How Do You Improve On Perfection?
The subtle genius of the Togroni, Ralph Lauren's layers and Rachel Kushner
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I considered starting out this week’s letter by stating that “the Negroni made me bitter.” That is, my taste for all things for tart, sour, sharp, biting, but almost always herbaceous, really started when I took a sip of a Negroni. It had one of those perfect square cubes in it. Campari, vermouth and whatever gin it was being served with. I don’t recall the exact reason for the thing I was at, but it was some forgettable hotel in Midtown with a perfect view and horrible decor. Just a real “Toss some darts at ‘millennial design trends’ and see what we get from Restoration Hardware on sale” kind of place. They’re a dime a dozen, but cost a whole lot of dimes to stay at, if you catch my drift. (Sorry. I just mean they’re expensive. I’ve been on a Raymond Chandler kick.) I was new to my 30s and looking to expand for my horizons in terms of what I ordered at a bar, really trying to get away from the all whiskey everything mentality that I think a lot of Americans are hung up on. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love whiskey. It’s just if you found yourself in New York City in the aughts, it felt like every bartender was trying to come up with some new cocktail and you’d try it and think “This is basically a Manhattan but you gave it a fancy name and used ‘house bitters’ that you made on your roof in Bushwick” or something like that.
Anyway, I’m having a flashback to 2010. Sorry about that.
That first Negroni was pretty unforgettable. Bitter, yes, but crisp and refreshing; utterly delightful. It was the kind of drink you had to drink slowly. Looking back now, it was really like nothing I’d ever had before and made me think that, yes, I can go forward and enjoy ordering and drinking cocktails besides just saying “Martini” or “Margarita” or running my finger up and down a menu and looking for whatever group of words looked familiar.
A decade or so later, the cocktail is fodder for New York Times op-eds. It’s the stylish cocktail. I wrote in 2019 about how Matt Hranek has become one of America’s great champions of the cocktail, and for a time before all the bars were shut down, you could find incredible variations on it from coast to coast. You could make a reservation at the Milk Room in Chicago and try one made of vintage Campari or stop off at The Interval in San Francisco and get one on tap. I’d say that, overall, the measure of a cocktail program, to me, was how the place made a Negroni. Now, I wouldn’t go to a tiki bar or anything like that and say “You won’t make me a Negroni! You’re finished in my book!” or anything like that. But in most situations, I liked a Negroni as my warm-up cocktail. If I wanted one, I’d always start with it and only have that single Negroni before moving on to something else. I’m not one of those people that would snap “It’s supposed to be Apertivo hour” if somebody ordered a second or had one with dinner, but I tried to keep it at a minimum for myself.
All this is to say that I love a Negroni, but I’d gotten a bit lazy over the last year and didn’t make them as much as I used to. I’ve made them from time to time, but my Negroni consumption has been limited to a few take out cocktail spots over the summer and the delicious St. Agrestis bottled Negronis. I’d become a bit of a lazy Negroni fan, I’m afraid.
But then I started seeing posts pop up on Instagram for this thing called a Togroni and began craving one for myself.
It looks simple, really. Nick O’Connell took a nip of Botanist gin, Antica Formula vermouth and, of course, Campari, fastened them together and poured it all over ice. A fun trick and a very strong Negroni were the result.
O’Connell, whose family owns a few wine shops in Massachusetts, and whose full-time gig is bottling up delicious syrups and barrel-aged honey for his company Cask Force, tells me that he and his girlfriend love drinking Negronis. The little bottles were there, and so was the idea to pour them all at once. O’Connell says he has tried and enjoyed a few pre-batched Negronis, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. “I don’t just want to crack open a can and pour it into a glass,” he tells me. “I want an experience.”
That’s exactly what you get with a Togroni. An experience. It’s fun. A little something to occupy a few seconds of your day. And we could all use a little more of that as of late. A silly little trick, sure. But people are responding to it. It’s bringing people joy. O’Connell tells me people in Argentina, Italy, Belgium and other countries have reached out asking for their own Togroni. The hilarious thing is that O’Connell, who had sold over 1,000 Togronis when we talked, simply take the three bottles and tapes them together. Actually, I should say he has somebody else taping them together. The younger brother of his girlfriend’s best friend, looking to make a little cash when he’s not at college, is the chief roller. And at $9.98 a pop, selling as many as he has, it doesn’t feel like overkill to hire some outside help. Especially because O’Connell says that in a year he’d probably sell 20-40 of the nips individually. I’m no economist, but I’d say that all it takes is a little tape and you’ve got yourself some massive growth.
I’m a big fan of the Togroni for a few reasons. The aforementioned fun part is key, obviously. But I also like the idea of simple innovation. This isn’t exactly stumbling upon a new way to make the wheel or anything, and it’s the sort of thing that could only catch on the way it has in the era of Instagram and TikTok. It’s colorful. It has a good name. It looks cool as a short video.
But it also makes a damn nice Negroni. That alone should make it the sort of trick you want to show off whenever it’s safe to have people over. Want to make a round of Negronis? This is a fast and fun way to do it. Have I had better Negronis made for me? I think so. But I also know that anything you eat or drink is about experience, and O’Connell tells me his whole reason for doing this is to provoke “one more activation of a different sense,” which is exactly what I’m looking for these days. Whether or not it catches on beyond the 3,000 or so people that follow the Togroni Instagram account isn’t really up to O’Connell, and he gets that.
“What ultimately needs to be done is an alley-oop to them.” The “them” O’Connell is talking about is Campari Group. He’s reached out to the company and tried to sell them on the idea, noting that they have Bulldog Gin and Cinzano vermouth in their catalog. It could conceivably work.
But so far, it’s just O’Connell and his college student employee, rolling together the little nips, trying to take the idea of the easiest little cocktail kit to the masses. This isn’t a get rich idea — O’Connell is aware he isn’t going to make millions off of taping three little bottles of booze together. He just saw a little room for innovation, something fun and irreverent. An idea that he’s literally waving in front of a massive corporation like Campari just trying to get them to take it and run with it. I like that. There’s something nice knowing that there are still ideas of all sizes out there, that there are people willing to do a little tinkering and come up with something. For O’Connell, it simply starts with a little idea: “How can we take something and make it better?”
The Dog Days of Winter Look
I’ve been thinking a lot about the September of 1987 cover of Esquire with Ralph Lauren pulling off what I have to think is one of the most incredible examples of layering I’ve ever seen. Barn coat, denim jacket, t-shirt, jeans. Top it off with some shades and a navy ship cap and, truth be told, this is one of my top five favorite looks the man has ever pulled off. It’s also the ultimate Late-January into whenever the temperature starts to climb look if you live in a place like New York City, where it’s normally about 30 degrees give or take. I have about five or six denim jackets lying around here. I’m not picky about those. The barn coat, however, is almost always going to be from Orvis. I know there are some other great options out there, but if you’re looking to pull this off, I’d either grab one for Orvis when they’re likely on sale in a month or so, or go vintage. I know there were some great old L.L. Bean ones floating around out there that I saw.
The Kush
One of my absolute favorite things is calling Rachel Kushner “The Kush.” Now, I realize that people might think I’m talking about weed or Jared Kushner when I say this, but please know that if you ever hear me speaking of The Kush, it is, in fact, Rachel Kushner.
I’m a massive Kushner fan. She one of those writers like Zadie Smith or Rivka Galchen who can pull off a novel as effortlessly as an essay. The writer that can defy classification as just a novelist or just an essayist and just be a damn writer is really my favorite kind. Same goes with poets. Melissa Broder and Saeed Jones come to mind as writers who I first gravitated towards because of their poetry, then they knocked me on my ass with a novel or memoir (Broder’s The Pisces and Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives, respectively). I know this sounds obvious, like a writer should be able to write, that’s not always the case. Some writers want to do one thing, and that’s totally fine and admirable. If you’re a brilliant novelist and you don’t think you have much else to say, then I can respect that. But as a person who reads a good deal, I like to pride myself on being able to tell when a writer has a curious mind and has more to say. Those writers are the ones I tend to pay the most attention to, hanging around waiting like a dorky fanboy for what they’re going to give us next.
Kushner really blew up a few years back with the publication of The Flamethrowers, and while I enjoyed that book, I tell everybody to pick up Telex From Cuba (I regrettably have not read The Mars Room just yet). But I also will tell them to go online and look for her nonfiction stuff that’s available because you’ll gain a deeper understanding into her and her work. That’s why I’m so excited for her collection of essays that’s coming out this April, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. I’ll be able to say “I love Telex From Cuba and you should also get The Hard Crowd as well.” So easy!
For those who want a sample, there’s a piece of Kushner’s in the latest New Yorker that I really love, “The Hard Crowd.”