I am become Death and Co.
Eric Felten
Of all the bars involved in the Great Cocktail Reawakening, perhaps none has had the cachet and hipster street cred as New York’s “Death & Co,” which opened on New Year’s Eve 2006-07. It quickly established a reputation as a bartender’s bar, providing the artistes of the mahogany a place to present their innovations.
Success came so quickly to Death & Co that it overreached, trying to open a small empire of bars around the country. But the prowess Death & Co crowd exhibited with the shakers and jiggers and ice was sorely lacking when it came to the business acumen needed for such an ambitious goal. But now, after well over a decade of artisanally distilling their magic bean juice, Death & Co bars have finally begun to proliferate. There is an LA iteration, a Denver redoubt, and now a Washington, D.C., variation down a back alley in the Shaw neighborhood.
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Death & Co built its reputation on cocktails original to the bar. No small number of Death & Co inventions have gone on to achieve status as new-generation standards. Among them, according to Robert Simonson, author of Modern Classic Cocktails, are the Oaxaca Old Fashioned (basically an Old Fashioned made with mezcal rather than whiskey), the Kingston Negroni (a Negroni with potent rum rather than gin), and a tiki-style kitchen-sinker called the Winchester, piled high with various gins. Start with an ounce each of Westbourne Strength gin, Old Tom gin, and Tanqueray. Add various citrus — three-quarters of an ounce each of lime juice, grapefruit juice, and elderflower liqueur. Half an ounce of grenadine, a quarter ounce ginger syrup, a dash of Angostura. And there you have it (once, of course, you have shaken it well and strained it into a tall tiki mug full of crushed ice).
Having waited in the alley for half an hour or so, some friends and I finally found ourselves wedged into a tight booth, and we worked our way through a few rounds of Death & Co concoctions. I chose a couple of spirit-forward cocktails, the sort served “up” in small, stemmed glasses, and found them to be well made, if aromatic — silky and aromatic yet crowding an ingredient or two too many in every diminutive cocktail glass.
One such was the Riot Act, made with Japanese whiskey, Vermouth, and pine-flavored brandy. Add another ingredient to those several flavorful constituents and you’re flirting with the sort of cacophonic results one would get from the 19th-century barkeep “The Only William.” And so what does Death & Co go and do but add another ingredient, and a complex one at that: Benedictine.
And yet, a drink that ought to be a train wreck proves to be so thoughtfully constructed and carefully crafted that it is not only tasty but tasty enough to warrant the cocktail’s $22 price tag.
The best drink on the menu the day I was there was a refresher called the Southpaw. The bar was kind enough to provide our table with the recipe. Start with an ounce and a half of Sfumato Amaro (a bitter Italian liqueur with a campfire smokiness). Add an ounce and a half of amontillado sherry, half an ounce raspberry syrup, a quarter ounce fresh lemon juice, a crescent slice of orange, and a dash of saline. “Muddle, whip, shake, dump.”
Any drinks mixer who has been paying attention for the last 20 years will know how to muddle. Dumping means pouring everything from the shaker into the glass in which the drink is to be served. But what is this “whip shake”? If you want to mix ingredients well without excess dilution (as when shaking up a drink that is going to be poured into a glass with crushed ice), shake with only one or two pieces of ice in the tin. That is a “whip shake.” And with the whip shake executed, pour it all into a goblet filled with crushed ice.
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Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?