Once upon a time, about seven years ago, a little East Village joint called Death + Company wrote the book on craft cocktails — figuratively speaking.*
Now they’ve done it literally, with Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails, a compendium of the famed watering hole’s best recipes and tales of boozy lore, available today.
If you are a self-respecting New Yorker who consumes alcohol, you’ll order a copy for your coffee table right now.
Contained within:
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More than 500 of D&C’s most innovative and groundbreaking cocktails, from the heralded Oaxaca Old Fashioned to the Whiskey Agreement, which manages to get bourbon, Irish whiskey and two kinds of Scotch into the same glass.
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Behind-the-scenes looks at the bar’s colorful history and nightly shenanigans. Fun fact: five minutes before opening is known as “GDT” (gangster daiquiri time) when the whole staff downs a round of mini daiquiris together.
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Proper learnin’ on drink theory, spirit buying and bartending techniques, all with pretty charts and infographics because words are hard when you’ve been drinking.
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A glossary of D&C’s charming colloquialisms – e.g., “get skinny” is a more polite way to say “get the f*ck out of the way.”
Basically, we’re talking a one-volume Encyclopedia Boozetanica.
And if you just can’t wait to try the libations contained within, the D&C family will be pouring their tipples in person to celebrate the book’s release tonight at 9 p.m. at the Bowery Hotel.
We’ll raise a glass to that.
*Death + Co. was the crest of the aught’s boozy sine wave, but close observers will recall that Dave DeGroff and Sasha Petraske, both mixologists of tipulars, squired the term back to fashion in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
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