The other night, I ate at D.C.’s popular, high-concept Afghan restaurant, Bistro Aracosia. The high-concept best entails delicious meals and beverages.
Specifically, I like the way the drinks are named. If you want a mix of rye and apple brandy, you could tell the waiter, “I have died to myself, and I live for you,” as the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi wrote. If you’ve dreamed of rye, dry vermouth, and maraschino liqueur, you can name out, “I’ve disappeared from myself and my attributes.”How did we get here, in which drinks have intricate and preposterous names? Although Aracosia may also have the only bar in which Rumi traces specify the drinks, the eating place is hardly ever on my own in overdoing it with the cocktail-naming conventions.
Two hundred years ago, one might have commonly ordered a drink named for its alcoholic impact, such as a “phlegm-cutter” or a “fog driver.” There have also been “slings,” “flips,” and a newfangled concoction called the cocktail, which was, at its earliest, just a sling with bitters.
By 1867, Mark Twain was in Paris looking for a proper drink. He became outraged that French bars didn’t realize how to make champagne cocktails, sherry cobblers, and brandy smashes. Twain rails against the barman who is clueless as to the composition of “a Santa Cruz Punch, an Eye-Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earthquake.”
By the 19th century, the Barnumesque age of merchandising turned into a complete swing. Publicists identified the free press one ought to get if the customer’s call can be connected to a famous drink. So it changed into then, in 1899, Broadway singer Mayme Taylor changed into celebrated with a sip of scotch, ginger ale, and citrus, known as the Mamie Taylor. Mayme is forgotten; Mamie isn’t always. There becomes a Caruso cocktail, made — most wrongheaded cocktail books notwithstanding — with cognac, candy vermouth, and Benedictine; a Mary Pickford, made of rum, pineapple juice, grenadine, and maraschino liqueur; a Ginger Rogers, which is a martini spiked with apricot brandy and lemon juice; and a Jack Dempsey, with gin, rum, lemon juice, and sugar.
But we’ve been within the age of the bad pun for a while. Boston bartender Jackson Cannon reviews having witnessed a cocktail menu with a drink called “Everything Happens for a Riesling.” There, it changed into a place in Harlem that used to have a drink. The use of thyme with the worn-out identity “About Thyme!” Barman Alex Day is answerable for “Unidentified Floral Objects.” The Laundry Room in Las Vegas has featured “Berried in Sin,” a bubbly drink with the berry liqueur crème de cassis. Bartender Devon Tarby got here up with the “Peeping Tomboy.” A pal claims to have absolutely visible an Amsterdam bar menu with the sad, sad pun “Pear Necessities.” A better order of wordplay comes from the chichi Chicago boîte The Aviary, which serves a drink known as the “Ford’s Model Tea Party.”
Then there are drink names that aren’t puns as complex inner jokes: Los Angeles bartender Daniel Zacharczuk created a drink he calls “Beth’s Going to Town.” The Aviary menu is “Harry, I Took Care of It.”
Rumor has it there’s a bar in Portland, Ore., with a drink that says, “If you wake up Sunday morning and overlook in which you parked your vehicle, it is out in front of Mary’s, like constantly,” Mary’s being a neighborhood strip bar.
Which is all excellent fun, h; however, it is longer precisely the kind of thing that trips off the tongue in a loud bar. It’s the rude counterpart of the beverages named with Rumi charges. One is bawdy, and the others are romantically philosophical; however, all are overcomplicated and overdone.
It’s time we get back to some less complicated naming conventions, and Forestall looks too clever by way of half. Some of the pleasant cocktail names are only descriptive. You don’t need to ask what goes in a gin and tonic.
Nor can you pass wrong with something easy and evocative. For instance, there’s a drink I’ve heard of known as a Manhattan. Now, there’s a call for a cocktail with a few staying electricity.
