How Did We Get to the Panettone Negroni?

Chocolate Negroni. Strawberry Americano. Pistachio Mai Tai. There’s a movement unfolding in cocktail bars across the country—call it the ’tinification of classics. As in the late 1980s and ’90s, a time when untraditional flavors were tacked onto the Martini moniker to produce highly adulterated riffs like the Appletini and Lycheetini, the larger roster of classic cocktails has now become the subject of such experimentation.

At Dante’s Beverly Hills outpost, the bar’s robust Negroni offerings include a Chocolate Negroni, a Strawberry & Rhubarb Negroni and a Coffee Negroni; elsewhere on the menu, there’s a Chamomile Sazerac. Romeo’s, a neon-lit cocktail den in New York City’s East Village, also serves a Chocolate Negroni, with a Cucumber Gin & Tonic alongside the aforementioned Strawberry Americano and Pistachio Mai Tai. Meanwhile, at Guzzle, a West Village cocktail bar that revolves around what manager and head bartender Steve Schneider refers to as “comfort drinks,” you can find a Yuzu Mugirita, a Mole Sazerac and a Pecan Old-Fashioned.

While the prosaic naming convention recalls the ’tinis of yesteryear, this is not the second coming of the dark ages. With this new breed of infused classics, the added flavors aren’t cloying or thick; they’re not coming from saccharine liqueurs or canned juices and on the whole, they still resemble the cocktails with which they share a name. Instead, these drinks reflect a significant shift in the way both bartenders and guests think about the cocktails they want to make and drink. While you’ll still find drinkers who are loyal to a single spirit or style, these days many drinkers are motivated by flavor first.

“Guests are gravitating more towards interesting and unique flavors and caring less about the specific type of liquor featured in the drink,” says Cristhian Rodriguez, beverage director at elNico in Brooklyn. “People who aren’t ‘tequila drinkers’ are much more open to trying a tequila cocktail if the supporting ingredients give it an intriguing flavor profile.” At the same time, people are still drawn to classic, recognizable cocktail structures—and when these two inclinations overlap, you end up with drinks like a Tamarind Paloma and Cranberry Hibiscus Margarita, both of which are on the menu at elNico, along with a Panettone Negroni infused with shortbread cookies, coconut and dried fruit.

Some bartenders partially credit this development to the high-concept boom, wherein cocktail bars have taken to distilling their own ingredients in-house, with equipment like vacuum distillers, or creating flavor-driven ingredients via sous-vide machines. With this technology, they’re able to create unique distillates (or other solutions) packed with hyperfocused flavors, around which they can build boundary-pushing drinks. Take for instance, the Osmanthus at London’s A Bar with Shapes for a Name, which builds outward from a housemade distillate of its fragrant eponymous flowers; the gin and sauvignon blanc that make up the rest of the Martini-style drink support the primary flavor. Or consider the menu at Double Chicken Please, which is leading the related food-as-drink charge with cocktails like the Waldorf Salad, Cold Pizza and French Toast—drinks whose precise makeup is less important than the overall flavor effect.

Of course, not every bar has access to these tools. Even so, in many cases, bartenders are starting with a fruit or ingredient that becomes the primary flavor in the drink—and they work backward from there, relegating the spirit to a supporting role. When creating the Pecan Old-Fashioned, for instance, “raisins and walnuts is where it started,” says Schneider. He first combined the ingredients with rum, Pedro Ximénez sherry and walnut-infused Scotch for a Rum Raisin Old-Fashioned, before deciding to keep the drink more traditional and stick with bourbon. The inspiration for elNico’s Panettone Negroni, meanwhile, came from cocktail legend Leo Robitschek, the former beverage director of the space, who brought the sweet Italian bread to the bar during last year’s holiday season and said, “Let’s make a Negroni,” recalls Rodriguez.

And drinkers, much to the delight of bartenders, are here for it all. Earlier in his career, “it was tough to get people to drink some of the creative stuff that [we] were doing because it was new,” recalls Schneider. But as pioneering bartenders have experimented with drink formats over the years, taking classics into uncharted territory, drinkers have become more adventurous and receptive to formulas that don’t follow all the established rules. “With all the great bars and bartenders out there, the general public has started to trust us to come up with something good, regardless of the spirit,” says Schneider. “And it’s super fun to serve people who are flavor-driven. It just expands the horizon of what you can do and the boundaries you can push.”