cocktail lists now: the best of times, the worst of times
“Please, no lantana. Kate Gibbs writes”
House-made tonics, botanical-infused gin, fat-washed bourbon, there’s a wave of innovation cresting right now in our best bars and some restaurants. Amidst an invigorated cocktail culture, intrepid bartenders are turning to fresh, in-season produce and native ingredients and some bars are employing actual mixologists instead of relying on waiters to think up a yuzu twist on the mule.
As cocktails become the extension of our gastronomical lust, every restaurant and pub, every back-alley nook with a few stools and an ice bucket, is getting in on the cocktail zeitgeist. Everyone wants a swig from the salt-crusted mason jar. But many get it wrong.
Some are rudely sour, some cloyingly sweet or phonily complicated, others have so much garnish and flourish it’s like having an order of flotsam with your drink.
I recently had a cocktail scattered with lantana, the flowers from that toxic, endemic and prickly weed. The floral garnish turned the drink into an icy, unsettling brew that had me weighing up whether $13 was worth a brief poisoning. Being so small and so abundant the flowers were impossible to pluck from the drink, so my top lip was left with a bloomy moustache while my teeth worked as a sieve.
Scan the list for something you recognise now – “that looks simple and elegant” – only to discover that everything you like about the cocktail has been replaced by something else in a bid to up the ante. Sake instead of vodka, burdoch syrup instead of sugar, any number of perfectly good classic drinks being wrecked with Midori, it’s all being done out there in the name of thirst quenching. Curiosity gets the upper hand and we’re left wondering where all the old-fashioned old-fashioneds have gone….
Read the rest of the story, published in Sunday Style magazine, here.