EMPIRE SLAKED
Where to drink when you’re in New York City
Everyone who takes booze seriously knows all about New York’s impressive host of romantically lit, fussy, retrostyle cocktail bars by now. The usual trendy Manhattan suspects include Death and Company, PDT, Milk and Honey and the Pegu Club: Joints that deserve their reputations, but are expensive by New York standards and can be hard to get into. On a recent trip to the Big Apple, I sniffed out other gems.
The Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station is a sprawling subterranean vault where you can rub elbows with commuters and sample unfamiliar varieties of raw oyster from the seas of the U.S. East Coast and elsewhere. I understand a character on Mad Men barfed after visiting there one time. My companion and I went a classier route: a nicely priced bottle of crémant de Limoux to wash down our oysters.
Dutch Kills is a long, narrow, dark-wood-panelled cocktail bar for serious fans of mixology, not tourists. If it were geared toward gawkers, they wouldn’t have stuck it in an unassuming part of Queens called Long Island City and concealed it behind a plain metal door. The typical cocktail offerings are house inventions in the style of the early 20th century. All cost $11, a bargain for New York. My favourite was bartender Jan Warren’s pillow fight, which blends gin, Lillet and pineapple juice into a sweet and tart concoction that tastes like tropical holiday and sophistication at once (see recipe at
natpo.st/hhdrinks).
❚ I stumbled into Ofi cina
Latina, a pan-American tapas resto-bar, while in Nolita dripping with sweat and desperate to cool down somewhere (anywhere). It turned out to be a find. Its “passion and love” is two shots of rum served on a mirror with orange slices and cocaine-like lines of sugar, cinnamon and coffee. You drink the shot, dip the orange in the three powders, and bite. Theatrical as that ritual is, I preferred the spicy and milkshakesmooth avocado cilantro margarita. Either way, get a buzz on and chuckle at the absurd little apartment-sized dogs strolling past on Prince Street.
❚ With their knowledgeable salespeople and shelves stacked up to the ceilings, New York’s better liquor stores are noble independent retailers like nothing we have in most of Canada.
I recommend Astor Wines. At Park Avenue Liquor, meanwhile, I took a chance on Greenhook Ginsmiths’ American Dry Gin. Craft-distilled in Brooklyn, it turned out to be spectacular: clean-tasting yet fiercely proud of its juniper aroma; sweet from elderberries while also earthy like an evergreen forest. It would be nice to be able to instantly spirit myself to Brooklyn anytime, for example to enjoy a lovingly recreated Victorian cocktail at the Clover Club. Failing that, it’s a consolation to have a sip of Brooklyn’s best in the liquor cabinet.