Countrypolitan Cocktail
I still remember my earliest encounter with a bartender who could remember my cocktails. My bride and I arrived for our first dinner at Goodfellows, which was well on its way to becoming the best restaurant in Minneapolis at the time. We were early, so we wandered into the glass and steel bar, and placed our fledgling-cocktail-drinkers martini orders—one Absolut on the rocks, one Tanqueray up with olive. The drinks arrived cold and clear, and we had become David’s new customers.
But that isn’t when we knew he was a first-rate bartender. Read more 
Pegu Club Cocktail
Rangoon.
I’ve never been there; all I know of the city is its evocative, roundly poetic name, its portrayal in the movies, and a little bit of WW2 history.
It slows you down just to say the name, “Rangoon”–something about the combination of sounds makes the surrounding sentence come to a halt for a couple beats while all the long sounds catch up; the name conjures the tropics, the monsoon, and the exotic faraway. In the movies it was a distant corner of the British Empire, with mysterious beauties, dark alleys, exiled drunks and losers, and wealthy expatriots in white suits and excellent hats who looked like C. Aubrey Smith. It was the starting point on the road to Mandalay, and until the Japanese took exception, a supply port for the Burma Road. Read more
Derby Cocktail (Bourbon)
Trying to track down the One True Derby Cocktail is a fool’s errand–so many Derbies, so little time. Read more
Cloister Cocktail
I have not been able to find historical information about the Cloister cocktail. It doesn’t appear in any of my older cocktail manuals, from which I infer that it is a relatively recent invention. Its main claim to fame, of course, is the inclusion of Chartreuse. Read more
