The Spirits is FOUR 🎂
✨Flash Sale!✨
Would you believe it is FOUR (4) years since I composed the first Spirits post, a reverie about a bar I would really like to exist - for these were the darkening evenings of the pandemic and we were all feeling socially distanced.
I’m afraid I haven’t got around to constructing this bar just yet. But I have reproduced the words below… And I am offering a FLASH SALE on annual memberships to the CABINET. 50%(!) off for a year. What? Yes. Hurry! Because the link will disappear on Friday in a puff of smoke. (The next Cabinet post, by the way, will be on Strega, the Italian liqueur that is a lot like Yellow Chartreuse only kind of nicer in my opinion and also a lot cheaper.)
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE TO KNOW that for the Month of OCTOBER, everything in the SPIRITS STORE is reduced by 10%. So, if you’re fresh out of gin, light rum, vodka, Italian vermouth, coffee liqueur, orange liqueur, Campari-esque amro and/or aromatic bitters, this is where you should head. Push the button below, choose your booze and shove the words RICHARD10 into the discount box upon check out.
But most of all, thanks for continuing to read and share and mix. It’s quite a thing we have here. So, see you again on Friday at the usual time. We will be making one of my favourite Martini variants, featuring light rum and, no I can’t believe it either, kümmel.
Richard x
OH, HEY.
Of course you can come in. Yeah - we are open. It’s usually quiet at this time. Shocking weather huh? Sure, sit up at the bar. Let me take your coat.
Water? Important to stay hydrated. Although this is Europe so I’m afraid we don’t do ice…
…Just kidding. We have figured out ice.
Specials on the board, I can recommend the... Oh? Sure. You can go off-menu if you want. I don’t mind. In fact - I encourage it.
🍸
I’ve long dreamed of running my own bar. A place where I set the lighting, choose the music, source the décor, design the menu, decide which dissidents get to hide out in the cellar. The tough glamour. The Campari headaches. The honest graft of helping people laugh, talk, dance, flirt, forget.
It will remain a dream, as I have zero doubt that business rates, spiralling rents, staffing issues, etc, would bring my creditors round within weeks - if not hours. I’m always impressed by anyone who can make a half-decent bar a going concern, even outside a massive global pandemic. And then, imagine: you do make it work, in extraordinarily challenging circumstances… and the Government spends five minutes coming up with a curfew policy that could be expressly designed to destroy you and all nightlife.
Yes, it’s tough out there right now.
And it’s no picnic at home, either. Few of us are going to be spending much time out this winter. I’m guessing that work, time, tide, money, children etc stop many of us from doing so as much as we’d like to anyway. But the first Lockdown reminded me that even if virtual is not the same as actual - even if our favourite haunts are closing at a depressing rate (RIP Milk & Honey 😔) - even if we’re using our kitchens to mix in, and pressing housemates/pets/yucca plants into service as drinking buddies - cocktails still somehow retain their magical ability to bring people together. And even socially distanced, we can do sociable part of drinking, share stories, songs, recipes. Let our edges become a little fuzzy.
So, welcome to my hypothetical bar. I say we hide out here. I hope you sanitised your hands on the way in.
🍸
It’s in a basement, by the way. Candle-lit, for the most part - the main exception being a neon sign on the back bar promoting an alcohol brand we haven’t actually sold since 1993. Late afternoons, a slant of daylight intrudes via a strip of stained glass in the corner. There’s a table underneath, a good place to nurse a wet Martini about 5 o’clock, watching the blurred feet of commuters hurry past.
It wouldn’t be secret exactly - there’s a sign on the unnecessarily ornate street lamp outside saying: BAR - but we don’t go out of our way to announce ourselves. No Instagram presence or anything like that. It’s in a backstreet near a train terminus. Or - better - an actual port. An area that’s chic but kind of humdrum, fast-moving but with pockets of stillness, glamorous once but weirdly impervious to gentrification. Maybe the 2nd arrondissement of Manhattan, the part that looks like Venice. Or possibly the 3rd canto of Venice, the one that looks like Manhattan? Or maybe it’s Tokyo by way of Paris or Buenos Aires via London. Sometimes, I swear, it’s like you enter in one location and leave in another.
The cocktails are great, of course. My bartenders are extremely good at their jobs. Daiquiris are $4 in the local currency. If you want a Sex on the Beach… I’ll make you one, fine. But mostly we keep things simple. No mists or flights or wanky concepts. There’s a daily punch. A single beer on draft (German or Czech). A few bar snacks (bread, cheese, olives, nuts, empanadas). The younger bartenders have taken to making fresh guacamole at the beginning of each shift - but once it’s gone, it’s gone. Maybe we let people smoke sometimes.
All this (plus an unfortunate incident involving a Ukrainian sailor, a ruined countess and a tray of Margaritas on the evening the guy from the Cyclopedia came to write us up) means we’re usually passed over in those lists of 31 COCKTAIL BARS YOU HAVE TO TRY!
Which is fine by me, to be honest.
Did I mention there’s a piano? Oh yeah. An old dude comes in off the street sometimes and plays it in the Harlem stride style. Claims he once sold a hat to Thelonius Monk. But mostly we put on a playlist. If anyone wants to dance, or be silly, that’s always OK.
There’s no mobile reception - but there is phone booth out back. Certain combinations of dial codes and obsolete coinage transport you to bars of former times: the Stray Dog, St Petersburg, 1911... The Beverly Hills Luau, 1953… Fat Sam’s actual Grand Slam… Oh and there’s a cellar too, a basement within a basement, where if you dig around, you’ll find rare bottles of Chartreuse Blanche, dusty crates of Bacardi from before the Cuban Revolution, a barrel of Flaming Moe’s, a promotional T-shirt from a Kuala Lumpur airport bar, plus a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance, where all places are seen from every angle…
But we can have root around in there at a later date.
In the meantime, sorry - I’ve been going on.
Drink?
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🛒 Running low on booze? Visit the SPIRITS STORE.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.
🍒 And here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
Still looking for that bar. Where you can sit a while on the end stool in a rumpled Denholm Elliot linen suit and feel you don't have to talk to anyone, but can if you want. Where it's busy but not too loud. Where the specials don't have too many obscure ingredients, are not too sweet and don't taste, "Ugh". Where the Martinis are just right and nobody knows your name, except as that guy who's here once a week.
11/10 for that Borges reference. Is there a companion short story "The Bar of Babel", where the menu contains every possible cocktail combination of every possible ingredient?
Auguri!! and cin cin