The importance of presentation, regarding a cocktail (and life in general), cannot be over-emphasized. After all, it’s your introduction to the new drink, the first time you lay eyes on it. And you would like this to be one of those “frisson” moments where your eyebrows raise, your eyes open wide, the corner of your lips move into a smile. “Wow! Look at this!” you say to yourself. And you regard the drink for a moment more before taking that first sip. Then, of course, the outward appearance must yield to its taste. After all, who cares if it looks great but its flavor leaves you unimpressed (much like a person). And instead of that smile full of satisfaction, you tilt your head to the side
“Our leaders suck, religion’s bunk Fuck it all, let’s get drunk!” —Postupack family saying anomie 1. social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards, morals, and values 2. personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals Life, as any thinking and feeling person knows, is difficult. So it comes as no surprise that yours truly, your humble narrator and mixologist, afflicted with the aforementioned anomie, occasionally draws solace and sanctuary through the well-made cocktail. Tonight, however, I will invite you in to the process itself, that of The Creator. Filled with anomie, I’ve already had three drinks (or is it four?). Two of my own inve
“Happiness is a chimera.” —Schopenhauer When asked once by a journalist if he was happy, French General Charles de Gaulle responded, “What do you take me for, an idiot?” Au contraire, mon général, but who’s the idiot here? You with your constant worries? You who sees the world as nothing but a place rife with difficulties? With hindrances, impediments, obstacles, road blocks, dead ends, and occasionally, Nazis? With strife, violence, poverty, despair, and hopelessness? With this thing called the human condition, where just surviving is often a daily epic struggle that taxes us to the limits of our endurance? No thanks, Big Nose! I choose to be happy! And for those of you
There’s not a lot of information about this month’s RETRO COCKTAIL, the “Parisian”, also known as the “Parisian Cocktail”. What we do know is that the recipe dates back to 1929, to Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, the haunt of expatriates, movie stars, celebrities, royals, and the rich. Over the years, Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Jack Dempsey, Humphrey Bogart, and even the Duke of Windsor and Prince Aly Khan have sat down and ordered a drink at Harry’s. But in 1929, Paris and the New York Bar was indeed the place. It was the end of the Roaring Twenties, the last round of drinks before the Great Depression and the terrible war, and there was a feeling of immediacy, of evanescence, of a charm
