I’ve only had like one martini in my life but my husband is an aficionado. He’s had bad ones in all kinds of places.
But the worst is when he orders a martini and the server says, “A gin martini? Or vodka?”
I think this gives him the same reaction as I have, when a server asks me what kind of cheese I want on my hamburger. I don’t want cheese on my hamburger. You have on your menu a thing called a “cheeseburger.” That is what you call a hamburger with cheese, no? If I wanted cheese on my hamburger I would have ordered a cheeseburger.
The worst, though…we ate at an Indian restaurant that was otherwise really great. But his martini was green, and apparently tasted like Scope. And may have been? And I had ordered a gin and tonic, and they brought me a shot glass with what might have been gin, and a bottle of tonic water. Oh, no lime, either. I’m not sure that place had an actual bartender.
Well, silly, you just couldn’t see the bartender because he was squatting down behind the bar. Seriously, what bars do you go to where they stand up to milk the rum goats?
There are a lot of sub-par bartenders out there. My wife and I were at an upscale steak place here in Dallas (Al Biernat’s, if you’re curious), and she ordered a daiquiri. Simple enough- white rum, lime juice, sugar, right? She got some kind of artificially flavored strawberry daiquiri. I ended up explaining to the bartender how to make one. Honestly, I expected more from a place where most entrees are in the 40-70 dollar range, with some excursions into the triple digits for Wagyu and tomahawk steaks.
And she’s had to explain to bartenders at plenty of places that she wants gin in her martini, as if that’s the non-standard version or something.
Occasionally, we run across the good ones- the guys at Macellaio in Dallas were awesome, as was the bartender at Bullion in Dallas. They correctly and competently fielded drink orders that were actually unusual, and were intrigued enough to come chat. THAT’s a good bartender, not some chump who slings light beer 99% of the time.
It’s even worse with an Old Fashioned. The recipe appears in every bartender book but half the country either never heard of it or can’t make a decent one worth a damn. Outside of Wisconsin if I order one there is a 50% chance I’ll get the deer in headlights look.
Or they’ll know what it is but use the wrong booze, or worse…MIX! Sacrilege!:mad:
Yes, but mixing a drink is more than looking up a recipe. There’s technique involved, especially with seemingly-simple drinks like Martinis.
Seriously? Old Fashioneds are the Hip Drink nowadays, they’re everywhere. That’s not to say they’re done well everywhere, but I can’t remember the last time I was at a bar that didn’t have some form of Old Fashioned. Heck, I stayed at a Marriott Courtyard during a work trip last week, and their little “bistro” thing (a mini restaurant/bar in the lobby) had Old Fashioneds. They were horrible, but they had them.
My biggest beef with Old Fashioneds nowadays is the hip bartenders who scorn at the muddled fruit version, and try to school me on “these are the REAL Old Fashioneds.” Dude, I’ve been drinking them since before you were born. The muddled fruit version has been around & popular for 50+ years. Yes, the other version is good as well, but this isn’t a zero-sum game and a muddled OF can be a wonderful thing if made correctly.
Back to the OP: if you’re ordering drinks at a place like Red Lobster, best to stick to the sickly-sweet drinks on the menu, beer, wine, or (at most) and “and” cocktail: Gin and Tonic. Whiskey and Coke. Bourbon and Gingers. Anyone can make those drinks.
I ordered an Old Fashioned in a hotel bar in the boonies. There was consternation behind the bar and eventually a drink was produced. The glass had much more fluid than I expected and I asked the server (she had also made the drink) what was in it. She confirmed that there was a shot of soda water. I looked it up later and found that, yes, a variation of an Old Fashioned will have seltzer or soda water. Schooled.
Which is what pulykamell described.
Bartenders don’t like to muddle drinks because it takes time. Embury’s classic book “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks” says that preparing a proper Old Fashioned may take up to 20 minutes. So muddling fruit and a sugar cube is replaced by simple syrup and an orange slice.
I like to muddle the orange peel because I like the flavour. Be sure to not have any pith left in the peel since it is bitter. An orange twist that exudes oils over the finished drink is fine, but it’s hard to get an orange fresh enough here for that to work properly.
The Old Fashioned is pretty much the official state cocktali of Wisconsin. I don’t think you’re even allowed to tend bar if you don’t know how to make one. That said, outside of Wisconsin, in my experience, an Old Fashioned is a drink based on rye whiskey (sometimes bourbon) and served with a splash of water in it (among the other ingredients, like bitters & sugar or simple syrup). In Wisconsin, it’s just as likely to be made with brandy and is often served with a splash of 7-Up, Squirt, 50/50. There’s a whole lingo to it. “Brandy old fashioned sweet,” for example, means the base liquor is brandy, and a splash of 7-up is the mixer. Whiskey old fashioned sour would mean Squirt or 50/50 as the mixer (although I have also had it made in Wisconsin with sour mix. Yuck). A “whiskey old fashioned press” would be a mix of 7-Up and selzter water. And then you can get it “soda,” which means seltzer only.
Now, outside of Wisconsin, the drink isn’t as standard, but at any good cocktail bar (not just the corner joint), they should know what it is (and, like Athena said, it is rather a fashionable drink), although the terminology of ordering something like a “brandy old fashioned press” would be unlikely to be known outside of Wisconsin.
Sure. My recollection also is that around mid-2000, right around the time of Mad Men, but just before, mixology and a return to discovering classic cocktails, riffing on them with new ingredients and stuff like homemade bitters, was ramping up as well. Mad Men did happen to coincide with this new wave of bartending, and I’m sure its popularity has revived many a classic cocktail (including the old fashioned.)
As I understand it, in years gone by, there were various rules put in place to limit drinking- one might have been that you couldn’t run a bar or something like that.
So there were entrepreneurial sorts who’d sell tickets to see a blind pig, and give out complementary booze as part of the show, thus circumventing whatever laws were in place.
That’s kind of funny… history does repeat itself. As David Wondrich relates in “Imbibe”, the original cocktail (as a class of drink) was just a little water, sugar, booze and bitters- basically a very spare Old Fashioned if you used bourbon.
Over time, bartenders started muddling fruit, adding stuff like vermouth, orange curacao, absinthe and maraschino liqueur. Eventually crusty old types began requesting ‘old-fashioned’ cocktails, meaning without all the additional stuff thrown in. That’s where the name comes from- people wanting the “old fashioned” type of cocktail.
So in a sense, the modern muddled-fruit Old Fashioned is kind of a throwback to the very drinks that in a sense, spawned the “Old Fashioned”. I say “in a sense”, because the drink itself never changed.
I’m not going to be pedantic; there’s a fair amount of room in cocktail nomenclature to allow for muddled fruit while keeping the name; at this point, BOTH are old fashioned.
I like ordering from the cocktail menu. If they don’t have one I’ll just get a beer or a straight bourbon. Otherwise it seems I invariably stump the twelve-year-old bartender or they’re out of an exotic ingredient like limes.
I’d really never order a vermouth-based drink in a bar that doesn’t serve a lot of them, because they probably keep their vermouth on the shelf at room temperature where it oxidizes and tastes like ass after a few days.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but unless a place is super old-school or staffed by hipsters in Phineas mustaches, your chances of getting a good cocktail anymore are pretty slim.
WAG: during Prohibition, the BATF was adding denatured alcohol to industrial alcohol to discourage people from drinking it. Blindness was a common side effect (as was death).
Most of England is not London, though. It’s like assuming Alabama is full of skyscrapers because New York City is.