DISPATCHES FROM THE ROOSEVELT ROOM IN AUSTIN, TX:
That’s a “Boulevardier,” a 1927-era Parisian cocktail made with bourbon, Campari, sweet vermouth, and an orange peel I’m holding, early on during my visit there. Eric, the bartender who made it, and his associates know what they’re doing — the drinks are awesome, the bartenders put on a great show, the ‘70s-era hard rock and new wave on the Muzak is very cool and quirky (David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision,” which I mentioned in my Eventide Harmonizer review on Friday played), and the menu of cocktails is period authentic, down to:
But the real draw of the bar is its massive menu, which features roughly 60 classic cocktails—an impressive selection considering that many top-tier craft cocktail venues attempt fewer than 20. The drink options are laid out on a timeline and organized by era, with selections from the early years, the turn of the century, and Prohibition, as well as a handful of Tiki drinks, post-Volstead concoctions, and modern classics. In the middle of the menu’s timeline, from the 1950s through the 1990s, is a period labeled “The Dark Ages.”
The drinks on that section of the menu aren’t all bad—James Bond’s “Vesper” is a perfectly tolerable combination of gin, vodka, and Lillet, and the “rosita” is a mix of tequila, Campari, vermouth, and bitters that will appeal to Negroni fans. All of them, too, are crafted with care. But even among this bunch of expert selections, there’s a noticeable dip in the essential quality of the drinks themselves, which tend to be built around vodka and…well, vodka. The drinks aren’t concerned with maintaining a sense of balance, or any coherent theory of drink design.
A sloppily constructed spirits-dumpster like a Long Island iced tea has no sensibility. At a bar like The Roosevelt Room, the drink would be carefully measured and served with freshly squeezed juice, then presented with dense, clear ice and a colorful garnish in a thoughtfully selected glass. Even in an idealized form, though, it’s just an ironic wink at drinking’s barbaric past.
For most of its existence, the drink—a mix of gin, tequila, vodka, rum, and triple sec that dates back to the 1970s—would have been served with sour mix, a vile substitute for fresh citrus, then slopped together in unmeasured proportions over cloudy ice, in whatever large-enough vessel might be handy. The Long Island iced tea is, at heart, little more than a crude booze-delivery system. A proper cocktail is a statement, a liquid argument, about how to drink well.
And it’s a miracle it survived. The above quoted passage, where I first discovered the Roosevelt Room’s existence, is from Peter Suderman’s article last year at Reason titled, “Government Almost Killed the Cocktail — 80 years after Prohibition, the Dark Ages of drinking are finally coming to an end.”