"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day." -Frank Sinatra
There comes a time in a young professional's life when he decides that there are better ways to end the day with a generic spirit splashed into a name-brand soda. Sure, if the only point of drinking a Jack and Coke is to take the edge off of a stressful day, why look any further? I mean, the last thing you want to do after a long day of work is to have to think, right?
But once I started thinking about drinking the way I thought about eating, my perspective changed. I was not one of these people who could be satisfied going to the same 3 or 4 chain restaurants for the rest of my life. Sure, there are plenty of people in this country who are perfectly content to consider culinary indulgence a perpetual rotation of Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang's and Macaroni Grill. Not I.
It took a visit to a culinary gem in pseudo-rural Missouri to fully open my eyes to the magic of truly thoughtful mixology. Stuck in the middle of a small town about 20 minutes north of Kansas City, The Justus Drugstore Restaurant -- truly another world inside of an otherwise unassuming store front -- changed the way I thought about cocktails.
This isn't a food blog, so I will refer you elsewhere to read about the astonishing cuisine that entices foodies from Kansas City and all of Northwestern Missouri to make the trek here. Fortunately, on my first visit to this joint, I had overestimated how long it would take me to arrive for my reservation, so I had about 20 minutes to kill. Accustomed to plopping down at the bar for my usual slightly-dirty vodka martini with four blue-cheese stuffed olives, I was immediaty intrigued by the dark wooden bar lined with hand-labelled crystal decanters with various liquids in them. Absent was the wall of spirits with all the store-shelf labels. In fact, I almost didn't feel like I was sitting at a bar at all. Perhaps I was biased by the name of the restaurant, but I felt like I was sitting in an alchemist's lab, absent the bunsen burners and bubbling beakers. The bartender was putting the finishing touches on a cocktail he was making for another customer -- opening one of the glass jars, he dipped a barspoon into a deeply ruby liquid, stirred it into the drink-in-progress in a stainless steel mug, and strained a clear rose-tinged liquid into a tiny shallow glass coupe (that looked like the kind of antique glassware that collected dust at your grandmother's house), and with a citrus tool, shaved off a perfect squiggle of lemon, gave it a twist, and rubbed it around the rim of the glass before setting it in front of a middle-aged woman whos eyes lit up like Christmas. She had had this drink before. And I was somewhere special.
And so I started paying attention, showing up early to restaurants to see if they got creative with the pre-game experience. Some places had "signature" cocktails that were jokes -- cheap knockoffs of something all-too-familiar. Others made me stop mid-sip and think.... trying to deconstruct what the mixologist had put in this drink to give it that.... whatever.
Fast-forward to New York City for a get-away-from-it-all trip when I was in a dive bar somewhere in Greenwich Village when a couple of girls from Chicago told me about "Please Don't Tell".... a bar where reservations are required for entry, and the books only open same-day, when you are expected to start speed-dialing at 3pm when the lines open. The fact that they won't tell you where they are in the era of Google is somewhat absurd, but they expect you to "find" them... inside a dingy hot-dog joint, right as you walk in, there is an old wooden telephone booth on the left. You slide open the door, pick up the rotary wall phone from the 80s, and a woman asks you if you have a reservation. If you do, then the wall of your phonebooth slides open to reveal the hostess, and they usher you into a dark-wood lined speakeasy and to your seat. Cocktails are $15 each, all obscenely creative and usually involve something that they infuse in-house. I was in heaven.
It was only by a stroke of good fortune that a friend of mine happened upon a Wall Street Journal article reviewing a newly-released mixology text -- The PDT Cocktail Book. A brief peruse of its pages revealed that neither of us (both having relatively well-stocked home bars) were not equipped to make more than a couple drinks out of this tome of over 300. The gauntlet had been thrown.
So we committed to, over the course of who-knows-how-long, make every single one of them. In an effort to maximize bang-for-our-buck, we spreadsheet the liquors by the frequency with which they appear in PDT. Some liquors are used 10 or 20 times throughout the pages (Plymouth Gin). Unfortunately, many are single-use bottles of expensive (another reason the both of us decided to go on in this together -- to defray cost). There are at least a couple dozen "recipes" where we have to infuse this with that. Some have ingredients we've never heard of. Others use kitchen staples.
It's going to be a long haul. We invite you along for the journey.
