Old time rock ‘n’ roll

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At a time when experimentation is the name of the game, the old classics still rule the roost. Mixologists may be hard at work concocting newer cocktails by the day, but the favourites will still be your Tom Collins, Long Island Iced Teas and Daiquiris. Amit Gowli, assistant F&B manager at the Trident, Mumbai, says

nearly 70 per cent of the patrons who walk into his bar prefer having the classics. “Most people know exactly what they want. Many order even without looking at the menu options,” Gowli says.
Any person’s drinking choices, says Gowli, don’t change over time. “You never really experiment with your drinks. You have a favourite, and you stick to it. And since everybody’s grown up with the classic cocktails, they stick to these,” he says, explaining their popularity. “Add to this, the fact that there is some nostalgia attached to them, and of course, they are awesome to taste and easy to prepare.”
But what made the classic cocktails such all-time legends? Gowli says there is often no stand-out element that makes them popular. “They obviously won’t work if they aren’t any good. But to have stood the test of time over as many as 200 years, there usually are other factors involved as well. Very often, it’s a historical or political connection that makes them famous. Sometimes, a celebrity would attach his/her name to it, or the cocktail may be shown or written about in popular culture. These are things that really contribute to a cocktail’s longevity,” he adds.
Of course, a classic case in point is the James Bond martini, while Ernest Hemingway’s daiquiri and mojito, Gatsby’s mint julep and Winston Churchill’s beer shandy are also as famous (More details for classic cocktails given below).
Of course these recipes are cast in stone. But can a bartender bring about his/her own twists to the recipe? “He can, if he wants to,” says Gowli. “But then, it wouldn’t remain a classic cocktail anymore. And even the patrons demand that the original recipe remain untampered. The most a person may ask for or tamper with, for instance, is to leave the olives out of the martini glass.”