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1
A PROPER DRINK
together, along with a bit of sugar and the effects of a lemon twist. It was
a seamless, cultivated, elegant whole, and like nothing I’d ever experienced
before. It was a drink with a story, a past, and more depth than most people
I know. The world stopped.
Where had this cocktail been all my life?
The entire week at Tales of the Cocktail was like that. Tales was a cock-
tail convention. That phrase, “cocktail convention,” sounded even more
silly then than it does now. People had actually gathered from all over the
nation to talk seriously about cocktails and mixology. Its founder was a
scrappy blonde Southerner about the size of a whippet named Ann Rogers;
I had met her by chance at an Illy Espresso pop-up in SoHo in New York,
where she was working temporarily as a PR hired gun.
“I do this little cocktail thing down in New Orleans,” she said. “You
should come down.”
New Orleans was something. I had been writing about wine for a few
years. I loved wine and vineyards, but the wine world was a buttoned-up
one. The cocktail world, while also dealing in intoxicants, was nothing like
that. Hugs. High fives. Hawaiian shirts. Seersucker suits. Two-toned shoes.
Hats on every head. Flasks full of wondrous potions, freely shared. Every
time I stepped into the lobby of the Monteleone, I was handed a drink by
someone. Thanks to tasting rooms, seminars, bars, and other events, I had
many drinking opportunities at Tales. I made a list of all the cocktails I
drank or sampled that first day. The total was sixteen. In addition to the
Sazerac at the Carousel Bar, they included:
2
P R E FA C E
I sampled six vodkas at a seminar about that spirit and tasted absinthe, a
spirit I thought was extinct and legally banned (it was), in a seminar led by
absinthe authority Ted Breaux.
I learned to pace myself better the second day.
When I returned, newly converted to the cocktail, I scoured New York
City for Sazeracs, my new favorite drink. Ten years earlier, I would have
found no bars serving the exotic concoction. In 2006, however, it wasn’t dif-
ficult. I could get one at a bar called Brooklyn Social, not far from where I
lived in Brooklyn. I found a better one at The Good Fork, a restaurant in
Red Hook, made by bartender St. John Frizell. I found other Sazeracs at
bars in SoHo, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side.
Something was obviously afoot. When I had moved to New York in the
late ’80s, brew pubs and wine bars were hot. No one, bartender or patron,
knew what a Sazerac was. When cocktails were drunk, Cape Codders and
Cosmos and Dirty Martinis were the orders of the day. Now, unfamiliar
libations like the Martinez, Aviation, and Corpse Reviver No. 2 were being
called for. What was going on? A lot, I soon discovered, as, over the next
year, I shifted my reportorial focus from wine to spirits and cocktails. It was
nothing short of a revolution in the way people made mixed drinks and con-
sumed them. And it wasn’t just happening in New York and New Orleans.
The world was revisiting the cocktail hour.
3
ABOUT THE “MODERN CLASSICS”
5
PROLOGUE
IN 1988, DEL PEDRO, an affable Bermudan who had fallen in love with
New York, was bartending at Sam’s, a lavish restaurant inside the Equitable
Center in midtown Manhattan. It had been built for $2 million and was
owned by actress Mariel Hemingway, who christened it with her nickname.
Though not as posh as its neighbors, Le Bernadin and Palio, it was opulent
enough. There was a mural by James Rosenquist. Chandeliers hung from
the twenty-eight-foot-high ceiling. And standing above Del atop the cir-
cular bar was a bronze bison. Sam’s was certainly a change of environment
from Pedro’s previous bartending gig, a 125th Street dive under the West
Side Highway called the 712 Club, where hardworking meatpackers and
construction workers also drank hard, and a gun was kept in a drawer. It
was there not to keep the patrons in line but to shoot the occasional intrud-
ing river rat.
The customers at the 712 Club wanted beer and shots. People at Sam’s
had different tastes. The headquarters of Time Inc. was nearby. Often, old-
school publishing types, people who remembered the drinks of another era
and hadn’t lost their taste for them, wandered in. They called for Martinis,
Manhattans, Negronis, and Gimlets. Occasionally, there’d be an order for a
Sidecar or Stinger.
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A PROPER DRINK