—WORDS Paul Best
While visiting Australia to launch a micro-bar honouring the perennially popular martini, the godfather of craft cocktails tells The Luxury Report about the techniques and perspectives shaping bar culture from Manhattan to Melbourne.
Dale DeGroff has fixed me a martini, no ordinary mix of gin and vermouth mind— this version is a suitably elevated mix of five ingredients. There’s the dry vermouth, French vodka in place of gin, a dash of orange bitters in 15-per-cent saline solution, as well as a shot of 2016 sauternes for the pièce de résistance. All this has been stirred with ice (not shaken), garnished with a Sicilian green olive and served in a frosted coupe. But of course, DeGroff is no ordinary bartender.
Known around the world for decades as ‘King Cocktail’, the New York City native is credited with reinventing Manhattan’s drinks scene in the late 1980s and ’90s during his reign at the legendary Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. It’s here he revived classic recipes for drinks like the Negroni, Clover Club and Between the Sheets.
Now aged in his 70s, DeGroff is admired by generations of bar professionals for pioneering a culinary approach to cocktailmaking that included adopting unusual, carefully sourced ingredients and spirits from around the world. He enshrined this approach in the James Beard award-winning 2002 industry bible The Craft of the Cocktail, which he revised in 2020 after no fewer than 18 hardback printings. This gastronomy-led revolution paved the way for the subsequent craft cocktail movement that emerged at the turn of the millennium, the foundations of which still greatly influence today’s bar culture.
“It’s fascinating what has happened [in the drinks scene] over the past 30 years,” says DeGroff, in town for the launch of Le Martini, an intimate new 34-seat bar at Crown Melbourne that is wholly dedicated to the iconic aperitif. “[Chefs] led the way, initially,” he explains. “The great restaurants of the 1990s created the audiences that we in the craft cocktail movement continue to enjoy today.”
GLOBAL INFLUENCE
DeGroff points first to the rise of nouvelle cuisine. Then came the fusion-style New American cooking, which brought with it a renewed focus on tequila and mezcal and with them, drinks like the pisco sour and mojito creole. The explosion in southeast Asian restaurants, meanwhile, opened diners up to big new flavours.
“I tell young bartenders today, [that’s why] people are willing to try your crazy drinks today,” DeGroff laughs. He sees New York bartenders drawing more inspiration than ever from chefs, with particular emphasis on savoury and umami notes. Scan a drinks list in the City That Never Sleeps and you’ll see unlikely ingredients such as parmesan, sesame oil, caraway or corn juice. Celebrated high-rise venue Overstory serves a drink with nori and buckwheat soda, for example.
Within Australia’s own (far younger) cocktail scene too, ingredients such as cashew syrup and distilled liquors such as Japanese shochu or Chinese baijiu are making their way on to more conventional drinks lists. Mirroring the farm-to-table ethos of the top kitchens means more sippable ingredients that are hyperlocal, seasonal and sustainable. Small-batch spirits, coveted for their exclusivity, are elevated further by a tighter focus on regionality. Instead of a mass-market agave, for instance, a bartender might reach for sotol, its more floral cousin from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, or raicilla from the western side of Jalisco.
SAVOURING COMPLEXITY
DeGroff says today’s mixologists have the freedom, knowledge and access to ingredients to create cocktails with multilayered flavour profiles. For proof, one need only consider the three martinis he has concocted for the Melbourne venue that opened in May in partnership with French vodka maker Grey Goose. The secret here, he divulges, is a drop of saline solution to “give the drink a little zip”.
Mixologists are also increasingly experienced with cheffy practices such as smoking, spherification, infusion and sous vide, DeGroff points out. He cites Iain McPherson of critically acclaimed Edinburgh cocktail bar Panda & Sons, whose lab-like freezing techniques (sous pression, freeze drying, freeze concentration) have elevated countless classics to deliciously inventive new heights.
While it may seem laborious to the uninitiated observer, this diligent quest for perfection and innovation adds to the compelling theatrics of the modern cocktail bar experience, designed to engage drinkers with a sense of occasion and wonder, wrapped up in old-fashioned hospitality.
And despite all the experimentation, many cocktail trends simply come in and out of fashion—just as they do in the world of food. In some quarters, there has been a revival of thrown cocktails and tableside cocktail trolley service. At the New Orleans-inspired Maison Premiere in Brooklyn, for example, you can have an Old King Cole Martini or various Sazeracs prepared at the table from scratch with a large dose of Golden Age glamour.
“Today’s young bartenders are arguably the most skilled the craft movement’s ever seen,” DeGroff says. Though he’s the first to admit that mixologists went too far at one point in the 2010s, overworking cocktails with too many ingredients—much like the molecular gastronomy wave that swept the restaurant world around the same time. “We started to get into what I call ‘tweezer drinks’, some with 12 ingredients; you ended up with mud.”
He says that tipping point prompted bar staff to switch their focus back to customers, and return to minimalist classic cocktails executed perfectly. Tellingly, one of DeGroff’s drinks for Le Martini is based on the first written recipe for the Martini from Harry Johnson’s 1888 bartender manual.
He says he has seen the “fancy, dress-up” cocktail bar make a return lately, meaning the kind of establishment where you might imagine bumping into Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack, as well as more restaurant-like venues with open kitchens rather than back walls filled with booze.
DALE’S PICKS
Best under-the-radar bar in New York City?
McSorley’s Old Ale House in the East Village.
After-work drink of choice?
A version of the Negroni Sbagliato, where sparkling wine takes the place of gin. I call it the Negroni Sbagliato Corretto, where I ‘correct’ the error by adding the gin back in.
Finest bar food in New York City?
You’ll find great cutting-edge cocktails and small bites at Bar Goto (Lower East Side), Katana Kitten (Greenwich Village) and Bar Masa (Upper West Side).
Ingredient you’d like to see more of?
Vermouth is driving the most exciting explosion of creativity in bars at the moment.
Most costly cocktail you’ve enjoyed?
At Merchants in Belfast, Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon made a USD$1000 Mai Tai using a bottle of Trader Vic’s rum from the 1940s. Salvatore Calabrese of the Lanesborough Hotel in London once made me a cocktail with a split base of rye whisky and 19th-century Sazerac de Forge et Fils cognac.”