Cocktails are there and then they’re gone—it’s part of their romance. They leave behind glasses that need to be washed, recipes in old books, and a hangover if you’re not cautious, but these are distant echoes. For all the effort and care that a good mixed drink requires, the most important part might be the memory it leaves—and thus the possibility it might one day be drunk again.
When the Cocktail Revival kicked into full swing in the early part of the 21st century, bartenders became archivists of a kind, rescuing old mixed drinks from the fog of history. But beyond the endless negronis and manhattans that flowed from that wellspring, a slew of legendary bartenders began cutting their teeth on their first original cocktails as well.
Some of these new drinks, deeply informed by the period’s neoclassicism, were taken up by fellow bartenders. Scribbled on bar napkins or jotted in iPhone Notes, these drinks would later be pulled from memory during their own shifts, spreading from bar to bar and town to town across the country.
These days, when so many excellent cocktail recipes are easily accessible with nothing more than good service on your phone, the cheap recipe notebooks we used to cram into our back pockets seem very quaint. I can’t help but feel a bit melancholy realizing that some of those secret-handshake, in-the-know drinks that were part of an underground canon in that exciting era of revival are as ripe for reconsideration today as some pre-Prohibition drinks were during the golden years of the cocktail renaissance.
In the spirit of those salad days, I hit up a bunch of bartender friends for some of their favorite back-pocket drinks—the cocktails the professionals love to recommend and recreate when you’re going off menu. These drinks are the cult favorites, the hidden gems, and the desperately appreciated recipes we’ve borrowed from some of our most admired peers.
You might not find many of these recipes on bar menus nowadays, but they’re drinks beloved by a few people who know what they’re talking about. And here’s some good news: In order for these cocktails to have easily traveled from bar to bar, they had to be easily duplicated, at least with the mise en place of the average cocktail bar. It’s nothing you can’t recreate at home in 2023 with a little mindful effort.
These are drinks for people who want to branch out and find something else to do with that bottle of Campari they bought. They’re for people who miss the days of bartender’s choice, which has fallen out of fashion in much the same way as some of these drinks. They range from quite simple to fairly fiddly, and they call for a gamut of spirits, but this list isn’t supposed to be the end-all of anyone’s back-pocket compendium. These are just a few choice recipes recommended by veterans of the industry—so that when the time comes, the perfect drink will be tucked away in your own back pages.
