The Rise of Fake Good Cocktails

New York City’s restaurants are in the midst of an epidemic of not-goodness. Sit down in any new dining room, and you are handed a cocktail list. Each drink on this document will have one ingredient you have heard of and seven that were apparently named after distant planets. Sometimes you may think you recognize a cocktail that you like (a good cocktail, in other words), but everything you like about it has been replaced by some other thing that you’re not sure about. “Hello there, that sounds like an old-fashioned!” you think. “But with burdock syrup instead of sugar, Croatian absinthe instead of bourbon, and hemlock bitters instead of Angostura.” If curiosity gets the upper hand and you ask for one, you will wonder why you couldn’t have had an old-fashioned old-fashioned.

New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells laments the rise of fake good cocktails. While he focusses mainly on their burgeoning presence in restaurants, they are becoming a true epidemic, having also crept into a number of lesser bars, looking to ring up the higher drink prices previously commanded by superior establishments. Like the rise of fake good coffee, places that pour fake good cocktails rely heavily on a handful of once-useful visual signifiers, forged by the actually good cocktail joints, in order to convey their supposed quality: “ingredients [that] appear to have the right pedigree,” as Wells put it; concoctions which appear in or allude to the spirit of pre-Prohibition or tiki or some other favored era of fancy bartenders; rows of bitters; beautiful barware; whimsical cocktail names; a bartender’s choice option; and the coup de grâce, suspenders.

Unfortunately for the average drinker, when a mediocre bar or restaurant cocktail program puts on its camouflage carefully, the only way to discern whether the cocktails on the menu are good, or merely fake good, is to try one — or rely on the internet, which is just as useless as looking at the bottles lining the back of the artfully constructed bar. (If a bar has recently opened and it’s STILL pushing the speakeasy or pre-Prohibition thing, however, RUN DON’T WALK to the nearest actual bar.) Of course, you could always just order a whiskey, neat. Or a negroni.

Photo of what may be a perfectly potable cocktail by Sam Howzit