New York

I spent this weekend in New York, visiting all my old friends and old haunts. I also went to another A Razor, A Shiny Knife dinner, which I'll blog about tomorrow.

For now, I'll highlight three different bars I went to.

Death + Company (in the East Village) specializes in complicated, usually pre-Prohibition-era cocktails. The kind with fourteen ingredients and egg white foam. Their door policy is that everyone gets a seat. Therefore, if there are no seats, you don't get in. They take your name and number and call you when seats/a table open up. Normally this is a great policy, but as we were waiting on a friend, it meant we had to wait nearly an hour on their stoop Saturday night. Then we got a table, not seats at the bar, which meant we couldn't watch the bartenders do their thing. THEN the bartenders were new or something, and we had to wait nearly half an hour for our second round, and finally we got fed up and left. But the drinks were delish, even at $13 apiece. Check out their menu here.

After that, we went around the corner to The Bourgeois Pig. They have the same cocktail philosophy, but don't have a full liquor license, so all the drinks were based on wine or beer. I had a lovely drink made from Lillet and finished off with pink peppercorns, which smelled surprisingly like pumpkin and cloves, though there were no pumpkin or cloves in the drink. And we got to sit at the bar and talk to the bartender.

Finally, B61. My old neighborhood bar, around the corner from my old apartment. Simple, cheap, full of locals, and unpretentious. I'm giving them a shout-out because, well, it's my old neighborhood bar. Good times.