Time Is Flat Coaster on a Very Fancy Bar

A year or two ago, some places in New York — in particular, a surprisingly enjoyable bar decorated like a seventies time machine from an Austin Powers movie, all orange light and black leather and gold highlights, its bathrooms plastered in vintage Playboy covers, with drinks like a fancy Long Island, the Hot Grasshopper, and its namesake Golden Gadillac — revived gross, tacky cocktails from the seventies, give or take, and made them taste good, or at least better. It closed, somewhat sadly. Now, in Portland, we have arrived back at the eighties:

For those unfamiliar with [Jeffrey] Morgenthaler, he’s the man responsible for whipping the bar world into a frenzy over barrel-aged cocktails in 2010 and bottled cocktail sodas a year later. But his most recent contribution, craft versions of “bad” cocktails, has brought back the ’80s, a dark age for drinks. Those who have tasted his Amaretto Sour at Pépé Le Moko, his newest bar in the Ace, know he was the man to do it.

We are so close to reviving pre-Prohibition revival cocktails from the aughts that you can taste it in your Nick and Nora martini coupe.

Photo by Petra de Boevere