I Don't Like Cocktail Menus

All I wanted was an Americano

Today is May 31st. Summer is officially 20 days away. If I was a betting man, I’d wager that we’ll be hearing about a “drink of the summer” within two weeks. That’s just my guess. For all I know, there might already be articles on this topic just like the New York Times jumped right into the ring on May 5th of last year by saying the Dirty Shirley was the thing you’d see everybody sipping on, or how “you start seeing articles on how “rosé is coming” in January the way Halloween decorations seem to start popping up in CVS aisles in July. Can you drink chilled pink wine in the winter? Of course! Can you spritz in Septmeber? Are you kidding? Yes! Do what thou wilt, I always say. But when it comes to the hotter months, I do like refreshing over everything else. That’s why I made the Americano my summertime cocktail. Not just the “drink of the summer,” but the thing I’m most likely to order when it’s hot out since it’s refreshing and low ABV since you’re swapping the gin out for bubbly water.

But I’ve been feeling silly lately when I go out to bars and order an Americano. I either get the server telling me “We don’t have coffee here” since they’re more used to the espresso drink, or I have to tell the bartender how to make it and that just makes me feel like a douche. I’m definitely overthinking this, but I’ve seen more than a few people order drinks that you might only know about if you read some obscure cocktail book from the Prohibition era or they’ll say something like “I really want a gin and tonic that will transport me Orwell’s Burmese Days. Do you have a gin like that?” I once was barbacking and helped the slammed bartender make drinks, and a guy in an Oberlin sweatshirt who was buying drinks on a black AmEx card goes “Barkeep! Make me a Harvey Wallbanger!” This was 2006ish, and I didn’t have access to the internet on my phone and admitted “I don’t know how to make that.” He laughed, said something snarky about how every bartender knows how to make a Harvey Wallbanger, and then told me the three ingredients (vodka, OJ, and he wrongly told me sambuca, not Galliano). I told him I wasn’t alive in 1976, the last time somebody ordered one, then made his cocktail. He didn’t tip. I don’t ever want to even seem like that guy.

Yet no matter how hard I try, I do find myself cocktailsplaining more and more these days. I try to be as friendly about it as possible since bartenders work hard and there’s more expected of them than before. The bar business has seen countless big changes and various trends over the last decade, from fancy cocktails to natural wine, trendy spirits, and customers who think they could work behind a bar because they know how to make one or two perfect drinks for one or two people and not an entire bar of customers yelling “Can I order” and trying to flag you down. Bartending is one of those jobs that’s like playing baseball or writing: some people see somebody doing it and they think, that’s easy, I can. do that. But the truth is that bartending is not for the weak.

That’s why I’ve started to think about the house cocktail list and how maybe they’re a bad thing. I don’t mean this across the board. Take a place like Grand Army in Brooklyn. I love what they do there with their seasonal-themed cocktail menus with inspiration ranging across the board. One time it was cats, and one winter they had a black metal-inspired menu that I wanted to drink my way through as an experiment. But most of the time now, you go to a bar and you look at the cocktail menu and there’s something called, I don’t know, “Shiv Roy’s Bold Choice” and it’s a Manhattan but they make it using housemade bitters. Or maybe it’s a Margarita with an everything bagel salt rim and they call it the “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” A lot of the drinks I’ve had like this either doesn’t make sense, have insanely complicated names, or just aren’t very good. I sometimes find the cocktail world slightly pretentious, but I appreciate that bartenders from that world seem preoccupied with trying to figure out how they could make the “perfect” Piña Colada or Old-Fashioned, and not trying to reinvent the wheel.

I’ve never run into a bartender who cares whether or not a person orders a Margarita or Negroni even if the cocktail isn’t “on the menu.” But whenever I order an Americano—a cocktail that has been around for over 150 years—and the bartender doesn’t know how to make it, I do wonder how far past the point we’ve gone and how much more pushing we’ll do. I’m a really big fan of a place like Capri Club in L.A., where the menu is deceptively simple, and the cocktails are expertly made and not much needs to be tinkered with. And every now and then I’ll go somewhere and my friend will say “You need to try the Shiv Roy’s Bold Choice” and I will. But for the most part, I’d just like the ordering of drinks to be as simple as possible with little to no thought involved in the choosing.