Omnivore - Book Review: Death & Co, Modern Classic Cocktails

New York’s Death & Co - If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere

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Let’s face it - you’ve got to be pretty audacious to think the world needs another book about cocktails. Pick any topic having to do with the drinks, and it’s been written about to death. But the folks at Death & Co, a heralded New York cocktail bar, are exactly the type of bold bar evangelists who are audacious enough to think they have something unique to share. Don’t believe me? Just look inside the front cover of their big, beautiful new book, where the boastful braggadocio kicks in with the very first sentence:

Death & Co is the most important, influential, and oft-imitated bar to emerge from the contemporary craft cocktail movement. Since its opening in 2006, Death & Co has been a must-visit destination for serious drinkers and cocktail enthusiasts... boasting a supremely talented and creative bar staff - the best in the industry.

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In the next paragraph, the bragging shifts from the bar to the book, which they state is, “destined to become a definitive reference on craft cocktails.” Those New Yorkers, always so swift to proclaim their supremacy (I should know, I’m an ex-New Yorker). And this ex-New Yorker was ready to dismiss the hype and boasts as so much wind blowing down the Hudson River. But you know what? The book is good. Really good. They lay out so much background and information that almost any cocktail fan can walk away with more than a few good nuggets of knowledge. Co-owners David Kaplan and Alex Day (along with co-writer Nick Fauchald) not only present information and recipes, but also weave in stories - from regulars, from other bartenders in the business, from their own staff - that give you a feel for what makes a bar like Death & Co special. It’s not just the recipes. It’s not just the environment. It’s the interactions that take place, the thoughts behind every motion, the attitude behind every proclamation.

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The first chapter in the book jumps in with a blow-by-blow account of what a day at Death & Co is like, from the 8 a.m. arrival of Frankie, the general manager... to 6 p.m. when Jack, the door host, escorts the first guests inside... to 7 p.m. when Jack is already taking names and phone numbers at the door and directing those on the wait list to other bars nearby where they can await their turn at Death & Co... to 3 a.m. when Jillian, head bartender, passes out a round of beers to the staff before they head home and gear up for starting the whole thing over again... and all the diligence and madness in between.

You also get Father Bill Dailey, a Death & Co regular and Roman Catholic priest, talking about his favorite drink - the Ti Punch - and a recipe to go along with his story. You get encyclopedic entries on the different spirits behind the bar, plus Death & Co’s recommended bottles of each type (and, yeah, I found myself nodding in agreement with most of their choices... Ransom Old Tom Gin, Elijah Craig 12 year old Bourbon, Rittenhouse Rye, Cocchi Vermouth di Torino, etc.). You get page after page of thoughts on garnishes, and ice, and bitters, and tools, and glassware, and technique, and cocktail philosophies. And a heck of a lot more things you’d want to know if you wanted to know about crafting great cocktails.

The recipes - over 500 of them - start off being sprinkled sparsely into those first few chapters. Then, starting on page 139, they come pouring forth in a deluge, actually two dozen deluges by type... classic and vintage, gin shaken, gin stirred, punch, and swizzles and Negroni variations and on and on. You’ve got simple and complex, common and unheard of. While the recipes themselves sometimes seem spare, you soon realize that it’s everything that came before page 139 that fills in the spaces between the ingredients and the brief instructions, answering the hows and whys and whats that any plain old cocktail recipe might arouse.

Once your head is swimming in an overflowing overdose of cocktailia, you may be convinced that the braggadocio at the outset of the book was warranted. Towards the very back of the book, the people of Death & Co offer provide a list of other cocktail books that deserve space on the reader’s shelf. There you’ll find names like Kingsley Amis and Harry Craddock and Dale DeGroff and Gary Regan and Jerry Thomas, the names most any cocktail geek will toss out as greats behind the stick or simply behind a Sazerac-stained pen. Maybe Death & Co’s new book does fully merit inclusion amongst the greats. That healthy dose of New York cocktail swagger? They back it up.

DEATH & CO: MODERN CLASSIC COCKTAILS
By David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald, and Alex Day.
Photographs by William Hereford.
Illustrations by Tim Tomkinson.
Ten Speed Press. $40.

For those of you interested in thoughts on the state of cocktail books from one of today’s foremost cocktail experts, David Wondrich, check out this recent interview with Liquor.com.