Ours is an epoch of bombast and bluster, blunderbuss superlative. Good is phooey. Gotta be best. Or worst. Either works. Where in this world, turned up to eleven, can one find respite from the throbbing gristle of braying and garish invective? Despite the very real possibility that we actually are living at the end of times—Climate change! Civil war! The likely election of a despotic tyrant hellbent on facefucking democracy!—there must be some recess of horse sense, sober good measure and understatement. Could it be, perhaps, a bar?
Sure, maximalism, in all its ruffles and ruches, has sidled up to the bar, ordered a grilled cheese Margarita topped with clarified tomato water foam, gazed at the leopard-print, black-lit, disco-balled, taste inferno it’s served within and declared it “OMG, the best ever!” And that makes sense. Bars are sensitive barometers of the zeitgeist. They are subject to change and the changes of the world outside their doors. (Even the more is more-ism was contrapuntal to a generation of self-serious bars whose baroque cocktails were frequently accompanied by a lengthy exegesis.) Yet, amidst all the hubbub, a sensitive ear can hear a countervailing melody. Across the country, bars of nontrivial ambition are boldly embracing understatement. From Portland, Maine’s Room for Improvement (one of Punch’s Best New Bars of 2023) to San Diego’s Happy Medium to Los Angeles’ Bar Next Door, braggadocio and pretension are being jettisoned for nonchalant Negronis, normcore slushies and a heavy dose of self-deprecation.
Erick Castro-Diaz, of San Diego’s Gilly’s House of Cocktails—a very good bar cosplaying as an OK one—points to both the ubiquity of cocktail culture and the pandemic as twinned factors driving this trend. “If you’re 30, you came of age when cocktail culture was already mainstream,” he explains. “They were drinking Sazeracs at the movie theater and ancestral mezcal at Disney World.” Not only were craft cocktails already normalized, he said, but the pandemic’s forced hibernation drove drinkers indoors, to purchase bar sets and spirits, turning them into DIY cocktail connoisseurs themselves. Only recently have they begun to emerge, galloping into this fetid world, thirsty for a YOLO FOMO FML ENM DDLG good time. No one needs ’splaining. No one wants a to-do. “Now, people want nice things without having to plan,” says Castro-Diaz. (This up-for-whatever motif, it’s worth adding, is also central to the cool new modern wine bar.)
At Gilly’s, where pool balls clack on a pair of tables and the Padres play upon a television set, he cloaks serious technique in a sort of ’90s slacker indifference. It doesn’t mean the drink before you wasn’t fat-washed or clarified or painstakingly calibrated to suit a draft line. It’s just that no one is going to talk about it. Apart from being more fun than an Advanced Mixology lecture, Castro-Diaz says, the approach is still rooted in cocktail history. “If you went to San Francisco 100 years ago and saw Jerry Thomas, I bet you there was prostitution and gambling,” he says. “The people at the bar were vagabonds. It wasn’t a hoity-toity thing.”
“The magic lies in that delta between the expectation and the experience.”
Across the country, down a dimly lit alley in Portland, Maine, Castro-Diaz has found a like-minded traveler in Arvid Brown and his bar, the self-effacing Room for Improvement. “Our core ethos,” says Brown, “is to err on the side of underpromising.” The space itself, a low-ceilinged basement with rafters, feels a little like your local VFW. Few would look twice at the menu, a standard bill of fare, but each cocktail has a back end as considered as something you’d find at, say, London’s Connaught Bar. The Espresso Martini, for instance, is made with a dark rum base, Allen’s Coffee brandy, Giffard Banane du Brésil and cold-brew concentrate. It comes under a raft of salted coconut foam, dispensed from an iSi. The Negroni, on the other hand, takes the three-part cocktail and divides that to six. The whole thing is batched, infused with pineapple and fat-washed with coconut before being presented with, as Brown wryly puts it, “a performative [ice] cube.” For Brown, the magic lies in that delta between the expectation and the experience. “I want people to take a sip of what looks like a normal drink and say, ‘What sorcery is this?’”
In fact, one way to conceptualize the current moment is to envision a matrix. The X axis is expectation; the Y is experience. Actually, I think I can figure out how to do this. Hold on. OK, here it is:
A regular dive bar (blue dot) is going to be in Quadrant III; a good craft cocktail den in Quadrant I (green dot). Quadrant II is bad news. No one wants to be there. Bars like Room for Improvement (and Marlow in Austin, Texas, and EZ’s Liquor Lounge in Houston) occupy Quadrant IV (red dot). They underpromise and overdeliver. They’re like a dad that just shows up and doesn’t make a big deal about it. Who doesn’t spend one’s entire life searching for that?
Of course, the ambitious bar masquerading as a regular bar is not new, even if the current proliferation is. Consider New York’s Mother’s Ruin, which opened in 2011 in Nolita, during a time when leather aprons and arm garters were still de rigueur. As T.J. Lynch tells me, he founded the bar after years in the industry—notably working with craft cocktail legend Toby Maloney at the Rusty Knot, an early (if now deceased) entrant into the genre—because he “wanted all the fun stuff of working at high-end bars without the extra pretension, attitudes and pressure.”
On a recent Monday night, I decide to check back in on the place. The city is mid heat wave, Biden is still too old and Trump’s bloody ear is being hailed as proof of divinity. Every bit of news would be catastrophic if catastrophe wasn’t the lingua franca. We’re all gonna die. That’s for sure. I need some Cholula honey wings and a good cocktail, and not the force-carbonated kind.
I push open the door. A slushy machine purrs. Holiday lights glow (it’s July). The crowd is a mix of happy hour die-hards, dates and bros. There are 29 people and only one collared shirt. (It’s mine but it’s the sweater knit kind because I’m on a date and want to look classy but bangable.) The noise, joyful as it is cacophonous, ricochets off the tin ceiling. Some guy at the end of the bar is drinking something blue. I’ll have one of those. According to the menu, it’s a Patient Zero, a vaguely tiki-ish drink made with gin, blue Curaçao, cacao, Lillet Blanc and lemon. And I order those wings. So many. A dozen, maybe, and a smash burger. I want these things without rigmarole or occasion, without promise or favor, without being told, really, even how they are made or by whom. Life is too short not to drink craft cocktails, but it’s also too short to be told about them at length. My Patient Zero arrives in a minute, tops. (“Our key is speed,” says Lynch.) It’s true, it’s blue, it’s cold. Nothing more needs to be said because just as soon, it’s gone.