Now, though, we find ourselves in a wonderful state of detailed refinement. ‘Business realities set in very quickly and the industry found new ways to adapt.’įor a while, the industry relished the history and wonder of all-things cocktailian. Josh Mazza, owner of Seamstress – and a slew of other New York staples – thinks this was a business decision that’s integral to the bar’s survival: ‘People realised that a 15-seat bar model was just not transferrable to a $200-per-square-foot lease,’ Mazza says. The general consensus points to sometime around the late noughties, when early wave-makers such as PDT and Death & Co – and the cocktail culture that they championed – started to transition into the mainstream consciousness. The exact point at which we switched to a more guest-orientated experience is hard to determine. No longer shackled by the bonds of prohibition (which we felt the need to uphold down to the very last sleeve garter), new ways to attain complex simplicity have allowed us to serve a higher volume of quality drinks, thus positively affecting both our bottom line and the guest experience. Now that we’ve come of age, we find ourselves in a wondrous period of objective introspection, where the best drinks are equal parts efficiency and elegance. Many of us took our initial steps through the pages of old cocktail books, ran faster than our minds could comprehend, went mad with invention and then rebelled as we became disenfranchised with what we’d created. Since the cocktail scene came roaring back into our lives at the turn of the century, the progression has been rapid. You, in the back row – you can pretend you’ve only ever sidled up to a bare bar to order a bottle of lager, but you’re not fooling anyone. Raise your hand if you’ve ever waited over 20 minutes for a drink. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID (COMPLEXITY THROUGH SIMPLICITY) « back to WORLD CLASS « back to NEWS-OLD K.I.S.S.