The other evening, I ate at D.C.’s popular, high-concept Afghan restaurant, Bistro Aracosia. The high-concept quality involves not only the delicious food but the drinks.
In particular, the way the drinks are named. If you want a mix of rye and apple brandy, you might tell the waiter, “I have died to myself and I live for you,” as the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi wrote. If you have a hankering for rye, dry vermouth, and maraschino liqueur, you can call out, “I’ve disappeared from myself and my attributes.”
How did we get here, where drinks have elaborate and preposterous names? Because, though Aracosia may have the only bar where Rumi lines specify the drinks, the restaurant is hardly alone in overdoing it with the cocktail-naming conventions.
Two-hundred years ago, one might typically have ordered a drink named for its alcoholic effect, such as a “phlegm-cutter” or a “fog driver.” There were also “slings,” “flips,” and a newfangled concoction called the cocktail, which was, at its earliest, just a sling with bitters.
By 1867, Mark Twain was in Paris looking for a proper drink. He was outraged French bars didn’t know how to make champagne cocktails, sherry cobblers, and brandy smashes. Twain rails at the barman who is clueless as to the composition of “a Santa Cruz Punch, an Eye-Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earthquake.”
By the end of the 19th century, the Barnumesque age of promotion was in full swing. Publicists recognized the free press one could get if the client’s name could be attached to a popular drink. So it was then, in 1899, Broadway singer Mayme Taylor was celebrated with a drink of scotch, ginger ale, and citrus, called the Mamie Taylor. Mayme is forgotten; Mamie is not. There was a Caruso cocktail, made — most wrongheaded cocktail books notwithstanding — with cognac, sweet vermouth, and Benedictine; a Mary Pickford, made of rum, pineapple juice, grenadine, and maraschino liqueur; a Ginger Rogers, which is a martini spiked with apricot brandy and lemon juice; and a Jack Dempsey, with gin, rum, lemon juice, and sugar.
But for some time now, we’ve been in the age of the bad pun. Boston bartender Jackson Cannon reports having witnessed a cocktail menu with a drink called “Everything Happens for a Riesling.” There was a place in Harlem that used to have a drink using thyme with the tired title “About Thyme!” Barman Alex Day is responsible for “Unidentified Floral Objects.” The Laundry Room in Las Vegas has featured “Berried in Sin,” a frothy drink with the berry liqueur crème de cassis. Bartender Devon Tarby came up with the “Peeping Tomboy.” A friend claims to have actually seen an Amsterdam bar menu with the sad, sad pun “Pear Necessities.” A higher order of wordplay comes from the chichi Chicago boîte The Aviary, which serves a drink called the “Ford’s Model Tea Party.”
Then there are drink names that aren’t puns so much as elaborate inside jokes: Los Angeles bartender Daniel Zacharczuk created a drink he calls “Beth’s Going to Town.” The Aviary menu includes “Harry, I Took Care of It.”
Rumor has it, there’s a bar in Portland, Ore., with a drink something like: “If you wake up Sunday morning and forget where you parked your car, it’s out in front of Mary’s, like always,” with Mary’s being a local strip bar.
Which is all good fun, but not exactly the kind of thing that trips off the tongue in a noisy bar. It’s the rude counterpart of the drinks named with Rumi quotes. One is bawdy, the others romantically philosophical, but all are overcomplicated and overdone.
It’s time we get back to some simpler naming conventions and stop trying to be too clever by half. Some of the best cocktail names are the purely descriptive. You don’t have to ask what goes in a gin and tonic.
Nor can you go wrong with something simple and evocative. For example, there’s a drink I’ve heard of called a Manhattan. Now there’s a name for a cocktail that just might have some staying power.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
