I enjoy the occasional cocktail experience. Which means I don’t mind going into a fancy cocktail lounge, piano bar, or nice restaurant.

On other occasions (think after a hard week at work), I love hitting up a dive bar for a beer and a shot.

The reason for making this distinction is simple: I know what I want when I go to each respective place.

This is how this works in my head… I walk into a dive bar, I ask for a beer, typically a craft beer, or an import if the place doesn’t have a craft beer menu, and I am happy. I don’t expect much in the way of classics or anything of note. So, when I walk into a dive bar and the bartender offers me a daiquiri and it isn’t a sugary bottled lime mess… I am impressed.

The opposite does not hold true…

In a decent neighborhood bar, I shouldn’t have to instruct the staff on how to make classic cocktails. If you have the stuff, you should know what to do with them. This has not always been the case for me.

Don’t misunderstand me here, I get excellent service once I have established the ground rules… but getting the ground rules is the hard part, especially considering that these places think they can charge the same prices that a place that has an established cocktail program.

This disconnect between expectation and reality is what led me to start this blog.

I have been to many places where I expected a decent cocktail. Despite always receiving excellent service, I’ve encountered situations where I have asked for something that they should be able to make, only to end up treating them like a dive bar out of disappointment.

Also, with all the wealth of information at our fingertips, I am trying to understand why places like these struggle with making them.

I was a chef for some of my formative years, and this is a reason that I am hyper-critical of the vibes you are trying to convey to me. Each location provides anticipation that I look forward to, so when I walk into a neighborhood bar (I am a Chicagoan, and have lived in Humboldt Park, Pilsen, Little Village, and presently in Garfield Park – so you have some reference if you are a Chicagoan, and if you aren’t, let’s just say they weren’t very upscale neighborhoods until more recently.) and get surprised by the inclusion of a Hemingway Daiquiri or a riff on the Old Fashioned, and they’re actually good, it’s a delightful surprise.

Having been to enough places where I have been met with disappointment when asking for the simplest drinks or places we have lost due to COVID, led me to learn how to make these cocktails for myself and try to reconstruct those lost and discover new ones along the way.

Join me, and along the way, I plan on pairing recipes with stories, music, photos, movies, or just random thoughts that brought me there.

To be clear, I am by no means a professional Mixologist or Bartender, but I have known a few when I was in the industry that gave me some insights along the way, and there are plenty of celebrity bartenders that I follow and respect that are a font of information and inspired me to do a written form of what they do.

Along the way, I will help you set up your own bar cart if that is a part of your goal and will give you tips on what to use if you are just looking to make something with what you have on hand. A cocktail should be something to be enjoyed after a hard day’s work, or in celebration of some accomplishment, and a lack of equipment should not be a hindrance.

In the index, I will list some recommendations on tools, first bottles, and additional items for your cart if you are hard set on building it right away. But if you are starting from a bottle of… (insert spirit here), then click on the tags, and they will take you to those recipes that you can build with items you have on hand or with a list of things to get per cocktail (Mise en place again, blame the chef in me).

This is how I began, searching for the perfect Daiquiri… so my first cocktail will be the Hemingway Daiquiri, which is a variant on the Floridita.