My wife swears that the greatest cocktail in the world is a cold Martini on an empty stomach. It’s not the taste she loves so much as the whole experience. The opalescent frost on the glass, the chilly slug of booze right to the gut, the shiver of hedonism.
Ever since Jerry Thomas began unfurling ribbons of fire to make Blue Blazers in the 1860s, that experience has been at the heart of cocktail culture. If wine is about theater—the presentation of the bottle, the popped cork, the swirl, the sniff, the first sip—cocktails are about spectacle. The form of the spectacle has evolved like any art or craft, but for all that time, cocktails remained the province of bars and lounges. Fine dining restaurants would gladly start you off with one, but everyone understood that once the food showed up, it was time to be a grown-up and switch to wine. Even as kitchen tweezers became a standard tool in a bartender’s kit, pairing cocktails with cuisine was seen as faintly ridiculous.
In December, I went to Clemente Bar, which sits above Eleven Madison Park in New York. The brainchild of EMP’s chef and owner Daniel Humm and an artist friend, Francesco Clemente, the bar has two rooms: a lounge that accepts walk-ins, where customers can order small bites and cocktails à la carte, and the Studio bar, a nine-seat chef’s counter where twice a night, a five-course tasting menu is served, with each course accompanied by a cocktail. There is no wine service, but for each cocktail there are nonalcoholic alternatives, which the bar asks you to request in advance. The cost for this experience is $225 plus tax, paid up front, nonrefundable.
Even though I was walking into a three-Michelin-starred restaurant (or at least its rowdy stepchild), to say I went in skeptical would be an understatement. First, since the menu advertised “small plates,” I was so sure I was going to still be hungry afterward—and probably drunk—that I made plans to meet up with my wife later to get dosas. But more than that, there are good reasons why, historically, cocktail pairing menus haven’t caught on.
The “bar tasting” concept at Atomix in New York City is a double act between chef and bartender.
First of all, it’s a lot of booze. Even pared back a little, a typical cocktail has more alcohol than the traditional 3-ounce glass of wine. Multiply that over five courses, and you start to ask whether you’re even going to remember the fancy meal you ate. And second, you have the problem of two complicated things sitting side by side. The point of wine has always been to enhance the food, to bring out its flavor and body. That’s not happening with a cocktail with five ingredients. I want to see Mariah Carey do a duet with Cher as much as the next person, but for, like, one song. Try to make that happen over a whole show and the arena’s burning to the ground.
That said, restaurants are in a bind: Food and labor costs are rising, and wine sales are plummeting. And, increasingly, consumers value experiences over mere products. At this point, putting Mariah and Cher together is looking like a viable plan. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of haute cuisine, where minuscule—and minimalist—omakase-style chef’s counters have begun to replace the palatial salles of old. At the counter, the focus isn’t on whomever you’re dining with, it’s on the person making your food. Putting cocktails at the forefront of this experience makes sense: Not only does it introduce a vast array of new flavors, it also matches the theatricality of the cooking in a way wine never could. Crucially, too, it opens an avenue for more adventurous nonalcoholic options.
At Supperland in Charlotte, North Carolina, where cocktail dinners at the Speakeasy run around $200 per head, the drinks involve even more mad molecular science than the food: The restaurant uses “vegan foaming hydrocolloids” and liquid nitrogen to create a cocktail that releases a huge plume of steam, inspired by the Griswold family’s Christmas tree from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. (The drink apparently evokes a smoldering fir tree.) At Clemente, meanwhile, a milk punch is strained over the course of the 90-minute meal through a towering copper coffee siphon that could have come from a medieval alchemist’s lab. And to be fair, if I’m paying over $20 for a cocktail, I do want there to be some stagecraft involved. (I should also say here that I did not leave Clemente Bar hungry, but I did wobble my way through Madison Square Park a little.)
Some places, like the Michelin-starred Atomix in New York, came to the “bar tasting” idea out of necessity. Originally, Atomix offered a casual walk-in bar above the chef’s counter level. The pandemic forced the restaurant to pivot and turn it into a second omakase-type space with five seats (now six). The challenge then became distinguishing one space from the other, so they decided to try making it a double act between chef and bartender. The cuisine at Atomix is Korean, and, as beverage director Jhonel Faelnar says, “people don’t have a lot of experience with this.” The restaurant has found that the innovative possibilities of the cocktail pairing menu ($285 per head) make guests more open-minded about the food by immediately announcing its departure from conventional fine dining meals.
At Atomix, the cocktail tasting menu signals a departure from conventional fine dining experiences.
For Derek Brown, a certified sommelier and former owner of the renowned Columbia Room in Washington, D.C. (which offered its own take on the cocktail tasting menu), the assumption that only wine can suitably pair with haute cuisine is “Eurocentric and limiting.” He’s baffled by the notion that, say, the proper pairing for Mexican food is an Austrian white wine. “What about pulque? Or this nonalcoholic spirit from Oaxaca made from agave? There are other ways to contrast and elevate the food.”
Historically, wine has played servant of or sidekick to the protein, helping to flatter and enhance it. Brown and others see the goal differently, arguing for a need to think beyond taste, to the broader experience. If any one thing is driving this mini boom in cocktail tasting menus, it’s the way that mixology allows chefs to paint with even broader, less-expected strokes. (Pairing menus also are great for restaurants, because you know exactly how much money is coming in on any given night.) That zero-proof spirit from Oaxaca may not “pair” with Mexican food in precisely the way a sommelier might intend it to, but it anchors the dish in its place of origin, deepening its overall sensation. It also offers nondrinkers an exciting, sophisticated option—and that might be the most important element in all of this.
If it was the dip in wine sales that prompted a rise in cocktail tasting menus, a boom in nonalcoholic sales is what’s sustaining it. People in the U.S. are drinking less than we have in decades, and a recent survey found that 49 percent of us plan to drink less in 2025. Younger drinkers (ages 18 to 25) in particular are over the booze; 39 percent say they plan to go dry entirely. Brown closed Columbia Room in 2022, in part because his own “relationship to alcohol changed.” Even so, I was gently shocked when Faelnar told me that at Atomix, one of the most coveted reservations in the city, “30 percent of our bar customers opt for the nonalcoholic pairing.” At Clemente Bar, according to bar manager Sebastian Tollius, it’s 10 percent, and downstairs in the main restaurant, they do 10 to 15 nonalcoholic pairings per night. There is no discount for the nonalcoholic pairing, either, because it turns out that it actually costs more to create and serve than the full-proof version.
It’s been a rough half-decade for the hospitality industry, and now its customers are turning away from its single biggest source of pure profit: alcohol sales. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the legions of people rejecting alcohol are still thirsty, and they’re looking for new options and new experiences, even if it costs $200 a seat. It’s still hard for me to imagine bartenders creating a nonalcoholic cocktail to rival the pure sybaritic pleasure of a cold Martini on an empty stomach. But if anyone can do it, it’ll be the mad scientists driving this cocktail tasting movement.
