lee’s. We shared a “Special Dinner Combination Plate,” or something to that effect—a prix fixe assemblage of foil-wrapped chicken, wonton soup, BBQ pork chow mein and crispy lemon chicken soaked in a neon yellow sauce so sour it could have been made with powdered Country Time lemonade. Full and already buzzed, we agreed on a nightcap at Hop Louie’s downstairs cocktail lounge, a noir-era relic from the days when drinking dens were labeled as cocktail lounges without a hint of irony.

Nearly everyone in the bar—art school kids, mostly—were drinking either bottles of Tsingtao or Scorpion Bowls, that lethal built-for-two tiki drink that is as much a provocation as it is an alcoholic beverage. I asked for latter, of course, and my wife promptly shot me that you’re on your own look. I’d barely gotten through half before a sudden sting of heartburn hit my chest like a screeching air raid siren—a warning for the college-freshman hangover that awaited me the next morning.

By itself, a lackluster Scorpion Bowl made with bottled juice and bottom-shelf rum didn’t strike me as all that interesting. But blended-to-order inside an old Chinese restaurant, that lone tiki drink signaled a broader type of idiosyncrasy.

I. The Chinese-Tiki Connection

Hop Louie isn’t the only Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles where you’ll find Scorpion Bowls, Zombies and Mai Tais flowing freely. In the neighborhood of Pico-Robertson—often referred to as LA’s Kosher Korridor for its ample Jewish population—are two beacons of Cantonese-American cuisine, Twin Dragon and Fu’s Palace, located not more than a few blocks apart. Twin Dragon, which opened in 1962, was remodeled and revamped a few years back, and while it lost much of its retro luster, an illustrated cocktail menu still hangs behind the bar, next to a long illuminated fish tank filled with koi. Options include the Flaming Virgin (with a floating lemon garnish set aflame), Blue Hawaii, Navy Grog and Banana Daiquiri.

Fu’s Palace, by contrast, has retained its kitschy ‘60s splendor, complete with a faded-green thatched roof and paper Zodiac mats on every table. Once a grand and spacious restaurant in its glory days, Fu’s is now best known as home to an extra-potent Scorpion Bowl, which functions as a tropical Long Island Iced Tea for rowdy and occasionally lascivious UCLA kids. The place is sometimes referred to as “F.U. Palace,” short for “fucked up.”

As it turns out, Fu’s had actually replaced an even older Cantonese restaurant called Wan-Q sometime in the 1970s, which was owned by a man named Benny Eng and known for its flamboyant tropical cocktails. Wan-Q, too, had a rival located just a few blocks away, a now-closed Cantonese establishment called the Kowloon, which served Polynesian delights like pineapple Peking duck and a Tahitian Rum Punch. On a number of message boards and tiki fan sites users have chronicled long-forgotten Cantonese restaurants like these not only in Southern California—Yue’s Cantonese in Gardena, Edwin Tan’s Chinese Gardens in San Bernardino, China Inn in Pacific Beach, Mandarin Tiger in Tarzana—but all across the United States, including a few that had managed to survive over the decades.

There was the beloved King Yum in Queens, Lun Wah in New Jersey, Chef Shangri-La in the suburbs outside Chicago, Zom Hee Chinese in Florida, Shanghai Lounge in Oklahoma, Ho Kong in Rhode Island—the list stretched onward. It’s been estimated by Chinese Restaurant News that 80 percent of the 40,000 or so Chinese restaurants in America serve what is considered Chinese-American food (egg rolls, sweet and sour, chow mein, tomato beef, cashew chicken, etc.). If even a small percentage of those restaurants also served tiki drinks, it would easily dwarf the number of tiki bars and restaurants left in America by a wide margin. What wasn’t ready available was an answer as to why. How, exactly, had Chinese food and tiki drinks become so intertwined in America?

On a basic level, their marriage was one of commercial opportunism. “Tiki bars were having great success with serving [their own] version of Cantonese cooking in the 1950s,” says Martin Cate, author of the book Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. “Basically the Cantonese restaurants all started to say, Hey, they’re already serving our food, why don’t we serve their drinks? Many Chinese restaurants at that time had separate cocktail lounges attached, so they added some bamboo and thatch in there and started rolling out the tiki drink menus.”

But to write the pervasiveness of tiki in today’s Cantonese restaurants off as a remnant of a burnt-out fad would be to miss the larger parable. If I wanted to understand the full story behind their enduring relationship, Cate told me, I would have to start at the very beginning.

II. Just Mysterious Enough

Ernest Gantt—the man who would later be known as Don the Beachcomber, the founding father of the tiki movement—grew up, according to some sources, the son of a wealthy Texas oilman. When he turned 19, his father handed him a large sum of money, ostensibly to be spent on a college education. Gantt decide to pack his suitcase instead. He spent the next five years traveling the globe—the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii, Singapore, the Philippines.

After he had exhausted his inheritance, Gantt landed in Los Angeles, where he worked various odd jobs: dishwasher at Chinese restaurants; valet at celebrity-filled nightclubs; set designer and technical consultant for schlocky, low-budget “adventure” movies. By 1933, Gantt had scraped together enough money to open Don’s Beachcomber Café in Hollywood, a palm frond and bamboo-clad shack that showcased island knick-knacks picked up from his travels; he completed the 24-seat island paradise with his own brand of “Rum Rhapsodies”—intricate cocktails influenced by both Caribbean-style rum punches and tropical juice drinks popular in the Philippines—and would later legally change his name to Donn Beach, taking on a bohemian persona that fell somewhere between Paul Gauguin and Jimmy Buffett. In an era when themed bars ruled LA, Don’s quickly emerged as a rollicking hotspot for Hollywood high society.

While Beach was busy planting the flag for exotic cocktails, Americanized Chinese food (cooked by mostly Cantonese immigrants) was breaking into the mainstream. Over the past few decades, Cantonese cooking had slowly expanded beyond the confines of Chinatowns, developing, as Andrew Coe puts in his book Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, a broad appeal as food that was “cheap, filling, and just mysterious enough.”

In 1937, Beach and his new wife, Cora “Sunny” Sund—a former Minnesota school teacher turned LA waitress—decided to expand their wildly successful bar (now renamed Don the Beachcomber) across the street into a much roomier space with a full kitchen. Beach, though a visionary in many ways, wasn’t know for being a particularly shrewd businessman. It took the foresight of Sund to realize that serving Cantonese food, tweaked with just enough Polynesian flair (read: pineapple) to label as their own, would be exotic enough to entice, but not intimidate.

“Among [Sunny’s] first moves was the hiring of a Chinese chef. With Don and the chef, she set to work to devise a South Seas-Cantonese cuisine to outdo any cuisine ever tasted in the South Seas or Canton,” wrote the author of a (rather condescending) 1948 profile of Don the Beachcomber in the Saturday Evening Post. “The usual victual Chinatown dishes up for Americans are composed largely of celery and bean sprouts, both inexpensive. Don and Sunny decided to use chicken, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots with a lavish hand… They also began to import oyster sauce, wild-plum sauce, lichee nuts and lotus nuts from China, an issued an ukase that there would be no chop suey and chow mein on their menus.”

At the new restaurant, large portholes were installed in the dining room so diners could peer into the brightly lit kitchen while immaculately dressed Chinese waiters were on hand to supply explanations for any dish that seemed unusual. Menu prices, while still relatively cheap (profits were supplemented by the high-margin rum drinks), were elevated just enough to distinguish them from the bargain chop suey joints across town.

It would be easy to dismiss Don the Beachcomber’s approach to Chinese food as unabashed cultural appropriation by two enterprising white folks—which it most certainly was—but in a broader sense, the restaurant marked an early shift toward legitimizing Chinese cooking as an elevated and distinguished cuisine in the eyes of many non-Chinese Americans. At that point in the country’s dining culture, if you were a restaurant that wanted to attract celebrities and other stylish segments of society, you generally served steaks or French cuisine. Not only did Don the Beachcomber serve something altogether foreign, but it was able to convince customers to actually pay more for it.

That same year, 1937, another budding entrepreneur in Oakland named Vic Bergeron added Chinese food to his tropical-themed bar, Hinky Dink’s, and renamed it Trader Vic’s. Bergeron was a world traveler with a taste for the island life, but unlike his rival he proved to be much more astute about growing a national empire. Bergeron realized that most of his customers would be turned off by actual Polynesian food (“Who wants to eat poi?,” he once quipped, according to Cate) and so created faux-Polynesian hits like the pupu platter, a combination of Cantonese-ish appetizers like shrimp toast, egg rolls and sticky-sweet pork ribs arranged over a flaming bowl. For the most part, what Americans soon came to identify as Polynesian food was in reality a carefully curated strain of rich Cantonese food, adorned with pineapple and copious amounts of rum.

Although tiki pioneers like Beach and Bergeron were, on some level, culinary carpetbaggers, they were also extremely earnest in their passion for other cultures. Both were known for treating and paying their staff well in an era when discrimination against Asians was still rampant. Both were exceptionally knowledgeable about global cuisine—especially Bergeron, who became a sort of proto-authenticity advocate and later expanded his menu to encompass food that no one else was serving at the time, including Malaysian curries, Thai satay and even sushi decades before they were well-known. As actual Chinese chefs like Cecilia Chiang began to expose the country to a more authentic genre of regional Chinese cooking in the 1950s, Bergeron would go on to borrow from her style as well, even going as far as to have traditional Chinese ovens installed in Trader Vic’s kitchens.

The Twin Dragon

It was only natural, then, that the growing number of Cantonese restaurant owners across the country would capitalize on the appropriation of Chinese food by the tiki movement, retrofitting their own existing cocktail lounges with palm thatching and elaborate exotic drinks to attract thirsty customers. 

By the 1950s, the tiki fad had gone mainstream. There were tiki bowling alleys, tiki apartment complexes and tiki furniture stores. The tiki aesthetic soon seeped outward from cities into the booming suburbs, and in the process had become democratized and commercialized. Restaurants could order everything from tiki mugs to bamboo table skirts to carved totems through mail-order catalogues, or from exotica-themed restaurant supply companies like Orchids of Hawaii and Dynasty Wholesale (which explains why so many tiki bars across the country use the same ceramic bowls for Scorpions).

Drink recipes, once closely guarded secrets, became widely available as former bartenders, waiters and managers at chains like Trader Vic’s or Kon Tiki—many of them Chinese-American—left to work at other restaurants, took over for their retiring bosses or, in some cases, opened their own establishments. Like a giant game of telephone, tiki culture became looser in interpretation as it expanded into Cantonese restaurants. The Dr. Funk, a rare tiki drink actually invented in the South Pacific (by Robert Louis Stevenson’s personal physician no less) was often renamed the Dr. Fong, and served in Fu Manchu mug. Bamboo wallpaper mingled with hanging red lanterns. And Polynesian dishes like crab rangoon (a Trader Vic invention) became firmly planted in the Chinese-American canon.

Once the trend had reached peak saturation, however, its devolution was inevitable. As Sven Kirsten, the accomplished author and historian behind Tiki Pop and Tiki Modern told me, “the mythology behind Polynesian restaurants was never about authenticity, but rather presenting these unknown flavors and sensations in ways that seemed exotic.” As Americans began to view the now ubiquitous Cantonese-American cooking as lowbrow—greasy chow mein, fried stuff in sticky sauce—it lost much of its allure for the thrill-seeker. As quickly as “Polynesian” cuisine had leapfrogged into the national consciousness, it began to fade from relevance.

III. The Post-Polynesian Era

During the dark ages of tiki—a period which, and this is open to interpretation, stretched from the late 1970s until the early 2000s—the most reliable place to find a tropical cocktail across the country was almost certainly at a Chinese restaurant.

Nowhere was this Sino-Polynesian alliance more impervious to change than areas like suburban Massachusetts—and the greater Northeast in general—which isn’t surprising given the affection Boston still holds for lovably bastardized dishes like Peking Ravioli and American Chop Suey. Brother Cleve, a musician, bar consultant and tiki enthusiast widely considered the paterfamilias of Boston’s cocktail scene, recalls being given free Scorpion Bowls and pupu platters after playing a show at a local Chinese joint called the Kowloon (established 1950) in his early touring days. When fellow tiki pioneer Otto Von Stroheim flew out from LA to visit in 1997, Cleve says that Von Stroheim was astounded that “you could walk out the front door and within five minutes find yourself a Scorpion Bowl, Fog Cutter, Mai Tai or Suffering Bastard, all at Chinese restaurants.”

In her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee describes Chinese restaurant culture as fundamentally “open-source,” to borrow a term from the tech world. “Good ideas have historically rippled quickly through the Chinese-restaurant system, carried by word of mouth, and by the experiences of dispersing immigrants,” she explains.

If something proves successful—General Tso’s chicken, for instance—it gets duplicated everywhere, a theory that explains why tiki drinks continued to find a home in Chinese restaurants even as the Polynesian trend began to wane in the late 1960s. According to Lee, Chinese food—especially when found outside of China—is above all else, malleable: “A driving force behind Chinese cooking is the desire to adapt and incorporate indigenous ingredients and utilize Chinese cooking techniques… Chinese cooking is a not a set of dishes. It is a philosophy that serves local tastes.”

If there are any glimmers of an update in the world of Chinese-tiki, it might be best personified in part by a decorated Boston bartender named Ran Duan. Duan’s parents own a Chinese restaurant, called Sichuan Garden II, located in the suburban city of Woburn. Back in 2009, the restaurant served bad tiki drinks.“We had all the classic Chinese tiki recipes, which basically meant that nothing was done properly… It was all sour mix, well booze—which can still be great. It’s become America’s Chinese classic now, you know, but it wasn’t really what I wanted,” Duan told Bevvy.co in an interview last August.

The self-taught bartender picked up cocktail books by Trader Vic and Beachbum Berry and crafted a menu based around quality tiki drinks, one that also pays homage to the Chinese restaurant his parents created. “It’s weird when you walk in and you see a Sichuan restaurant in an old, colonial-style house and now it has two tiki-centric cocktail bars,” Duan said. “But it works.”

Back in Los Angeles, there are further hints of a reimagined connection. Bryant Ng, chef and co-owner at Santa Monica’s wildly successful Cassia, is the grandson of two Cantonese immigrants who emigrated from Hong Kong to Santa Monica in the 1950s. Ng’s family manufactured and sold laundry detergent in China, but decided to open a Polynesian restaurant called the Bali Hai when they moved to the U.S.

“They served typical Polynesian foods like pupu platters and crab rangoon, but also Chinese-American staples like egg rolls, barbecued honey ribs, silver-wrapped chicken, pork chow mein, sweet and sour pork, egg foo young, Peking duck,” Ng told me. “I love looking through the old menus.” Cocktails included the Doctor Wong, the Tonga Cooler, the Mr. Chan and, of course, a flaming Scorpion Bowl built for four and served with 20-inch straws. Bali Hai closed in 1968, around the time the popularity of both tiki and Cantonese food were beginning their decline.

Ng is now a third-generation restaurant owner, one that deals in a more au courant style of Asian fusion, but there are still nods to the past, in dishes like a classic Cantonese fried rice tossed with cured Chinese sausage (lap cheong), salt pork and preserved fish, and an evocative pineapple-coconut Lava Flow—the favorite drink of Ng’s wife, Kim—topped off with a swirl of strawberry-balsamic gastrique.

While Cassia and Sichuan Garden II pay homage to the now timeless connection between tiki and Chinese restaurants in America, there won’t ever be a way to replicate places like Hop Louie or Twin Dragon. They were born from a mixture of commercial opportunism, exotic fantasies and ethnic distortion, all thrown together into the whirling blender of pop culture. We’re probably too obsessed with culinary authenticity these days to get swept up in such blissful ignorance again.

Last September, after nearly 76 years in operation, the family behind Hop Louie decided to close their long-tenured restaurant. Running the place required too much work of its aging owners, I was told. To the relief of many, though, they decided to keep the cocktail lounge downstairs open, albeit only for the time being. There’s comfort in knowing that until the final day comes, that Scorpion Bowl will be on the menu, unchanged, like a rum-soaked fossil preserved in amber.

The post A Match Made in Paradise: The Story of Chinese-Tiki appeared first on PUNCH.

Old Monongahela is back. This is thrilling news for whiskey lovers, but it also raises a reasonable question: What the hell is Old Monongahela?

The short answer: Monongahela (MO-non-gah-HEEL-a) is a rye whiskey distilled in and around southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern Maryland, typically within barging distance of the Monongahela River. (Geography refresher: the Monongahela flows northward from Virginia and, via tributaries, from Maryland into Pittsburgh, where it merges with the Allegheny to become the Ohio River.) The rye made in this region long had a reputation for being bigger, spicier and “chewier” than other, softer ryes historically made elsewhere, and was certainly more assertive than the corn whiskey associated with distilleries that cropped up as settlers moved west.

Old Monongahela has also, until recently, had the reputation of being non-existent. Chasing after it was like chasing after a ghost: A few descendants of original producers persisted (Rittenhouse, Old Overholt, Hochstadter’s), but all had been acquired by bigger producers and production uprooted to outside the region. You could call these “Nongahela” ryes—the same in name but not necessarily in style or flavor.

The fact that this category of whiskey had all but disappeared is surprising, historically speaking, given the dominance of Monongahela in the early days of the republic. Pioneering farmers had pushed west over the Alleghenies and Appalachians and cleared dense forest, where they found fertile soils ideal for growing grain. But they had no way to economically ship bulky grains to coastal cities. (Canal and rail networks wouldn’t arise until the 1830s.) But, thanks to the know-how of German and Scots-Irish immigrants, they were able to distill what they grew into whiskey, which could be put in a barrel and shipped more practically.

Thus, rye whiskey became a thriving industry in this part of the Mid-Atlantic in the 18th century. Today, the region is perhaps best known for being home to the Whiskey Rebellion, which came to a head in 1794 after the new federal government imposed taxes on liquor to pay off debts incurred during the revolution. This did not go over well with the farmer-distillers; federal troops had to be sent in to put down the foment, and the tax remained.

As the 19th century progressed, distilleries moved off farms and into centralized areas with better access to transportation, and distilling centers like Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania became known for the quality of its whiskey, much as Kentucky would later become famed for its bourbon. (Not coincidentally, both regions are noted for their limestone deposits and thus high levels of calcium bicarbonate in spring water, which raises the pH and aids fermentation, as well as adding other desirable minerals.)

But then came Prohibition. Hundreds of distilleries shuttered in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Kentucky. Other industries (such as steel and glass) took over factory locations in the east; rural Kentucky had few competing industries and so many of the distilleries were simply boarded up. When Repeal came around, Kentucky fired up the stills again, and went on to dominate the whiskey world. Pennsylvania and Maryland, meanwhile, had few stills to resurrect and, for decades, their whiskey roots were more or less lost to history.

With the rise of craft spirits, however, many curious bartenders and distillers—especially those endlessly intrigued by the ghosts of spirits past—clamored to bring it back. Just one problem: few could agree as to what actually defined a Pennsylvania or Maryland rye, other than that they were made in one of those two states.

Some evidence has cropped up that distillers in the east used different methods than Kentucky bourbon makers. Notably, they employed a sweet mash rather than supplementing with the leftover wash known as sour mash, which yields a sharper-tasting product. They also appeared to invest more in stout rickhouses, in which they could better control the environment and speed of barrel aging.

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Some in the position to know, including spirits historian David Wondrich, have argued that the distilling technology in the east was also fundamentally different than in the west. A few years ago, Todd Leopold, of Leopold Brothers distillery in Denver, came upon a 1910 diagram of a unique three-chamber still that had been used in Peoria, Ill. He had never seen anything like it, and believed it to be linked to traditional ryes. Since none existed, in 2015 he wrote a check for more than six figures and had Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville make one for him, despite the fact that Vendome wouldn’t guarantee that it would work. It did. He’s since been cranking out rye, which he plans to begin releasing once it’s spent five years in barrel. (He also makes a traditionally distilled “Maryland-style” rye, which he defines as a sweeter rye than the Pennsylvania style; he achieves this via careful yeast selection.)

Today, the style is more typically defined as whiskey made from local rye grains, whether grown in eastern or western Pennsylvania, or Maryland. Meredith Grelli, who with her husband, Alex, founded Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh, argues that the definition is cultural, and begins with Monongahela rye in Western Pennsylvania. “Monongahela was born out of our earlier settlement patterns, with the Germans and the Scots-Irish. The rest of the state then expanded on that tradition, with Pennsylvania rye,” she says. “I do think there’s something about regionality, whether with grain or culture or who was distilling and where, along with what they were able to grow.”

She admits that a clear definition of an eastern rye will be elusive. She sees these more like “Old Tom gin” or “Philly cheesesteak”—terms that acknowledge tradition and history rather than narrow definition. “We have to be okay with living in the gray area with this one,” she says.

As eastern ryes start to reemerge from their century-plus slumber, expect these old flavor profiles to make incursions in new markets, offering newer, more distinctive ryes. “Rye should be young, rye should be vibrant,” says Herman Mihalich of Dad’s Hat Rye in Pennsylvania, “and rye should smack you in the face a little bit.”

The post America’s Oldest Rye Whiskey Is Back from Extinction appeared first on PUNCH.

The swim-up bar is pretty much clickbait incarnate. Just ask your browser: “Coolest Swim-Up Bars in the World” (Travel + Leisure) “18 Resorts and Hotels With the Most Amazing Swim-Up Bars” (Trips to Discover), “12 Best Swim-Up Bars Around the World” (Travel Channel), “The World’s Most Enticing Swim-Up Bars” (Paste).

“It says something about a hotel and casino when the pool is one of its sickest, most sought after attractions,” Thrillist notes in their entry into the crowded field of swim-up bar reporting. Yet, for all of the “coolest,” “most incredible,” “sexiest” slideshows of swim-up bars the world over, it’s a lot harder to figure out where the hell they originated.

When exactly did people decide they wanted to sip frozen Margaritas on a submerged bar stool?

Like most seemingly misguided drinking trends, the swim-up bar was born in—you know it—Las Vegas. As architect Stefan Al explains in his recent book The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, the initial goal of Las Vegas developers was “to seep gambling into a suburban vacation.” Swimming pools grew tenfold in the U.S. during the early-1950s, becoming a requisite hotel attraction. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to mash up legalized gambling and pool-going.

Just after opening, in 1952, The Sands Hotel and Casino launched floating craps and blackjack tables, as well as poolside slot machines, as a gimmicky way to garner press coverage. It worked: in 1954 the casino landed a spread in Life magazine. Other hotels took note. When the Tropicana opened at the other end of the strip, in 1957, the pool area quickly added “swim-up” blackjack tables and tiki drinks in an attempt to combat the loss of summer revenue from guests hanging out in the pool as opposed to the casino floor. It turned out to be a match made in paradise.

“These days in Las Vegas, the bar and the pool have truly become a hybrid,” Al told me over email, “with entire pool clubs, such as XS in Encore, among the top 10 world’s highest-grossing nightclubs, because they can get revenue during the day as well as the night.” In actuality, buoyed by frequent poolside “nightswim” performances by musicians such as Laidback Luke, XS has been the number one highest-grossing bar in the entire world the last five years running.

However, today’s more archetypal swim-up bars—with their signature submerged stools and comically-named drinks—are more closely associated with Mexican and Caribbean resorts, favored by the same folks who enjoy Carnival cruises and the ring of “all-inclusive.” Credit for this breed of swim-up boozing goes to the Jamaica-based Sandals Resorts.

Originally, Sandals’ Montego Bay flagship location (which opened in 1981) only served beachside cocktails to guests who didn’t want to leave the ocean. But when a new block of rooms was added away from the beachfront in 1984, management decided to build something that might attract guests to that end of the property. Architect Evan Williams casually remarked to Sandals chairman Gordon “Butch” Stewart that he “never understood why you couldn’t have bars in pools.” Recognizing a potentially lucrative idea, Stewart promptly gave Williams the go-ahead to build the Caribbean’s first swim-up pool bar. It was an immediate hit; today, all 16 Sandals resorts sport swim-up bars serving drinks like the rum cream-backed Hummingbird and the Dirty Banana.

“Guests love these bars because they are a novelty,” claims Paul Bauer, Sandals group manager of F&B standards. “Plus, it’s virtually instantaneous cocktail service without having to move a muscle.”

Less a trend than a resort necessity, swim-up bars have become an indelible part of relaxation culture, spreading beyond well-trodden vacation spots.

Des Moines, Iowa, has a swim-up bar. Last summer, Nebraska got the state’s first at the Fun-Plex Waterpark. The famed Wisconsin Dells (“The Waterpark Capital of the World!”) has two: Margarita’s Swim-Up Bar at the Wilderness Resort and Mud Hut Swim-Up Bar at the Kalahari Resort  (with both places serving 42-ounce “monster” drinks in souvenir cups). And you’d better believe the Jersey Shore has a swim-up tiki hut.

So does Manhattan, it turns out. Located in Times Square’s Hotel Room Mate Grace, the pink-lit swim-up bar is located in a side room of their indoor nightclub. The 3’ 9”-deep pool abuts a 40-foot bar, hosts DJs and synchronized swimming performances and offers guests disposable bikinis and swim trunks. As a goggle-clad drinker told Travel Channel earlier this year, “Having a cocktail in the pool just can’t be beat. You’re not gonna find that at the Y.”

Unsurprisingly, the swim-up bar has also been co-opted by private citizens looking for a snazzy McMansion amenity. For the less financially-solvent among us, there are a few inflatable swim-up bars out there, which are probably more fun than a few twenties should buy you.

But nothing really beats drinking Mudslides in lukewarm water alongside middle-American moms and dudes with barbed wire tattoos. It has its risks, though. While Tropicana’s pool bar was shut down in 2015 for a litany of predictable health hazards, there is a more benign, but ubiquitous issue, according to Bauer.

“Well, we do have to increase the amount of chlorine in the pool,” he says. “Many guests either won’t—or can’t—leave.”

The post The Surprising History of the Swim-Up Bar appeared first on PUNCH.

It’s hard to imagine a drink that is equally as loathed and enduring as the Dirty Martini.

“The classic Martini is so beautifully balanced,” says David Wondrich, cocktail historian and author of Imbibe!. “It’s focused like a laser beam—cold, refreshing, incisive—and once you put olive brine in it, it kind of spoils all of that stuff.”

Yet hoards of people—people like me—continue to order it, savoring the guilty pleasure of cold vodka or gin sloshed together with suspect brine. It is a flawed drink with a remarkable fan base. Which is why many of the country’s bartender-critics are (however begrudgingly) trying to fix it.

According to Wondrich, the un-fairer Martini’s history begins in 1901, when John E. O’Connor served a Martini with muddled olives at the Waldorf Astoria. But a dash of brine doesn’t appear, at least in writing, until 1930, in G.H. Steele’s My New Cocktail Book. The drink, dubbed the Perfect, à la Hyland, consisted of half gin, half vodka, dry vermouth, three types of bitters and one teaspoon of olive brine. It appears again, in the years following World War II, sans bitters, perhaps most notably by way of FDR, whose Martini call was two parts gin, one part vermouth and a teaspoon of olive brine.

This brine-dashed variation remained an anomaly during the 1950s and 1960s, when the bone-dry gin Martini served as a stand in for post-war values: pure, strong and homegrown in the U.S. By the 1970s, however, vodka was outselling gin, and the cocktail aesthetic was skewing (much) sweeter. Fast forward even further, to the late-1990s, and the classic Martini had been sullied six ways from Sunday, making plenty of room for its dirty sibling to dig in.

“Nobody knew anything. Everything was bad,” says TJ Lynch, co-owner and bartender at New York’s Mother’s Ruin. “I’m sure there were some people doing the right things, but I made a lot of Dirty Martinis in the ‘90s, and it was literally just vodka and crappy olive juice.” (Today, he prefers a 50/50 gin Martini with a dash of Alfonso olive brine.)

With the rise of craft cocktails in the early aughts, the Dirty Martini went underground, but it never quite faded away. In fact, today, as bartenders seek to upgrade even the most un-loved cocktails, the drink has reemerged in the same bars that sought to estrange a generation from vodka ‘tinis.

Much of the new dialogue around the drink centers on the freshness and quality of the brine, and the method of employing it. For Josh Goldman, who consults on the bar program at Santa Monica’s Belcampo, the answer came in a teabag, which he first witnessed used in a drink (in horror) during the mid-2000s, when D.C. bartenders were making “Nicotinis”: nicotine-infused cocktails meant to placate smokers in the days following the city’s ban.

His method begins with a sachet of six ingredients, which he blanches in hot water—long enough to prime the aromatics but not unduly raise the temperature—before placing it in the glass. He then adds Aylesbury Duck vodka (which has been stirred to chill), alongside a finishing spritz of concentrated olive brine. Let it steep for 20 seconds if you like your Martini slightly dirty, he says, and a whole minute if you like it filthy. While Goldman won’t reveal his exact blend, I could detect olives, dried herbs and a hit of miso.

Lynnette Marrero, the bar director at Llama Inn, has taken a more post-modern approach. She is currently workshopping a riff that calls for thickening olive brine by adding modified tapioca starch and then painting it along the inside of a Martini glass—a perhaps unintentional but wholly appropriate ‘90s throwback move. (She hasn’t quite nailed the texture and flavor—an early attempt with Kalamata olive brine was unsuccessful—but, she says, “I’m going to keep pursuing it.”)

At Petit Trois in Los Angeles, beverage manager Courtney Rose is also taking a modern approach to the drink, by way of fat-washing. She makes use of the herb-studded oil the kitchen routinely tosses out by Cryovacing it with gin, then tossing the mixture in a sous-vide machine for an hour. She then freezes it, strains off the solids and pairs it with sweet vermouth and lemon oil for a “dirty” take on the Martinez, a precursor to the Martini.

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The award for the most obsessive take on the drink may well go to New York’s Naren Young. During his tenure at Saxon & Parole, Young, an outspoken critic of the Dirty Martini, spent two years creating his Olives 7 Ways, which calls on a custom olive bitters by Bitters, Old Men and an olive distillate Young co-crafted with Allen Katz of New York Distilling Company. For the latter, they distilled a small batch of neutral spirit with Cerignola olives and used it as a replacement for brine. Robert Simonson, writing about the drink for the New York Times, described it as “more elegant than any offspring of the dirty martini deserves to be.”

While this kind of innovation on the bar side certainly has elevated the drink, it’s the advent of premium bottled brine that has had the biggest impact on the quality of the Dirty Martini nationwide.

Consider Dirty Sue. The brainchild of Eric Tecosky, Dirty Sue was founded in 2004 after a particularly rough service behind the bar at the Jones Hollywood. Aggravated by having to strain gallon jugs of olives during service, he found himself googling “pre-bottled olive juice.” It yielded zero results.

He eventually took to making phone calls to farms in California and connected with a grower who was also importing olives from Spain. From there, he formulated a product using the mother brine (the original brine that the olives are shipped in rather than the salt water and lactic acid they are distributed in) and, by 2005, began hand-delivering samples to his friends and colleagues in the industry.

Two years later, in 2007, brothers Daniel and Marc Singer came up with a similar idea in Florida. They noticed that bartenders were replacing pre-bottled mixes with fresh juices and adding herbs to the bar, but olives were still coming in from distributors in the same gallon jugs that they were using in the ‘90s.

“Everybody hated their olives,” Daniel Singer recalls. They were oily and salty, and no bar would cycle through them quickly enough to avoid oxidization, which made the liquid especially bitter.

The Singers looked at 200 types of olives around the world and settled on a coastal Greek variety that was less oily, with fleshy fruit. Rather than adopting the industrial method of curing olives in lye, they persuaded a family to naturally ferment the olives in salt water, changing the water every two days over four months to slowly draw the bitter glucoside out of the fruit. By comparison, the same process using lye takes only four days, but, according to Singer, lye “shuts down the pores and strips the fruit of all that woodiness and nuttiness.” To compensate, producers add a ton of salt and oil to return flavor to those gallon jugs of olives.

In 2009, the brothers launched Filthy Food, a line of artisanal cocktail garnishes that includes Filthy olive brine, which is made from their Greek olive brine and filtered five times before it is packaged in squeeze bottles and distributed around the country. Today, both Filthy Food and Dirty Sue ship to thousands of restaurants and bars nationwide, from P.F. Chang’s to Pegu Club. In fact, order a regular Dirty Martini at Dante, and Young will make it with Filthy olive brine.

Yet, despite cleaning up its act, the Dirty Martini’s dirty-pleasure status remains gleefully intact. And those of us who order it wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like to make them for myself where nobody can see,” says Petit Trois’s Rose, who tips the brine from habanero-stuffed olives into her gin Martini at home. “A lot of people I know drink them on the hush-hush.”

The post The Dirty Martini Cleans Up Its Act appeared first on PUNCH.