This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
While one of the bartenders at the legendary Connaught Bar in London mixes your martini tableside, you’re invited to choose your bitters to complete the drink. Lavender, perhaps? Or would tonka, coriander, or cardamom please you? Oh, what about the house-developed Dr. Ago’s? Whatever your choice, you feel special for having collaborated on your order. But in truth, the selection process is so carefully planned by the Connaught that they’re still behind the wheel. It’s customization and control in perfect balance.
Recently, though, some bars have been kicking customization into overdrive. Destinations that earned their place on “best of” lists with cocktails uniquely composed via creativity and expertise are handing control over to guests, and by my estimation, the trend could be heading into chaotic territory. Preselecting five different bitter options that work well with a classic martini is one thing. But letting guests run wild adding tinctures across cocktails, resulting in something like a chrysanthemum margarita?
You can’t blame cocktail bars for giving the people what they seem to want. “Personalization” and “customization” are buzzwords around the Gen Z audience from marketing to fashion, and consumers seem to respond well to what feels catered to them in our increasingly isolated reality. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the customization standard in other hospitality spaces splashed over to cocktail bars, too. But, then, aren’t cocktail bars one of the spaces where we go to experience their creations? We might shout requests at concerts, but we don’t ask our favorite bands to rewrite their songs on the fly.
“Guests increasingly want that ability to tweak things to their preference,” said Matt Piacentini, managing partner and director of operations at the Up & Up in New York City. “Gluten-free pasta, oat milk, it’s everywhere in the service industry now. Cocktails are just the latest thing to fall under that umbrella.”
Informally, customization has always been an option in cocktails, typically at more casual bars where patrons are likelier to order standard call drinks than choose from a highly conceptualized menu. Ordering a gin and tonic and specifying one’s preferred gin counts as personalization. The martini—gin or vodka, wet or dry or bone-dry, etc.—is a classic version. Some cocktail bars are simply formalizing this ordering process, like Bar Edera in Minneapolis. Their “Martini My Way” is overtly customizable based on spirit, preparation, and garnish.
“It’s a drink people already have strong opinions about, so it made sense to let them shape it,” said the bar’s general manager, Aaron Rawson.
Printing the full list of options guests have for a famously personalized cocktail aside, though, do we really need to take $22 cocktails into call-drink territory, leaving a cocktail’s finished flavor profile up for grabs?
“In restaurants, it’s fairly common for some adults to say, ‘I just want protein and I don’t want these starches that come with it,’ etc., and I do think you lose a major part of the culinary experience by going too far,” said Ben Potts, founder and partner at Unfiltered Hospitality. “From a beverage perspective, you might as well make that drink that home.” If you want a cocktail where you can select the spirit, how it’s prepared, what syrups and garnishes are added, why are you bothering to have a professional make it for you? Likewise, if you’ve decided to head to a destination cocktail bar, isn’t it because you want to absorb what that spot is known for and why?
“You’re going to bar to experience their version of hospitality,” said Chris Tunstall, co-founder of A Bar Above cocktail consultancy. “Letting go, being part of that journey, is beneficial, as opposed to pushing your own flavor preferences … just trust the bartenders to do what they do really well.”
Some bar managers feel there’s no use fighting this consumer desire to tweak things to their specifications. But they’ve found a savvy way to avoid total bedlam: Printing more options on menus actually keeps customization where they can filter guests’ differing requests through their own quality standards. It’s better than a guest not seeing exactly what they want and ordering something totally outside of the bar’s program, reasons Logan Rodriguez, beverage director at Oddball in New York City.
“As bars become more creatively audacious and culinary, it feels more and more like if a guest isn’t ordering from the listed menu, then they aren’t getting the real experience. For a lot of bars, the lowest-friction solution to this is modifying existing items as best they can so that guests can get a respectably good sense of the experience.”
It’s an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach that only really works when it’s well strategized. The average guest doesn’t have anywhere close to the working knowledge of the professional behind the bar, so leaving key decisions up to them would require more education than most people want when they’re just trying to enjoy a night out. Every single possible combination a patron can make, then, must be painstakingly dialed in so the drink delivers no matter what—because if it doesn’t, guess who will be blamed?
“Too much choice becomes noise,” said Dominic Dijkstra, director of mixology at Waldorf Astoria Osaka. “Customization only works when it’s tightly curated.” The Osaka Waldorf’s bar Canes & Tales features a cocktail so intricately conceptualized, it’s a master class in how offering guests a few options still feels definitively curated. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a Rob Roy–style drink with a choice of Glenfarclas 10- or 25-year-old Scotch whisky. Every drink on the Canes & Tales menu is inspired by one of the stories in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age, Dijkstra explains; the choice of the age for the whisky reflects Benjamin Button’s living life in reverse.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a fully composed cocktail with one element of personalization Canes & Tales can remain in control of, and that serves a storytelling purpose, too. It doesn’t require much consumer education, and doesn’t cause guests decision fatigue.
And there’s yet another way this cocktail represents a positive form of customization on a bar menu—its third option for the whisky is a nonalcoholic one from Japanese brand NEMA. This much is clear amid the noise of cocktail bars potentially undermining their own authority with various tinctures, liqueurs, and spirit bases: Drinks that are convertible from alcoholic to nonalcoholic are a definitive win.
I first encountered this type of customization at Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., and learned this is something the bar’s owner, Ryan Chetiyawardana (aka Mr. Lyan), has been doing for a decade at other bars—it’s now a feature of his new New York bar, Seed Library, too.
“When we were working on the menus at [London’s] Dandelyan and White Lyan, we had a separate section for nonalcoholic cocktails,” Chetiyawardana said. “We try to make everything we do as inclusive as possible, and in one regard, we thought we were being considerate having that different section catering to any palate or mood.” However, some guests didn’t want to feel relegated to some other part of the menu. Fortunately, Chetiyawardana’s menus are known for their artfully deconstructed and scientifically composed cocktails. He and his team have an arsenal of tinctures, extracts, oils, and juices they’ve created from just about every culinary ingredient imaginable, which they can tap to re-create the sensory experience of one of their alcoholic cocktails without relying on nonalcoholic spirits—an industry category that’s quickly evolving but still not quite up to snuff.
Take, for example, the Mighty O on Silver Lyan’s menu: It’s Scotch whisky, miyeok muchim cordial, turbo persimmon, lemon, and antler, and it’s available booze-free for $5 less. “People are excited about the stories our drinks tell and the ways we’ve been able to pull out unique flavors and techniques, and those are the bits they want to partake in,” Chetiyawardana said. “We decided to make these wonderful stories we’ve been able to crystallize into drinks available whether people want to drink alcohol or not.”
At Silver Lyan, my group ordered some drinks in both forms and couldn’t believe how little difference there was between the alcoholic and nonalcoholic versions. The inclusivity that comes with allowing guests to experience artful cocktails in destination bars is a real level up from the nonalcoholic menu sections that can seem like afterthoughts at even the priciest joints. Like customizable alcoholic cocktails, these boozeless beverages only work when bars make a real dedicated effort. As the majority of nonalcoholic spirits still can’t quite replicate alcohol’s sensory experience and texture, the bars that succeed with convertible drinks dive deeper into ingredients to find closer matches.
Owner of BarChef in New York and Toronto Frankie Solarik said a bar’s versatility in turning alcoholic cocktails boozeless demands an extremely well-versed staff and strategic mise en place (meaning all possibly needed ingredients are prepped and ready to use behind the bar). BarChef doesn’t print that every cocktail can be made sans alcohol, but guests can request anything they’re interested in without booze. He believes accommodating guests’ preferences regarding alcohol is more of a fine-dining approach to cocktails, just as a restaurant would ensure a diner can still enjoy the dish of their choosing even if they’re allergic to a certain ingredient.
Half of the core cocktail menu at Crane Club in New York can be prepared without alcohol. At Oddball, unconventional menu items like a blueberry horseradish daiquiri and palo santo Negroni can be made boozeless. Indienne in Chicago features gin-and-tonic and spritz menus on which the cocktails can be made alcoholic or non, and Cat Bite Club in Singapore offers four complex cocktails that guests can order without booze. More cocktail venues are adopting this approach, and this kind of customization is becoming the mark of a bar worth its salt.
That’s a clear improvement for cocktail bars and their guests. More people will not only feel welcome in these spaces even if they’re not imbibing, but they’ll get to experience the same flavor journeys as those who are partaking, too. Ideally, bars would focus their energy on this alcoholic-to-non customization instead of turning their alcoholic cocktails into optional-ingredient-driven flow charts. This is on guests, too: When you go out, why not try to actually enjoy what makes that bar distinctive? If you really want to micromanage every aspect of your drink, maybe it’s time to break out the shaker at home.
