For the love of drink.
I moved to Manhattan in 1988, a month after my 21st birthday, and in the time between the first welcome-to-New-York Rolling Rock at a forgotten East Village bar, and my farewell pints of Bass at Milano’s on East Houston Street 10 years later, I learned many things about alcohol. Not much about life, of course — I hadn’t figured out how to make a lot of money, or find true happiness, or make a relationship work — but I did learn about drink: how to order it, how to hold it, how to leave it alone, how it could take an everyday occurrence and make it at once absurd and sublime, how to feign sobriety while walking home at 3 a.m., and how if you were at the right bar with the right bartender and the right friends, last call was merely a suggestion and the party could continue until dawn.One lesson absent from my alcohol education, however, was how to mix a decent drink. My New York drinking years revolved largely around beer, with the occasional scotch thrown in for good measure. It wasn’t until I’d been in Seattle for five years that I finally learned how to mix a proper Manhattan, and the effect was that of a whiskey-fueled satori: the skies cleared, the universe slipped into balance, and for the first time in my life I understood the concept of bibulous beauty. Overblown? Perhaps — but liquor has a tendency to do that.
After that, the pursuit of cocktail wisdom began to consume virtually all my free time. I’d spend hours prowling eBay in pursuit of bartending manuals from the cocktail’s heyday, and began allocating a part of each paycheck to building my liquor collection from a meager couple of bottles of vodka and crème de cassis into a mighty mixological machine replete with dozens of kinds of rum, bottles of obscure liqueurs and every type of bitters I could lay my hands on. [...]
San Francisco seems to be largely populated with vermouth-making, locavore-oriented Alice Waters-style bartenders who are not only growing in number as fast as those in New York, but are taking a shot at Gotham’s title as the country’s most exciting city for cocktails.
Bartenders in Portland are deploying improvisation and experimentation that is waking up the city’s once-sleepy cocktail culture, and in Los Angeles — where for years the quality cocktail scene was mostly as glossy and devoid of substance as, well, the rest of L.A. — a growing group of die-hards is reintroducing the city to the beauty of a well-made drink, eschewing simple visual dazzle and blatant product placement in favor of drinks made with a deeper culinary comprehension.
And as I talked to bartenders and drink geeks who lived in or had visited places I haven’t in recent years, I saw that this flood of quality drinking was not confined to the West Coast: Boston bartenders are challenging Seattle for the designation of most-vibrant-yet-underappreciated bar scene in the country; a small group of Texas bartenders are preparing to make Houston an unlikely fine-drinking destination; and craft bartenders have established a beachhead in and around Washington, D.C. And in New Orleans — which hosts a convention each year for bartenders and other cocktail geeks like me — bartenders such as Chris Hannah at Arnaud’s are proving that the city’s mixological range extends well beyond Sazeracs and Hurricanes.
Continue reading at the New York Times.