• 1.5 oz gin or Cognac
• 0.5 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 tsp simple syrup
• Champagne or sparkling wine
French 75
The last word: The classic Gibson
“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
—Bette Davis as Margo Channing—Gibson in hand—in the classic 1950 movie, All About Eve.
Gin fizz
The gin and tonic is sophisticated again
Jason Redmond expected to be impressed by many things about Spain, but he couldn’t have guessed the biggest takeaway from his trip last summer would be a new take on a humble highball.
“I was really surprised at the big signs outside all the little cafes and bars claiming they were selling the best ‘Gin Tonic,’” the bar manager of Whistler’s Spanish-influenced Bar Oso recalls.
“It was a really big deal, and one I had no idea about beforehand.”
The Stump Gin & Tonic
A West Coast take on a global classic
INGREDIENTS:
• 2 oz Fermentorium Stump Coastal Forest Gin
• 4-6 oz Fermentorium Artisanal Dry Tonic, depending on taste
METHOD:
Garnish with a sprig of rosemary smacked between your palms, a thin slice of lime, and juniper berries.
Serve in a large (approx 20 oz) Burgundy bowl.
Bittersweet symphony
The latest twist in the tale of the Negroni
For a drink so simple, the Negroni is one impressively complicated cocktail.
It contains only three ingredients—equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and Campari—but those three ingredients comprise a world of flavours and aromas: bitter, sweet, citrus, floral, herbal, spicy, medicinal. It has a sexy backstory, except that it isn’t true.
A classic Negroni
When only the original will do.
• 1 oz gin
• 1 oz sweet vermouth
• 1 oz Campari
Place all ingredients into a mixing glass with ice. Stir and strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist.
The Cosmopolitan
John Burns, our man at the bar, reveals the not-so-guilty pleasures of drinking alone
A man walks into a bar. He’s alone; it’s the same old story. Maybe he’s looking for company, or to get out of that hotel and watch the game, or just to unwind. So he orders a drink and it’s the right drink and it’s made well. He takes a breath, a sip. A breath, a sip.
Even in the age of 24/7 social check-ins and check-outs, it’s still possible to head to a bar and just…be. It’s one of my signal pleasures when I travel, which I do often for work. (I’m writing this on a plane now as it happens, en route to a bar.) After a wall of meetings, I want some alone time, but not alone alone. Follow? I want bustle around me but stillness within—perhaps that’s one definition of the right cocktail at the right spot.
Exactly a year ago, I was sitting in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the gallery Hitler built to glorify Nazi art. On the main floor of that austere relic is one of the city’s best watering holes. There’s something both seedy and worldly about the Goldene Bar. Rattan chairs cluster conspiratorially around tables onto which fat candles slowly melt. Servers are friendly, children come and go, everyone’s wearing scarves and exactly nobody glances at the walls and their patently racist gilt paintings (original, from the ’30s) depicting the countries of the spirits served. It’s voyeur heaven, made perfect by a Cosmopolitan jolted by local bitters and (a quirky touch) a shot of Munich’s famed helles beer.