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\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what to order anymore. When I walk into a fancy cocktail bar<\/span>\u2014<\/span>I should add right away that I absolutely love fancy cocktail bars and always have<\/span>\u2014<\/span>and they slide me the menu, I feel like Elmer Fudd.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n It used to be, 10 or 15 years ago, that when you studied the menu at one of the then-new craft cocktail bars, the odds were pretty good that you knew what to expect from each drink. There would be a benchmark house Daiquiri or Old-Fashioned or something like that, so you could see how they did things, a few carefully chosen drinks excavated from one or another old cocktail book and, finally, a clutch of original drinks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
One or two of those originals might have pushed things a bit, deploying an obscure ingredient or a novel technique<\/span>\u2014<\/span>say, <\/span>Peychaud\u2019s bitters as a base<\/span><\/a>, or <\/span>bourbon that had bacon fat poured into it<\/span><\/a> and strained out again. Most, however, were pretty restrained twists on the classics, relying on not much more than a judicious substitution or two.<\/span><\/p>\n
Nowadays, though, I look at a menu and the dozen-odd drinks will all be new to me, which takes some doing: I\u2019ve been writing about cocktails since 1999 and drinking them a lot longer still. If there\u2019s a classic, it\u2019ll have undergone a Shakespearean sea change. As for any original cocktails, they certainly are that. These will have five, six, seven or more ingredients, many of them obscure or house-concocted, and all combined in ways intended to startle. Say, marigold-blossom infused espad\u00edn mezcal mixed with Alsatian kirschwasser, Strega liqueur, house-roasted sweet-potato nectar, sercial Madeira and yuzu bitters. They\u2019re built to say \u201chey, look at me!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t automatically a bad thing. Some of these creations turn out to be truly delicious, and without a push toward the experimental, we would never have this spectacularly broad palette of ingredients, or fun things like ice diamonds and the so-called <\/span>Coconut Blast<\/span><\/a>. But balancing that many full-flavored ingredients has a high risk of failure. And, with that many variables in play in each drink, there\u2019s no way of predicting whether my $20 is being advanced for something heady and delightful or something that tastes like water mopped up from a flower-shop floor.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n So, what the hell happened? Clearly, a corner was turned, and somehow we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs, creating tricky, impossible-to-replicate works of culinary art<\/span>\u2014<\/span>but when was that, and more importantly, why?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n To answer that question, it\u2019s worth noting that we\u2019ve been through this kind of change before. In fact, the history of the American bar, from its very beginning in the lean years after the Revolution, is one of irregularly alternating cycles of classicism, let\u2019s call it, and creativity. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, these things were pretty regular: There\u2019d be 20-odd years of bartenders turning out all kinds of elaborate, occasionally unhinged drinks, followed by another 20-odd years of their successors tidying things up, like keeping the good drinks and bouncing out the ridiculous ones. Take, for example, the Mint Julep with three kinds of wine plus French brandy, Jamaican rum, lemon, pineapple and powdered sugar. It was followed by the simple Brandy Julep, which kept the rum as a float and ditched the rest. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n \u201c<\/span>Somehow we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n The 20th century broke that pattern. It began, for reasons we need not get into (think Prohibition, World Wars, the Depression), with everything freezing solid for a really long time. From 1910 or so until the early \u201960s, cocktail bars barely changed what they offered. While the many drink books published during that stretch are full of new recipes, if you look at the surviving cocktail menus from the period<\/span>\u2014<\/span>which give us a record of what was actually served<\/span>\u2014<\/span>you find the same 40-odd drinks over and over. You\u2019ve heard of them, drunk them, seen them printed in technicolor on suburban diner menus. Today we call them \u201cclassic cocktails.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n But by the time the mid-1960s hove into view, five long decades of deferred change burst out like a dam-break. When the baby boomers reached drinking age, they brought with them not only a wave of new drinks, but a tide that swept out most of the old ones. The young men and women (in unprecedented numbers) in bars weren\u2019t there to acquire a taste for Scotch and rye or to appreciate a dry Martini made just so. They weren\u2019t training to be grown-ups, like their parents had at their age, and there were enough of them to force the world to bend and meet them for a change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n So, in came easy, fun, youthful stuff like <\/span>Harvey Wallbangers<\/span><\/a> and Velvet Hammers, <\/span>Godfathers<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Pink Squirrels<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Pi\u00f1a Coladas<\/span><\/a>, and out went all but a few of the, dare I say, sluttier classics<\/span>\u2014<\/span>the Sloe Gin Fizz, because it was sweet and pink; the <\/span>Singapore Sling<\/span><\/a>, because it sounded sexy; the <\/span>Brandy Alexander<\/span><\/a>, because it was sweet and creamy. (The Martini still survived, but only if you count the <\/span>vodka Martini<\/span><\/a> or the <\/span>Martini on the rocks<\/span><\/a>.) Dirt-simple was in. \u201cTwo ingredients to a drink seems to have become a golden imbibing rule,\u201d the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> noted in 1966; use a light spirit like blended Scotch, splash in a little liqueur<\/span>\u2014<\/span>Drambuie, amaretto, whatever<\/span>\u2014<\/span>and done. Along with the stiff old drinks went the stiff old bartenders, the veterans who understood the traditional principles of mixology that guided how drinks were mixed, who knew the lore that made people want to drink them. Enter instead a mess of charismatic young college grads who knew how the kids thought and could be taught to bang out a few simple drinks. If they had career aspirations, they weren\u2019t in bartending; they\u2019d work the job for a while and then someone younger and, now, hipper would replace them. San Francisco\u2019s pioneering fern bar, Henry Africa\u2019s, placed an ad for bartenders in 1972 that said it all: \u201c21-25 yrs., well proportioned 5\u201910\u201d + \u2026 College degree required, experience not.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n By the 1970s, when everyone had gotten a little bored with this new mixology, bartenders didn\u2019t back off, they doubled down. Once you establish that the game is novelty, it\u2019s hard to stop that game. As the \u201970s wore on, bartenders tried a bunch of things, including giving their simple drinks ever-smuttier names<\/span>\u2014<\/span>e.g., Sloe Comfortable Screw, Screaming Orgasm<\/span>\u2014<\/span>and whipping technicolor liqueurs, artificial fruit syrups and ice cream into an ecosystem of new, flamboyantly nonclassic, weakly alcoholized kiddie drinks. (The Mudslide is the main survivor from that cohort.) Some bartenders, on the other hand, leaned farther into the performance aspects of what they did. Dale Rosenberger of Edmonton, Alberta, took the cake by working the very busy bar at the Rex Motor Inn while hanging upside down from gravity boots.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n By the late 1980s, Generation X, which followed the baby boomers the way the guy with the shovel and the wheelbarrow follows the elephant parade, had enough with these boomer shenanigans and started feeling its way back to something rather more traditional. It took a while, and a whole lot of Cosmopolitans and Apple Martinis, but by the late \u201990s, forces were aligned to overthrow, or at least offer a widespread alternative to, the new mixology in all its branches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n \u201c<\/span>Once you establish that the game is novelty, it\u2019s hard to stop that game.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n I\u2019m not going to get into a blow-by-blow history of the cocktail revolution here, or whatever you want to call it. But by 2005, a loose group of assorted bartending traditionalists, culinary mixologists, cocktail archeologists and such had succeeded in making the ghost walk: For the first time in two generations, pretty much every major city had at least one bar where a nongeriatric bartender would gladly mix you up a proper Manhattan from rye, enough vermouth and bitters. You could even get a Jack Rose, a White Lady, a Pegu Club or<\/span>\u2014<\/span>well, pretty much anything that would have been on the list of a good hotel bar in 1937.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n For the most part, the bartenders made this look easy; for the most part, it was not. Resurrecting a cocktail at a time when many of the requisite ingredients were no longer imported was dark magic, far darker than the conjuring and prestidigitation practiced by the <\/span>flair bartenders.<\/span><\/a> It was necromancy, it was time travel, and it caught on quick. In the decade after the World Trade Center was attacked, escaping through time looked awfully good.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n But the 2000s were not the 1930s. Bartenders and barflies both got a little itchy on a steady diet of classics and \u201cforgotten classics\u201d (which were basically also-rans excavated from old cocktail books and shown a little limelight, most of them for the first time ever). Once these various dead cocktails were sliding across bars on a regular basis, they became the living, and the living are just never as interesting as the dead.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Bartenders responded by tinkering with the old recipes, keeping the pattern and the attention to detail, but substituting one ingredient or another with something slightly more adventurous, then giving the result a new name. A Mojito with Champagne instead of soda water? Call it the <\/span>Old Cuban<\/span><\/a>. A Last Word with rye for the gin and lemon juice for the lime? That\u2019s a <\/span>Final Ward<\/span><\/a>. Coming on the heels of such \u201990s creations as the Red Headed Slut and the Irish Car Bomb, these non-shitty new drinks were a complete novelty<\/span>\u2014<\/span>and many of them became modern classics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Yet a bigger problem was looming, based on the rule of necromancy that you can only raise the dead once. The next wave of bartenders, the ones trained maybe not by Audrey Saunders or Murray Stenson, but by their prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, found themselves in an awkward position. They knew<\/span> everything, more or less, that their mentors knew, because their mentors weren\u2019t your typical magicians: Their mentors revealed everything, how they did it, where to find their sources, everything. They told it in lectures and articles, in books, on TV and via the internet. That left little for the next wave, with fewer historical secrets, lost techniques and forgotten cocktails to reveal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n So the prote\u00e9ges<\/span> started their own informal, semisecret little cocktail revolution, right in the heart of the other one. Where the first one was concerned with revival and reestablishing traditions, this one didn\u2019t really care so much about that stuff. Strip out the culture and the lore and just focus on the mixology, on the things that could be measured in ounces and milliliters.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n \u201c<\/span>Once these various dead cocktails were sliding across bars on a regular basis, they became the living, and the living are just never as interesting as the dead. \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n
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