The Cup Overfloweth

In this new era of maximalist drinking, every trend from the past 25 years is happening everywhere, all at once, sometimes in a single drink.

In a single night at Shinji’s in New York, I sipped a Screwdriver whose components include a vacuum-macerated house orange liqueur, a lactic acid solution and liquid shio koji served in a hollowed-out ice sphere tucked inside a hollowed-out orange; sampled a foie gras– and cocoa butter–washed Sidecar accompanied by a sidecar of foie gras mousse resting atop a porcelain duck’s foot; drank a Vesper made with two Japanese gins, beeswax-washed vodka, a housemade aperitif and local mead, stored at a teeth-aching –27 degrees Fahrenheit; and downed a Hot Cold Toddy shot that was, well, hot on one side of my mouth and cold on the other. Liquid nitrogen flowed freely under the softly glowing “concubine” silk lamps that dangle over the black velvet–wrapped room, a nautically themed jewel box whose centerpiece is an octopus ripped from an ukiyo-e print and brought to life as a metal sculpture, its loosely tangled tentacles draped across the backbar. A lot? Sure. Uniquely so? Well, roughly 20 blocks south of Shinji’s, iconic Soho dive Milady’s has been resurrected as a hot pink–limned party where it is never not 1998. There, top bartenders sling meticulously crafted Midori Sour Jell-O shots, Jolly Rancher–hued Appletinis and Hawaiian Iced Teas. Bounding east from there, Double Chicken Please is serving a Margarita that pays homage to cold margherita pizza (get it???) made with cheese-and-toast-infused tequila, a lime-basil cordial and clarified tomato water, which is shaken and then topped with a custom edible rice paper illustration of a slice held gently aloft by its crust. Cross back over Houston Street to the kaleidoscopic agave bar Superbueno, where even the vodka-soda is extra: infused with pasilla chile pepper, mixed with a clarified guava cordial and Velvet Falernum, then force-carbonated and garnished with a dehydrated guava salt rim. And that’s just what’s happening within roughly one square mile of Manhattan. If there is a word that captures the vibe of drinks and drinking right now, it is maximalist: more components, more complexity, more spectacle, but also more choices, more labor (to make and sometimes to drink) and definitely more money. U.S. bars, both genuinely high level and the merely spendy, are pushing the form of the cocktail—and the envelope of taste—in a way and at a scale that has never been seen before, from New York to San Francisco to Shawnee, Kansas.

APRIL 7, 2023

Matt Klampert

story:

photography:

KO SASAKI

by Matt Buchanan

October 11, 2023

PLACES

"If there is a word that captures the vibe of drinks and drinking right now, it is maximalist: more components, more complexity, more spectacle, but also more choices, more labor (to make and sometimes to drink) and definitely more money."

Subcal bars are niche by nature, but many are open to newcomers.

Caprese Martinis, cacio e pepe Gimlets, Cosmos made with fermented Kool-Aid, emu neck distillates and deer antler tinctures. The Martini zeitgeist as a whole (not that kind, but, like, also that kind). Jell-O shots galore. Enough breakfast foods to stock a suburban hotel buffet. Clarified, acid-adjusted, fat-washed, vacuum-infused, house-carbonated, lacto-fermented. Tiki everlasting—in space. Menus designed to be “experienced.” Endless themes and set pieces, each more wildly specific than the last: You’ve stepped into the 1970s, the world’s kitschiest living room, Tulum before it got ruined, someone’s black-light fever dream, the underside of Godzilla’s foot. Caviar bumps. A college theater production with every drink. Foam. Even the once-humble Aperol Spritz can’t escape what’s happening right now. Seemingly every ambitious new bar program is bent on charting virgin territory in the realm of more, hoping it will lead them to the promised land, where they will appear on both increasingly prestigious “best bars” lists and the kinetic TikTok feeds of fickle, clout-hungry influencers.

For some, this state of affairs is exhausting, or even cringey, but it could also be said that we are living in a multiversal golden era of drinking: Virtually every trend from the past 25 years, good, bad or tasteless, is happening everywhere all at once—sometimes in a single drink. The feverish intensity propelling this omnitrend, and its sprawling, extremely extra trajectory, is also a product of this particular moment in culture—one that celebrates excess and indulgence in response to these unfeeling times. And every fever inevitably breaks, right?

Since the dawn of the 21st-century mixed drink renaissance, the self-anointed stewards of U.S. bartending have taken us through the history of cocktails with a remarkable adherence to chronology: In the aughts, bartenders obsessed with going back to a time when the Old-Fashioned didn’t contain a fruit salad lived the dream of the (18)90s to the 1920s, wordlessly shaking Last Words, stirring Martinezes, spawning new riffs on old drinks and refusing to serve vodka-sodas. Following several years of Very Serious Bartending and amid the lows of the Great Recession, more fun was called for, and so tiki, in all its postwar escapist glory, was revived next (unfortunately, so was some of the colonialism). Then, as times got ZIRP-y, the cycle back to the Dark Ages of cocktails was complete: Amaretto Sours, Saketinis and blue drinks could actually be good, we were told (not everyone agreed).

Somewhere in there, a handful of bars began toying around with things like rotovaps and centrifuges and liquid nitrogen; a certain kind of person began to imagine their life as a perpetual aperitivo hour, never not drinking Negronis and Aperol Spritzes, or at least telling everyone else about it; whiskey highballs (Toki only, please) came back; and the Australians got literally everyone drinking Espresso Martinis. But for the most part, time remained a relatively flat circle. Then the pandemic happened. We won’t attain a complete reckoning with how profoundly the pandemic has shifted the axes of our lives—culturally, politically, economically—for years, if not decades, but its effects on consumption and the industries that create goods and services have been especially acute. The vibe shifted: Consumer taste, especially among the young, has changed over the past three-plus years, while the bar and restaurant industry is only just on the other side of a mass extinction event whose continuing reverberations make survival an aspiration, even for establishments that might appear to be thriving. So the mundane truth is that pandemic economics—namely, that everything is vastly more expensive—circumscribe the entire bar scene right now, from the diviest of watering holes to the fussiest of mixology programs. “The cost of labor has gone up in the last three years, the cost of rent has gone up in the last three years,” says Jonathan Adler, the bar director of Shinji’s, where drinks cost $24 to $38. “We only have 18 seats; we need to make sure that we’re hitting a certain price point.” This is true even at high-volume establishments like the Broken Shaker empire, which can see hundreds of covers a night and where cocktails typically run $18 to $20. “Without saying all the dumb catchphrases that are out there right now about cost of goods, and, you know, Inflation, blah blah blah, that’s what we have to do to run at cost,” says Christine Wiseman, the beverage director for Broken Shaker parent company Bar Lab. Bar programs have become more prominent at restaurants because it’s hard to turn down the revenue, suspects Shannon Mustipher, cocktail consultant and the author of Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails. “The bar is a fantastic profit center,” she says. “I’ve worked in Michelin restaurants that didn’t seem to get that,” but since the pandemic, “chefs maybe had to sit down and look at numbers and say, ‘We really need this bar to make this money.’”

"The feverish intensity propelling this omnitrend is also a product of this particular moment in culture—one that celebrates excess and indulgence in response to these unfeeling times."

But if $18 or $20 is the new floor for a drink, it’s no longer enough for bartenders to simply deliver a well-made classic. This is partly because cocktail nerds won the drinking culture war: In the 24 years since Sasha Petraske sparked a Cambrian explosion with the opening of New York’s Milk & Honey, every major city has become populated by dozens, if not hundreds, of bars and restaurants that can make a decent Boulevardier. Then, during the pandemic, homebound aficionados learned how to hard-shake their own Corpse Revivers (thanks in part to out-of-work bartenders). “Why do I need to go out to a cocktail bar and spend 20 bucks on a [classic] drink?” asks Ryan Chetiyawardana, who has been probing the frontier of cocktails since opening the groundbreaking White Lyan in London in 2013. “They’re available at a regular bar, you can get that as part of your dining experience, you can make it at

home. It doesn’t really offer value for people if you’re a great cocktail bar that becomes a destination and you’re just listing a Negroni or a Manhattan.” What people want when they go out to spend more than they ever have on a drink, he says, is to “explore something new, step outside their comfort zone or bask in expertise.” Those circumstances may sound punitive, but Chetiyawardana believes that it actually gives bars “more license to push their creativity.” The cocktail scene in London has been more aggressive in stomping through creative boundaries than any U.S. city for the past decade, broadly speaking, because it doesn’t have the same historic connection to the cocktail canon. There’s been much more of “a thirst to explore different styles, different occasions, different palates,” which has “allowed bartenders to not feel so rigidly tied to the classics,” Chetiyawardana says. New York is still a long way from London-style liberation, but the strict adherence of the past 20 to 30 years to the ethos and tenets handed down by icons like Petraske, Dale DeGroff and Audrey Saunders has loosened somewhat because the guard has changed. “We lost a good number of people during the pandemic who left hospitality,” says Dave Arnold, author of the modernist bartending bible Liquid Intelligence. “That accelerated this phenomenon where the people who are doing things now don’t have a lot of the same hangups that people had back in the old days.” They’re also, says Mustipher, more diverse. The pandemic exodus “opened up space for people to become better artists that maybe would have had to wait, like another five or 10 years,” she says. “You have a more diverse set of people working behind bars as, let’s say, five years ago, and that could be contributing to this myriad of styles that we see.” Mustipher also believes that “the diversity in drinks has a lot to do with diverse cuisines we’re seeing emerging now” in fine dining. The decadeslong hegemony of French, Japanese and other stalwarts of the Michelin galaxy is giving way to high-end restaurants that showcase, for instance, African diasporic foodways, hyperregional Mexican cooking and a wider variety of Asian cuisines. As fine dining chefs collaborate more closely with bartenders, this has not only produced new flavor profiles and ingredient combinations, but an intense, globalized layering of them—Indian takes on tropical drinks, pan-Caribbean perspectives on classics, aperitivo meets Mexican meets Japanese monsters—that has parallels with the original “Golden Age” of cocktails, when a then-new explosion in global trade produced many of the drink frameworks still regarded as sacrosanct a century later.

A lot of newness—some of it much overdue—has been injected into the industry and practice of making drinks in a very short period of time, in other words. But while trends in art, fashion and food for the most part go in and out like the tide (until recently, anyway), every microera of cocktails from the past 25 years is still firmly with us: Pre-Prohibition staples and their infinite iterations, tiki and its more refined spinoffs, irony-soaked good-bad cocktails, Aperol Spritzes, Negronis—none have gone roughly into that bad morning. “Every single thing comes in and just gets layered on top of the next thing,” says Toby Cecchini, a 30-year industry veteran and an owner of Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar. “What we’re experiencing is a reasonable trajectory of all these different things—a lot of very smart people with a lot of enthusiasm throwing themselves at bartending in the last 20 years.”

Of course, drinking culture cannot be separated from the wider culture, and the defining traits of post-pandemic material and pop culture are excess, opulence and escapism, even as crushing inflation has washed over the economy. Fashion houses like Prada, Balenciaga and Chanel have had their most wildly successful years ever, with 95 percent of luxury brands seeing higher profits in 2022 and “quiet luxury” booming in ironic protest. “Shein hauls” have entered the lexicon. Ceaseless “brand collabs.” More is more. Revenge travel, especially to scenic, far-flung destinations has further exploded, with Delta so overwhelmed by high-status flyers it’s been forced to make its premium accommodations even more e(xc)lusive.

It’s not just the rich who are spending—much of the luxury boom is coming from middle- and lower-income consumers. That’s because it is largely youth-driven, and while there are broad sociological reasons behind the sweeping cultural tendency toward excess and escape—a trauma response to the pandemic and climate cataclysm, paired with visibly rising income inequality, which somewhat counterintuitively “fuels consumption,” as one expert told Vox—it is hard, if not outright impossible, to separate all of this from TikTok and influencer culture. TikTok’s reach and the voraciousness of its recommendation algorithm have not only redefined the velocity and scale of virality by an order of magnitude, they have transformed the service into a search engine; at one point last year, it was bigger than Google. Even more than Instagram, it’s a visual way to discover what to spend money on—a marketing-powered perpetual trend

machine and a vital source of recommendations for the young. And right now, the most “optimized” content for it is aesthetic indulgence: Dishes ooze, gush or drip; caviar bumps, black truffles, uni and gold leaf show up in abundance; drinks are vibrantly hued and ornate, if not melodramatic. Vibes above all. Now when Bar Lab is designing a new drink, “99 percent of it” is considering how it will look on social media, says Wiseman. “People want cocktails based on what it looks like.” Chetiyawardana agrees, saying that “a good amount of visual flair in cocktails is tied to social media.” As people confront political turmoil and a dramatically higher cost of living, he continues, “they are looking to demonstrate they’re still part of that more indulgent sphere.” The Martini, which has attained a status as the drink of gratuitous post-pandemic bar culture, might appear like a countertrend or even backlash. “The natural reaction to all of this is just, like, ‘Ugh, fuck it, just give me a Martini,” says Cecchini. “‘I just want, like, an aquarium of gin with a twist in it. Arctic cold.’” But isn’t Martini the most maximalist drink of all? It epitomizes sheer indulgence and supreme luxury as the convergence of elaborate ritual, visual splendor and infinite expressions. As straightforward as spirit and vermouth, or as complex as single-estate vodka infused with freeze-dried olives and topped with a shimmering dot of spirulina algae–tinted olive oil infused with gold powder; classic (Tuxedo, Gibson, Alaska) or chaotic (Pornstar, Bikini, Tomatini); globe-spanning or hyperlocal; thrown sky high, prepared tableside or extracted from a cryogenically cold freezer and poured in bullet-time slow motion. The Martini is now, and always has been, the single drink that contains everything, everywhere, all at once. It is a crystalline portal for escape, simultaneously of the moment and timeless. No one knows what comes after this fever breaks, but whatever it is, it will likely emerge within the confines of a V-shaped glass. Just don’t be surprised if the glass is Baccarat.

"A lot of newness has been injected into the industry and practice of making drinks in a very short period of time. But while trends in art, fashion and food for the most part go in and out like the tide, every microera of cocktails from the past 25 years is still firmly with us."

Matt Buchanan was the executive editor of Eater from 2018 to 2022.