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This Bostonist owns many a compact, black and white volume of cocktail recipes, with small type and bare diagrams. Mixologist, booze consultant, and Museum of the American Cocktail founder Dale DeGroff's new book is, by contrast, a large, typographically lush (and generally lush) book of cocktail recipes with near-pornographic photography of perfect drinks, shivering in their garnishes. The Essential Cocktail is lovely, and, if we learned anything from its launch party at Drink on Monday night, you should take its commands seriously, including its injunction to flame those orange peels.
Such details make all the difference in classic cocktails, and even more so in such oft-maligned standards as the Cosmopolitan: we must admit that the one we had, prepared to Mr. DeGroff's specifications by John Gertsen et al., was the tastiest we've ever had. We toasted gay marriage with that drink, and a fellow Bostonist's Monkey Gland. The latter, a favorite of Bostonist's that goes down easier than its name, is an old school concoction of gin (Plymouth, in this case, if we recall correctly), fresh-squeezed orange juice, grenadine (the good people at Drink make their own), and absinthe-or-something-legal-like-it (the event having been sponsored by Pernod Ricard USA, this was anise-heavy Pernod).
The Manhattan was inevitably delicious (lemon oil was a nice touch), as was the nifty sake-based Manhattan variant ("Manhattan East"), but what took Bostonist by surprise was the complexity of the East India Cocktail (cognac, raspberry syrup, orange curaçao in lieu of long-extinct red curaçao, Angostura, maraschino) and its topping of pineappley but not-too-sweet foam. The Barbara Lynchian snacks—cheesy custard topped with quince, dollhouse-scale cumin flatbreads with dabs of crème fraîche—made us forget dinner.
Also in attendance were some upright citizens belonging to Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (for whom Drink must be like a wilderness preserve). We chatted about LUPEC's upcoming USO Show, Bourbon Belle's rigorous training regimen for the national round of the Hendrick's Bartender Battle, and where to buy not-stale angelica root around here (Christina's Spices, not Harvest Co-op). Not long after saying hey to the proprietresses of wine-and-esoteric-liqueur wunderkammer Brix, Bostonist realized that it was about an hour past the hour at which we'd meant to head out for dinner. We donned our coats and stopped by Mr. DeGroff's perch at the far end of the bar. He said he was headed out to Eastern Standard for dinner, himself, signing our copy of The Essential Cocktail to this Bostonist's first name, with "happy cocktailing and soft landings" and a lot of lowercase a's that look like lowercase s's.
Lyette Mercier, also present and imbibing, contributed to this post.
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this place is terrible. Granted the actual bar is cool( in shape and what it is constructed from) but my drink was 1.5 inches and not good and its more pretentious that I could take(and I can take alot).