This is my last column for Half Full. Over the past five-and-a-half years, I’ve been lucky enough to write a great number of them here, on any topic I found interesting. Anything from the crucial role African American bartenders played in the development of the American way of mixing drinks; to the history of America’s oldest whiskey brand, Old Overholt; to the difference between Aristotelian bartending and Platonic bartending; to the epic, or at least epically long, story of New Orleans’ oldest bar (in four parts, no less); and a whole lot of other things besides. Histories of cocktails, biographies of […]
David Wondrich
8 posts
I’m not sure exactly where I got it—I think it might have been at an antiques barn in Hawley, Pennsylvania. I do know that I didn’t pay more than three or four bucks for it. It’s a little booklet, about 2 ½ inches by 5 inches, landscape-oriented and printed in garish colors; the process they used for Terry and the Pirates and Flash Gordon comics and such. How to Make Old Kentucky Famed Drinks, it’s called, in some variant of English. The cover, which shows a tipsy, Col. Sanders doppelgänger and a Whitey McWhite management-trainee in a tux clinking Mint Juleps, […]
Normally, this time of year I’d be offering suggestions for something with which to charge the flowing bowl, so that its bounty, ladled out with cheer and kindly hospitality, would make the intolerable among your family and acquaintances tolerable and the tolerable truly delightful. There would be soft-focus anecdotes about Charles Dickens or some old English earl, Dutch “Mynheer” or not-so-very-proper Bostonian. There would be rum and port and a thick dusting of freshly grated nutmeg. It would be jolly—damned jolly. But this holiday season, with the specter of COVID-19 hanging over us all, the idea of gathering in close and […]
I keep trying to write about drinking and ending up writing about politics, whether I want to or not (mostly, it’s not). It’s an easy border to wander across: more Brooklyn-Queens than the old West Berlin-East Berlin. There’s no Checkpoint Charlie to pass through. Politics always having had the capacity to make people tense, of course, and alcohol always having had at least some capacity to ease the worried mind, the connection is by no means a new one. I don’t want to give it a blanket endorsement (not that that would make a bit of difference in how much people […]
This marks the debut of an occasional series in which our Senior Drinks Columnist, Dr. David Wondrich (yes, he really is a Doctor; OK, no, not that kind) takes a concise look at the history and, to coin a word, mixologistics of a particular historic cocktail—or if not historic at least old and pleasant. Why? So you’ll have something different to mix yourself this cocktail hour, that’s why. As someone who has been publishing little histories of mixed drinks for a good 20 years, from time to time I attract random questions on the stories behind various cocktails or their evolution. […]
While there’s nothing that would give me more sheer joy than to have all of our bars safely open again and full of people laughing and chatting and holding forth, their eyes artificially bright, their grins a little lopsided, and all of their troubles parked outside where they can’t bother anyone, the reality is that’s not going to happen any time soon. In the meanwhile, we can sit outside, a little nervously, and hope for the best, or we can take those lovely drinks home and sip on them in the same space we’ve been doing everything else in since the […]
Every year my wife Karen (her real name, and no, she’s not at all like that and has never asked to see the manager, or even the assistant manager) and I host what we call our “Round Up the Survivors” Fourth of July barbecue. Most New Yorkers of our demographic—middle aged, bourgeois—find a way of getting out of town for the Fourth, so some 25-odd years ago we started gathering up those of our friends who like us were stuck in town and looking for something to do on the holiday. We lived, then as now, in Brooklyn, in a somewhat-cockeyed […]
A great many people have done heroic and selfless things in response to the novel coronavirus epidemic. A few have done stupid and selfish things. I can’t say I did the first and I hope I didn’t do the second. What I did do is what I know how to do, and that’s show people how to mix drinks. On Friday, May 29, I closed out a 75-day run of posting a Twitter thread at cocktail hour demonstrating—with pictures—how to make a different classic (or classic-ish) drink, with ingredients folks were likely to have around or at least might be able […]