Lost in translation
Another trip across the pond, another bad cocktail experience. Even when you think you know how to navigate cross-culturally, it's always the little differences which can trip you up.
The background to all this is the definition of a cocktail as the mixture of a base alcoholic beverage mixed with one or more moderating liquors. Without that mixture, you're either having a drink neat, on the rocks, or otherwise diluted (e.g., "and tonic").
Somewhat oddly, the classic base beverages are more northern European -- think Scotch, Gin, Brandy, Vodka -- while the great modifiers are somewhat more southerly and romantic -- Vermouth, benedictine, fruit juices. While there are a variety of exceptions to each rule (Rum and coke?), the fact is that the best cocktails come from a brisk and mouth-watering combination of the two sensations.
Which brings us to the Long Bar at London's Sandersons Hotel.
The hotel itself is a frightening post-modern disaster, Kubrick meets Jeeves. The lobby has scattered Louis XIV furniture in a sterile white room, with shawls draped hither and yon, desperate to convey casual chic. The reception desk is fronted by video-displays, while the elevator has galactic projections and black-light ambience.
Off the front lobby are the two successes of the hotel, its restaurant, Spoon, and the white-marble-on-chrome bar, long, centrally placed, brightly lit, and functional.
Going to the bar to meet colleagues after work, I expect to be ignored by the fashionable crowd and served by a non-traditional bartender. (By non-traditional, I mean as opposed to the crew at the local pub, who know nothing about cocktails at all).
What to order after the second day of an off-site, spent sitting around listening to interminable powerpoint presentations? Something strong, bracing, but not too forward as we'll be heading out for more drinks and dinner soon enough. And someting which is a small reminder of what I've left behind for this trip...
A Manhattan.
The Long Bar doesn't have a great back bar, but a memorable Manhattan does not need a rarefied bourbon or rye spine; smoothness is the key. And so I order a Makers Mark Manhattan.
The waitress asks, "Sweet, Dry, or Perfect?"
I am dumbfounded. These are exactly correct questions to ask, but to have them asked in London, England suggests to me that though our differences are large, our global village is indeed growing smaller and smaller. Due to jet-lag and dehydration, I take a second to answer (and this, it turns out is my downfall.)
The modern school of thought, say since the Truman Administration, is that the Manhattan is a mixture of bourbon or rye whisky with sweet, red vermouth. The alcohol of the former combines with the sweetness of the latter to produce a congenial beverage that simultaneously wakes up the senses and relaxes the mind.
But what proportion of bourbon to vermouth? This is, of course, up to each person. A dash of vermouth, and you're drinking a stiff bourbon; the other way around and it's a very sweet and sticky drink. Rather than shout our fractions or ratios, the common parlance is "dry" for something like a four-to-one bourbon to vermouth stiff one; "sweet", closer to one-to-one for the sweet-toothed.
I respond, "Dry, please."
Alas, London only poses as a modern capital. To be honest, it is still stuck in mid-century privations and misunderstood cosmopolitanism. I should have realized that the bar-staff would have been trained with old cocktail manuals and, worse, their clientele wouldn't have known the difference.
The clue was the reference to a "Perfect" Manhatan. The pre-war definition of this drink permitted it to be made from any combination of dry and white or red and sweet vermouth. This was both wrong and confusing because while sweet and dry vermouth share the same last name, they are utterly different liquors. Any base beverage mixed with one will have a completely changed taste and texture than when made with the other. Once the Manhattan was defined as being made with sweet vermouth alone, the only item to be decided was the proporation.
But the question asked was actually referring to the earlier, pre-war definition: A sweet Manhattan would be made with sweet vermouth, a dry manhattan with dry vermouth, and a "Perfect" Manhattan with a combination of sweet and dry vermouth.
By saying "Dry", I was looking for a stiff after-work drink; What I got was a pale, lackluster, unsatisfying quaff. An objective correlative of the day's presentations and the difficulties in translation between two great nations.