Robert Simonson on chronicling the ‘second golden age of cocktails,’ from A to Z

By Brian Braiker

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Robert Simonson has a dream job: He writes about cocktails, food and travel for the New York Times where he’s been a contributor since 2000. He’s the author of seven books about cocktails. He literally wrote the book on the Old Fashioned and then one on the martini.

His latest book, out now, widens the lens. By a lot. “The Encyclopedia of Cocktails: The People Bars, and Drinks, with More than 100 Recipes” is a delightful omnibus, an alphabetical compendium of the most notable drinks, influential bartenders living and dead, the most important bars that have shaped the cocktail world over the past quarter-century and more. All in more than 300 wry, shot glass-sized entries from Absinthe to Zombie.

“I tried to put the facts in there, but I also put opinion and a joke now and then,” he says on this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”

We sat down with Simonson on a recent weekday at noon, so there was no alcohol consumed during this interview. Unfortunately. Still, we did talk about his “Encyclopedia of Cocktails,” his favorite Brooklyn bars, drinks he likes, drinks he doesn’t and why the era we’re living through now is one of the most important moments in the history of the cocktail, the “second golden age of cocktails.”

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s been a lot of fun dipping in and out of “Encyclopedia of Cocktails,” but this is actually a ruse. I just wanted to get you here to talk about hot dogs.
Well, I’m happy to talk about hot dogs or cocktails or books or any of those things.

I kid, of course, but I do love that you’re a hot dog fanatic. You recently wrote about hot dogs as bar snacks.
Grub Street was nice enough to give me that assignment, so I was able to go to bars and eat hot dogs at the same time. So it was like two of my favorite things.

On someone else’s dime.
That’s right. That’s right.

Since you are an aficionado, you must know the hot dog was invented in Brooklyn and the inventor, Charles Feltman, is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.
Yes, he has a very grand grave site. He had a lot of money. It’s quite edifice.

You would hope for some sort of hot dog symbolism or something, but I don’t think there is.
It’s just this kind of Grecian folly.

We are here to talk about your book. It’s a great book. It’s a nonlinear history of the cocktail and everything that comes with it, the bars, the bartenders, the glassware, the equipment, and I love how you say in the intro that you modeled this after Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” from 1775. I got a kick out of that. What about this book takes its cue from Samuel Johnson?
Yeah, I wondered what people would make of that. It was true. I kept that in mind the whole time. I guess I was a weird kid. I liked Samuel Johnson, I admired him. I thought he was a fascinating figure. When I was in college, I went over to Scotland and I tried to trace his steps where he and Boswell did that tour of the Highlands and the islands. I managed to go to some of the places. But what I had in mind was, well, Johnson was of course the author of the first English dictionary. Even though he was very erudite and smart and a bit of a brag about that, kind of boorish about that, he was also funny.

He was silly.
We think of a dictionary as a very dry book: “Dog,” and there’s a definition of a dog and there’s no humor. But Johnson put humor in there. Some of his entries were very sarcastic and very cutting. I thought, “If I’m going to do a reference book, I want it to be an entertaining reference book.” So I tried to put the facts in there, but I also put opinion and a joke now and then.

Let’s start with the entry for “cocktail,” which I thought was interesting that you included. I know you’ve been on a lot of very deep-in-the-weeds cocktail podcasts. That’s not this. I’m a total dilettante. When did cocktail, the word, enter the lexicon? What was it originally when the word first appeared, and it’s a ridiculous word. I love that you point out that it’s a ridiculous word.
It’s a ridiculous word. Nobody ever talks about how silly that word is. It first appeared in English in a London newspaper in the late 1700s. It first appeared in an American newspaper in 1806. What it was was a mixed drink that contained spirits and sugar and bitters and water, and that was it. And at the time it was a very specific drink. There were all kinds of mixed drinks out there, but only the ones that had those four things in it, especially the bitters, was a cocktail and that’s how people knew what cocktail was.

And as far as the name is concerned, there are lots of theories. Probably the most legitimate one — my fellow cocktail historian David Wondrich came up with this — was the idea that if you had an old horse that you were trying to sell for money, you would take some ginger and you would put it where the sun doesn’t shine. And that, of course, would cause the horse to jump all around and its tail would cock up and it would look like a lively horse and you’d sell it. So, “cocktail.” And so the idea is if as a human you would go to a bar in the morning, you’d get a drink and you’d appear more sprightly and your tail would cock up. So, cocktail.

So that was the original cocktail. Do you think it would’ve been any good?
Well, it would’ve been very different. I think it would’ve been good. You put those things together and it’s pretty fail-safe. Ice was not prevalent. Ice was a luxury item back then, so it’s very likely your cocktail would’ve been room temperature or maybe it was briefly chilled, I don’t know. But cocktails are always meant to be drunk rather quickly, so maybe you wouldn’t have noticed.

For the past 20 years or so, almost the entire time you’ve been covering cocktails, we’ve been experiencing what you seem to consider the most important moments in cocktail history.
Second golden age of cocktails.

Well, what was the first and what are we living through now?
The first would’ve been like the 1860s to Prohibition started in 1920. That’s when cocktails came into full bloom and bartenders were respected members of the community and all the great classics that we know — martini, the Manhattan, Rob Roy — all these things were invented. So that was it. And then after Prohibition, we had to relearn all the skills and cocktails became unfashionable, eventually got replaced by drugs and things like that in the ’60s and ’70s. In the last 25 years, they’ve had a revival and basically all the bartenders had to relearn everything. But now we have several new generations of very skilled cocktail bartenders.

Yes, and the book does a great job of highlighting specific individuals, living and gone. I like the historical entries here a lot. People who invented drinks, people who became famous for their craft. People like Jeremiah Thomas, who I’d heard of before. Tell us about him.
He’s generally thought to be the father of modern mixology. His main claim to fame was that in 1862, he published the first cocktail manual, mainly geared towards bartenders, though laymen did use it too. So he put all the formula, all the recipes that he was using in the bar. He was the most famous bartender of his day, and he put it in a book and therefore legitimized it: “What I do as a bartender, making these drinks, is not just a job, it’s a skill.”

And an art form.
It’s a profession, it’s an art. And so that’s Jeremiah Thomas. He is buried up in Woodlawn in the Bronx, you can visit his grave. It’s actually a tourist attraction now.

Do people tip one out for him on his grave?
I think they do. I did. During the pandemic when we were all trying to find things to do with ourselves, my wife and I took a little drive up there, and as you know with Green-Wood, cemeteries became very popular during Covid.

Yeah, I was there all the time.
You could take a walk in the fresh air, and so we walked around and I brought up an Old Fashioned and I poured one out and I drank one over his grave and we can thank the cocktail revival for that. His grave, people did not know it was there. He was forgotten. He was lost, and now it’s actually on the map that they hand out to guests and tourists.

You also have people like Tom Bullock, who I hadn’t heard of. The history is dominated by white men, so it’s important to highlight figures like him. You highlight a lot of women in your book as well. Who are some of the undersung people of color or marginalized-by-history people that we’re learning more about today than we may not have known before?
You mentioned Tom Bullock. He’s in there because he was the first Black male bartender to publish a cocktail book, which he did in the 1910s. He bartended at a private club in St. Louis. His book was reissued about 10 years ago, and so he got renewed attention. Like most professions in America over the past 200 years, it was dominated by white males. Obviously women, they could not get into bars. They were not allowed in bars.

So in recent years, the industry has tried to shine a light on the forgotten members of this history. So there’s Tom Bullock, and then there’s another guy that I sort of helped rediscover named Julian Anderson, who was a Black bartender at a private men’s club in Helena, Montana, where he bartended for actually 60 years. And he also published a book which was recently rediscovered, I think it was like 1919, called “Julian’s Recipes.” So he was quite a remarkable figure. As far as women are concerned, there was a woman named Ada Coleman who was the second head bartender at the American Bar in the Savoy Hotel, which is one of the most important cocktail bars in history.

It’s in London, right?
Yeah, in London. She invented a famous drink called the Hanky Panky. She’s proved very inspirational figure in the modern movement. There have been just as many men and women who wanted to become mixologists and wanted to learn this craft and were passionate about it, but they didn’t have as many models to look up to. And so Ada Coleman is one of those.

I know you made it a quest to have inventors of specific cocktails be the people to serve those cocktails to you. Who would you love to have a drink with who’s no longer with us or what bar would you love to go back in time and visit?
There are so many places I’d want to go. There is a bartender that I’ve been obsessed with for some time and written a lot about. He was a Chicago bartender and his name was Theodore Proulx. He was a French Canadian. He came down to Chicago and he was a bartender at this wonderful old Chicago tavern called Chapin and Gore. It was a palace. It was just beautifully appointed, and that’s where all the sporty characters and the businessman and even the theatrical stars and the music stars would go. He managed to self-publish a cocktail book called “The Bartender’s Manual” in 1888, and it had the first recipe printed recipe ever for the Old Fashioned and the martini.

Both drinks you have written entire books about.
That’s right. And then he left the profession in his 20s and he became a lawyer and he just walked away from it and he probably thought he had made no mark whatsoever. But I would love to go back to that bar and have a drink served by him. I admire his book. His book is full of a lot of good advice on how to be a good bartender. He seems like a very sage and mature person for his age. I just would have a lot of questions for him. I’m also fascinated by the bar because it looks beautiful. They used to publish their own cocktail book on an annual basis. You cannot find these cocktail books anymore. I think they have them in the Chicago Historical Society and there’s just no trace. There’s no trace whatsoever of Chapin and Gore. No old buildings, no nothing.

Speaking of Chicago, there is a bar that’s trying to maintain that historical accuracy. Have you been to Milk Room, where they’ll show you a bottle of Tanqueray from like 1972 or whatever?
I have, yes. At the old Chicago Athletic Association, which used to be a private club and now is a hotel, a fancy hotel with several good bars in it. And the Milk Room is very small one. Are there less than 10 seats, I think? It used to be run by a guy named Paul McGee, and I was fortunate enough to go there a couple times. I had one of the best, I think it was a rusty nail that I ever had. Using antique spirits.

Yes, antique spirits that they’ve dug up. I don’t know how long they can keep that going or if that’s a finite resource.
It has that old Chicago atmosphere. You can easily imagine what it was like a hundred years ago and probably not much different.

There are bars like that in your book throughout, but back to your quest to have famous drinks served to you by the people who invented them. Can you run through a few of them? I mean, they’re in the book, some of these folks. Is it possible to do that for our listeners? Let’s say they’re in Brooklyn. 
It’s less possible because most of the famous bartenders who created lasting drinks do not bartend anymore. You can’t bartend forever. It’s not for everyone. And so they go on and they become a brand ambassador or bar owner or something like that. So there’s a guy named Dick Bradsell who was the leader of the London cocktail revival in the ’90s and aughts. He created the espresso martini, also a famous drink called the bramble, so I met him once and he made a bramble for me. I stupidly did not ask him to make me espresso martini. I don’t like that drink, but I wish I could go back.

It’s also gotten its fair share of negative press recently. Like, enough with the espresso martini.
Oh, has it? I feel like it’s still incredibly popular.

And you don’t like it?
I just don’t like coffee in my drinks. I mean, I feel that cocktails are stimulating as they are. It just seems like a drink for people who like vodka and Red Bull. They want a fancy version of that.

The Irish coffee is the original vodka Red Bull.
That’s right. Another English bartender called Salvatore Calabrese. He invented something called the breakfast martini, which is fairly well known. This happened just recently. Last year he was in town, he doesn’t really bartend anymore, but he was guest-bartending at Dante in New York City. He was going to get me a breakfast martini and have one of his minions make it for me. And I said, “No, Salvatore, please go behind the bar. I need you to do it.”

What is in a breakfast martini?
It is gin and lemon juice, and I believe curaçao and a bit of marmalade. There’s jam that you strain out, but it does flavor the drink.

I have never tried that.
There’s the famous Tommy’s margarita. Everyone knows what the Tommy’s margarita is, and that was invented by Julio Bermejo in San Francisco.

Let’s pretend that they don’t know what it is. What is a Tommy’s margarita?
It’s just a margarita without the Cointreau. So it’s tequila, lime juice and agave syrup, and he invented it at his place. Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco.

Give us a tour of Brooklyn. Let’s say you have a guest coming, someone who’s never been here, they’re here for a couple days. What’s the 2024 circuit you would take them on? The reason we’re doing this is because we met upstairs at Gage & Tollner. You were giving one of your Q&As, a “spirited conversation” about cocktails. And then we all adjourned upstairs for a drink at the Sunken Harbor Club, which is an amazing tiki bar. That’s the context for this, the origins of this conversation. Where would you take someone new to Brooklyn?
I would go there. Definitely Gage & Tollner is one-of-a-kind restaurant with this perfectly preserved, beautiful 19th century interior. Also, their cocktail program is a perfect example of the classics done well. They serve only classics and they do them exceptionally well. And then you can go upstairs, like you said, and you can get some of the best tiki drinks in town at the Sunken Harbor Club, which has an interior that looks like the hull of a boat and it’s quite fun. I’m very well situated. I am in Boerum Hill on Bergen Street near Bond, so I go to Long Island Bar a lot. I would take them to Long Island Bar.

Great spot.
Which is an old luncheonette, which was reborn as a cocktail bar about 10 years ago. I would take them to Clover Club on Smith Street, which is run by Julie Reiner, who’s one of the leading lights in the cocktail world. And it’s basically the blueprint for a modern craft cocktail bar across the street is Leyenda, also owned by Julie Reiner and run by Ivy Mix. They specialize in Latin spirits. A couple blocks from me is another place, Grand Army, which is a great cocktail bar. It’s a neighborhood joint and one block from me is the old Brooklyn Inn, which is Brooklyn’s version of the Old Town Bar. It’s our really, really old 19th century saloon.

You just mentioned two people that I did want to get to. Ivy Mix has been on the podcast. I’ve interviewed Julie as well. It’s so fun dipping in and out of this because there are so many bars that I’ve been to, bars that I want to try. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about Julie who has had a tremendous impact on the cocktail renaissance. I remember the early days of the Pegu Club, which I loved. I loved the Flatiron Lounge, both of which are gone now and I’m sad about that. But she, to your point, opened the Clover Club. She just resurrected Milady’s in SoHo. Talk about her impact specifically.
Yeah, she’s one of the pioneers in this movement and she came from San Francisco where she learned how to bartend and then she came here and she first got attention in Greenwich Village at a small place called C3. She’s opened so many important bars. First was the Flatiron Lounge, which was the first craft cocktail bar that bought cocktails to the masses. Before that, you had little speakeasy places like Milk and Honey. Very few people could get in. They were secret. Her bars have never been secret. They’ve always been like, here I am. I’m a cocktail bar. Everyone come in.

And not snooty, not pretentious at all about it.
And then she opened Pegu Club with Audrey Saunders, which is easily one of the best cocktail bars ever in history. And I do miss it. There’s certain drinks you could get there and you can’t get anywhere else now.

I’m glad to hear you say that. It sort of validates my love for it.
So many bartenders were trained at Flatiron and Pegu and went on to open their own bars. She opened a place in Brooklyn, Clover Club, because she lived in Brooklyn and she was frustrated with the idea that there were no cocktail bars out here. This was back in 2009. So she just did it herself and then she did it again with Leyenda. And now of course Brooklyn is crawling with cocktail bars. But you have to remember 15 years ago that was not the case.

That’s right. You sort of alluded this a little bit with Milk and Honey. Sasha Petraske, who opened that, has what must be the most profound impact on the current cocktail culture, and I think the longest entry in your book. He died so young and yet had such an impact. I’ve been to PDT. I don’t think I ever made it to Milk and Honey while he was there. I wonder if you could talk about his impact.
He definitely was the most influential figure in the cocktail renaissance, and he opened Milk and Honey on New Year’s Eve, 1999. It was just a small place, a hole in the wall. There was no sign outside. It had no phone number, it had no website. He just had to know it was there. He wanted a little civilized drinking den, quiet place. He played jazz music. He gave you glasses of water with slices of cucumber in it. Every time you got a drink, there was a cloth napkin that it was all very sophisticated and he wore suspenders and old-fashioned clothing. He wasn’t putting on a show. He actually dressed like that. That’s what he liked.

And there was no signage and it was low-key because he needed to appease the landlord. It wasn’t a pretentious thing.
That’s right. The landlord was his friend and he made a deal with him. He said, “I won’t run a noisy bar.” I mean, there were all reasons for this. He didn’t have a menu because he didn’t know how to run a printer and everyone thought he was just being pretentious. It actually led to this wonderful thing where if you wanted to order a drink, you actually had to have a conversation with the bartender and you learned a lot and you figured out what you wanted to drink, what you might like, what you might dislike, and you knew the bartender was going to make you something good.

He trained a lot of people and he opened a bunch of other bars with other bartenders that he worked with. He was very democratic. He was raised in a communist household, so he wanted his bartenders to go on and have their own bar, their own livelihood. He didn’t want them to just remain employees. They usually ended up doing a lot better financially than he ever did. So, you can’t go to Milk and Honey, but if you want to experience what a Sasha Petraske bar was like, it’s easy. You go to the bars that were opened by his proteges. So there’s Attaboy in New York, there’s Little Branch also in New York. There’s Dutch Kills in Queens. Seaborne.

In Red Hook.
So he finally gave Brooklyn a bar. It took him a while. He did consult on Weather Up, which still exists, but go to those places and the people that were trained by him, they don’t really change. They continue to make drinks the way that he did.

Weather Up on Vanderbilt. You mentioned Seaborne. Is that where the Red Hook cocktail originated, which has its own entry in your book?
No, Seaborne’s down on Van Brunt. It’s run by Lucinda Sterling. It’s another hole in the wall. You’d miss it if you walked by it. So the Red Hook was invented by Vincenzo Errico. He was an Italian bartender that Sasha Petrasche brought back from London to work at Milk and Honey, and he was just experimenting. He was trying to create a version of a Manhattan or a Brooklyn cocktail that’s spotlighted Italian ingredients like Punt e Mes and maraschino liqueur. And so he came up with the Red Hook.

Punt e Mes, which is vermouth.
I have had him make me that drink, and that is the drink that I went to the greatest lengths to get. So I was in Italy a couple years ago, and so I was in Rome and we took the train down to Naples, spent a couple days there, and then we took a ferry to the island of Ischia because that’s where Vincenzo’s bar is. If I was going to get him to make me a Red Hook, I had to go to Ischia. And I did.

To an island off the coast of Italy. And you did and it was good?
Oh, it was perfect. And also he made me his other modern classic, which is called an Enzoni, which is his kind of citrusy version of a Negroni.

I’ll have to try that. When you were talking about Sasha and the suspenders and all that, I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent Jimmy Fallon sketch that made the rounds a couple of weeks ago with Keegan-Michael Key where they’re lampooning bartenders with suspenders and mustaches and man buns. It felt like a joke from 2012. I was surprised that that has stuck as an image.
Yeah, I was surprised at that too. Maybe you remember about 10 years ago there was a viral video. It was like a mock rap song featuring these three guys and it was called “Hey, Mr. Mixologist” and it basically made fun of mixologist in the exact same way. And so I wondered if Jimmy Fallon had seen that sketch and decided just to do it over again. But really those stereotypes, they do stick and they don’t really apply anymore.

No, they don’t.
The cocktail bartenders are much more relaxed now. They’re more casual in their dress. They still have the chops. They know how to do everything, and they’re serious about their craft, but they’re not jerks like that anymore. So I was not pleased by that video. I get a little tired of making fun of cocktail bartenders.

It was pretty lame.
As if they’re saying bartending can’t be serious. “How dare you take your job seriously; how dare you try to serve me a good drink?” And also the whole idea that they’ve got this precious uniform. I mean, everyone has to look in the mirror, no matter who you are. You’re wearing some kind of uniform. There’s a uniform for hipsters. There’s uniform for rock musicians.

What’s your uniform? You’re the sophisticated journalist.
Well, it’s funny because you know what? Journalists end up dressing like journalists, they can’t help themselves, and you end up wearing tweed and corduroy before you know it. That happened to me. I like it. So maybe it just comes with the territory.

You’re dapper. It works. So this is your seventh book on cocktails. I do love it. This is also something of a second career for you. You started as a theater writer. The timing of your beat transition couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Were you just maxed out on theater or you got really into cocktails or a little bit of both?
A little bit of both. I was definitely burned out on theater. I’ve been writing about it for 20 years, and it’s a very small sandbox to play in. I had written everything and I had always been interested in cocktails and mixed drinks. I grew up in a household that, like many, had a cocktail hour, so I was happy to make that switch. For a while, I thought it struck me as bizarre. I think it struck other people as bizarre. In the journalism game, you probably know people don’t usually change beats. They get stuck.

Some papers, at least it used to be, you do the transportation beat for a couple years and then you move over to education. I don’t know how The Times operates.
That’s the way it is at The New York Times too if you’re a staff member. If you’re a freelancer though, and I’ve always been a freelancer, you get known for something. It took a few years to get people to let me do the cocktail thing and not the theater thing, but it did happen, and I’ve come to realize that everything that I write about is basically the same. So I used to write about theater and I write about cocktails and I’m interested in hot dogs. My wife pointed this out to me the other day, said, “You just like American things,” and they are all American. The American musical theater, cocktails, hot dogs. I also like things with a long, rich history. I like eccentric things. I like things that have a lot of ritual. These are very individualist fields.

What is that, a swordfish hanging behind you? Are you a fisherman as well?
No, that’s my wife’s. It’s a sailfish. She inherited it from a guy in New Jersey who was known as Captain John. He was moving, I think, and he couldn’t take it with him. The story is that Captain John caught this while fishing with Hemingway. Of course, everyone’s got one of those stories, so who knows.

Hemingway, who has an entry in your book. Notorious drinker.
Yes. Yes. The unavoidable barfly of all time. But when Captain John gave it to her, he made her promise, “You can never give it away. You can never throw it away. You’ve got to take care of it.” And she promised, so we’ve been in several apartments. It’s always on the wall, so there it is.

Does it have a name?
Nick, as in Nick Adams.

You transition to cocktails and this is right as the boom is clicking. You go to New Orleans. What was your gateway cocktail? I think I’ve heard you say a Sazerac was an important one.
Sazerac, yes. It’s an eye-opener. It’ll change your mind.

Yeah, change it a lot. What is important about a Sazerac for people who that may sound like a deep cut for?
It’s a rye cocktail for people who don’t know, and it’s fairly simple. It’s rye. It’s got traces of Peychaud’s Bitters, which are made in New Orleans, and absinthe, herbal liqueur and sugar to sweeten it, and then you got a lemon twist on top that you’re supposed to throw away. So it’s associated with New Orleans and for a long time you could only drink it in New Orleans. People didn’t have it anywhere else, mainly because two of those products, Peychaud’s and, well, they couldn’t use absinthe because it was illegal, so they used Herb Sainte, which was made down there, so you can only get them down there. I love the Sazerac for the way it tastes. It’s just a few simple ingredients, but it has a very complex flavor profile.

It sort of unfolds on your tongue.
Yes, it does. It does show you how complex a cocktail can be, but also the ritual. Once upon a time in the 19th century, all cocktails were made with two glasses. They just throw the liquid between two glasses until they got cold. The Sazerac is the last drink that you have to make with two glasses. You chill one glass with ice while you mix a drink in the other glass, and then you throw out the ice and you rinse it with absinthe, and then you pour the rye stuff into the other glass. So I love that that’s this remnant of the 19th century technique.

Analog, almost. I’ve had a Sazerac at the Roosevelt Hotel. I’ve had the Ramos Gin Fizz there as well.
Yeah. Ramos Gin Fizz. A lot of famous bartenders, but he’s like the only one who managed to get his name on the drink and it stuck. Henry Ramos.

Harvey Wallbanger was not a person, unfortunately.
No, not a person. That’s tough to get your name on the drink.

You go from theater to cocktails. You have a Substack, The Mix with Robert Simonson. How has that been? It’s a brave new world for journalists, Substack has had its ups and downs in the past couple of years. Are you able to accrue an audience and monetize and all that?
It’s been great. I’ve been very pleased with the whole experience. I started it in January of 2022, so I’ve been doing it for a little over two years. I started it as we were just emerging from the pandemic. During the pandemic, I realized that I couldn’t necessarily count on my editors to give me work, so I better find my own work and I wanted a little more independence. We have a great subscription base. I have been able to, as you say, monetize it. It does make money.

I won’t ask how much, but I’m glad that it’s working.
Yeah, it is working. I love that I can write about whatever I want. There is cocktail stuff there because that’s what people expect from me, but there’s also food stuff, travel stuff, hot dog things, whatever I choose to, and I also love the direct connection with the reader. They’re very engaged.

And opinionated, I would imagine. Have you gotten any feedback from the encyclopedia? It’s obviously a finite volume. There’s a lot in there. It’s dense. I’m sure there are things you wish you had included in retrospect, but are people like “How could you not include XYZ?” Is there anything that’s not in there that you wish would’ve been?
No. I’m happy with the amount I got in everything that I wanted to get there. I am sure that there are perhaps some people in bars out there who think they should be in the book and they weren’t, but nobody has come up to me and actually said that. I’m sure they’ll complain to their friends. You can’t please everybody. I do try to bring a journalistic attitude towards my subject. Most people who are in this arena, bars are fun. Cocktails are fun, and we all like to know each other. We all like to know our bartenders, and so I think sometimes journalists get a little too close to the subject so that it can’t report objectively. I try not to make that happen, and so the things that are in the book are the things that I feel should be in the book, not just doing favors for friends,

Not just your buddies. You also have an entry on the cocktail writer, which I was both surprised to see and amused by, especially the fact that you didn’t include yourself in the list.
I wrote the book, there’s no reason to put me in there.

People can extrapolate.
Cocktail writer is a profession that didn’t exist. It started to exist 25 years ago. I had a finite book and I could write whatever, 300 entries or 320 or something, and there are important cocktail writers and I thought, who do I write about and who do I not write about? And I just got the idea. I was like, well, just let’s put them it all in one entry. Give them all their due, but under one entry.

Speaking of one entry, we did mention you’ve written whole books about one cocktail. The Old Fashioned has a book, the martini has a book. If you were to write another book on a single cocktail, is there a single cocktail out there that’s worthy of its own book?
People have asked me, I don’t think I want to write another book about just one drink. I wrote one about the Old Fashioned and the martini. I think someone should and someone will write a whole book about the espresso martini because it’s so phenomenally popular and there are so many variations at this point, and also it’s kind of an old drink that’s almost 40 years old, so somebody can do that. Somebody who likes the drink can do that. I recently learned that somebody wrote a whole book about the Pimm’s Cup and that’s fine with me. You could say a lot about the Pimm’s Cup. There’s been one about the Manhattan. There’s been one about the Bloody Mary. There’s been several about the Negroni.

I think the Manhattan is the first cocktail I was aware of existing as a cocktail because my grandmother drank it. Growing up in California, the Manhattan sounded so elegant.
Great cocktail. My wife’s favorite cocktail

Might be my favorite too. I know that you’ve recently been something of a Boothby evangelist.
Yeah, which is a Manhattan with champagne on top.

I haven’t had one yet. I’m going to go out, that’s going to be my next. Is there a place around here where you can get a good one?
Go to Long Island Bar where they didn’t know how to make a Boothby. I told them how and so now they know. If you’re lucky enough to get to the bar when a guy named Phil Ward is behind the bar, he will make you a good Boothby.

Do you have a current go-to? Is that it? I know you’re a martini guy.
At home we drink a lot of martinis, Manhattans, Negronis. I don’t drink that many sours at home. For some reason. It seems like the extra step you have to juice the lemon or juice the lime. That makes one more minute between you and your cocktail, so I just do stirred cocktails most of the time.

Do you have a go-to hangover cure?
No, I just don’t drink too much. Hangover cures, my God. There’s a whole school of journalism. Those articles come out on a regular basis, just a bunch of balderdash. Nothing works.

My favorite answer was Anthony Bourdain who said, “Coca-Cola, a joint and spicy [Szechuan] food and you’ll be fine.”
Okay. He was always good for a quote.

Are there trends that you want to see go away?
I published a story today. It came out on a website called VinePair. People ask me what the trends are all the time, and I’ve been at a loss because I haven’t seen any new trends. It’s just the same old trends and then I realized the new trend is all the trends, everything that we’ve learned for the past 20 years is being done simultaneously at the new bars. The new bars open and offer everything. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. You can’t do everything well. In the early days of the cocktail revival was great because people focused and we do this the best and they did.

The Jack-of-all-trades trend.
I don’t know what I would want to go away. I just like people to kind of narrow their focus a little bit.

I know you’re from Wisconsin and, talking about the book’s inclusivity, it’s also geographically diverse. You’ve got London covered, Japan covered. And Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge in Milwaukee.
With the book. I wanted to make sure I covered old history and new history. I wanted to connect all the dots from the 1700s to today because it’s all one through line. The people who are making cocktails today and producing the spirits and opening the bars are in a tradition that goes back to the people who did it 200 years ago. It’s all the same thing, and the people today are no less important than the people in the past.

I wonder, do you have a sense of when the first establishment would’ve been that you could walk into that would be recognizable as a bar to a modern person? What year, roughly, or decade, if you were to walk in a building as a contemporary human and say, “This is a bar. This looks like a bar.” When did that start?
Saloons are as old as the hills, so you could go into an old saloon or tavern that served nothing but ale and you go, “Oh yeah, I’m in a bar.” But if you’re talking about a cocktail bar that we would recognize today, I think you’d have to go back to the 1870s. A lot of them were in hotels and then you’d say, “Okay, I get it,” and maybe you’d recognize it as a cocktail bar because so many of the new cocktail bars have tried to imitate that style and bring it back. All the neo-speakeasies and all that.

Love the neo-speakeasies to an extent.
To an extent.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.