Author: Bob Westal

I originally covered the Hanky Panky as my New Year’s drink for 2012/2013. I was still a baby cocktailian back then, however, and I honestly have no clue what I was thinking. Instead of the two dashes of Fernet Branca called for in the recipe I’d cribbed from Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, I increased the dosage of Fernet from two dashes to a full quarter ounce! If you’ve ever “enjoyed” that infamously invigorating digestif neat, you will understand why I now plead temporary insanity. Time to make amends. The invention of Hanky Panky (the drink, I mean) is credited…

The Midnight Fizz was written up by New York Times food and drink writer Rebekah Pepplar and that’s about all I know of its origins. Why “midnight”? I haven’t a clue. The drink is greenish white and there’s nothing particularly nocturnal about it; it would make a fine breakfast cocktail if you’re into that kind of thing. What I do know about this fizz is that it’s a variation of a gin-based Silver Fizz or Gimlet. It’s a decent reworking of old themes and it’s got more booze than its predecessors; so, there’s that. Also, it’s second summer here in L.A. and maybe where…

Cocktailian writers devote a great deal of ink to the Martinez. We are drawn to its likely relationship to the modern-day Martini, its multiple creation myths, and the fact that it’s close to being a gin Manhattan. I’m no exception and I covered it most recently in 2019.  While I’ve made multiple versions of the Martinez in the past, I’ve never made one with the base spirit that was featured in the version promoted by ur-bartender Jerry Thomas back in the day. Instead of the familiar London dry-style gins, Thomas’s recipe called for Old Tom gin. Think of it as London wet gin;…

Labor Day weekend is here and I’ve got a simple, sweet, and icy-cold refresher to cap off this long, hot, and tense summer. Our main ingredient is an increasingly popular Italian aperitif that has been accurately described as Campari with training wheels. Campari itself can be accurately described as the sweetest thing you’ve ever tasted followed by the most bitter thing to have ever assaulted your tongue. It’s the rare bird who will drink it straight – I have and I find it oddly invigorating – but not everyone likes it even in its most traditional habitats, a Negroni or an Americano. With…

And now, the final drink in this series celebrating the 2023 TCM Film Festival, long may it unspool.  1943’s Shadow of a Doubt is famously Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite of his 53 pictures but it’s probably his least seen masterpiece. It’s almost deliberately unsexy, it’s not overtly stylish in the manner of his spy thrillers, and while it feints towards the dark places of the mind Hitch would explore much more overtly 17 years later in Psycho, it spends as much time on the psychology of why we do good things as why some of us do very bad things – and also…

Today, we look within the heart of an artichoke and salute Broadway diva Margo Channing and the titanic performer who gave her life. When All About Eve was being cast, Bette Davis was a substitute for Claudette Colbert, a very different actor who had been sidelined by an injury. The part was rewritten to some extent to make the character a closer fit and now it’s tempting to say it’s hard to tell where Margo ends and Bette Davis began. But Davis was acting even if she could draw on her own experiences and feelings. It’s true she married actor Gary Merrill, who…

If you’re a Gen Y, Gen Z, or Gen Zygote, you have likely seen 1988’s Stand and Deliver at school. If you’re a bit older, you maybe caught it on a lazy Sunday afternoon on cable or streaming and, if you haven’t, you should. Directed and co-written by Ramón Menéndez, it takes its place near the top of the inspirational-high-school-teacher subgenre that began with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and has never quite gone away. Compared with 1967’s To Sir With Love, or 1989’s Dead Poets Society, it has a low-gloss, down-to-earth feel while being less apocalyptic than, say, 1955’s juvenile-delinquent heavy The Blackboard Jungle. Its depiction of East Los Angeles –…

The Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, aka TCMFF, is alive and well in 2023 and so, I hope is Drink of the Week. This time, I’m returning to an old tradition where I come up with a series of new, or at least newish, cocktails inspired by some of the main classics that were shown this year Co-written and directed by a George Lucas we’d never recognize today, 1973’s American Graffiti is to baby boomers what Dazed and Confused is to Gen Xers and millennials. It’s also one of the more profitable movies of the 1970s, with a reported budget of…

It’s been well over a decade since I covered my first Corpse Reviver, one of a family of similarly named drinks that were supposed to be morning hair-of-the-dog hangover no-cures. To most modern-day drinkers, corpse revivers are quite strong enough to be the whole dog but they also make very nice before or after-dinner drinks. Also, in case you haven’t noticed, this blog has been in remission since late summer of 2022. Why not use one to mark our reemergence into the light? But why this corpse reviver? It has to do with the fulfillment of my long quest to get my hands on…

Labor Day Weekend is upon us, it’s obscenely hot here in SoCal, and I haven’t done a single fizz all summer. My shame is immense as there is no better cure for short-term hot weather blahs than delicious refreshment and a mild alcohol buzz accompanied by the only known pleasure-related headache – but with much fewer calories than an ice-cold shake. Like the Silver Fizz or the Sloe Gin Fizz, most fizzes boil down to spirits, wines, and/or liqueurs of various types and combinations, fresh lemon or lime juice, ice cold soda water, and egg white. Many fizzes are often made without the…