How to ruin a classic cocktail and which one people need to stop drinking

For one weekend, cocktail elites from six major cities traded their home bases for the glittering avenues of Macau. On March 13 and 14, top bartenders from New York, London, Bangkok, Singapore, New Delhi and Jakarta converged for the second edition of Wing Lei Bar & Friends at the Wynn Palace hotel in Macau. The programme featured guest shifts over two nights hosted by Wing Lei Bar’s own head bartender, Mark Lloyd. A panel discussion took place on the second day titled “The Death or Rebirth of the Classic Cocktail”. Moderated by Lloyd, it featured Ben Yabrow of Sip & Guzzle (New York), Shashank Rana of No Vacancy (New Delhi), Fransiska Putri of Modernhaus (Jakarta) and Jack Sotti from Archive & Myth (London). Each shared their thoughts on the evolution of the craft in their respective cities, the perils of over-complication and the responsibility of senior bartenders to pass the torch. Is the classic cocktail a sacred blueprint or a launching pad? The panel quickly reached a consensus: classics sit at the core of the industry’s foundation, but they can easily be done wrong. “In the UK, if you look at the most successful bars in the market, they’ve always been classics-led,” Sotti said. “What the general public wants to drink is always classics.” Yabrow went further, arguing that it is not just about the general public. “If you went to 100 bartenders without any prep and just asked, ‘What’s your favourite cocktail?’, 100 out of 100 would say a classic,” he says. “There’s a reason these drinks have been around for 150 years.” He said that riffs and twists bartenders apply to classics often end up straying too far from the original. He offered a simple test for such situations. “If you put that drink down in front of a guest, they should be able to see it as the classic,” he said. Rana added that in India, bartenders do not always have access to all of a classic’s ingredients, so they sometimes have to change things. “But you can still identify it. If you taste it and you’re like, ‘This could be a good drink, but this is not a martini,’ you’ve done too much.” At that, Sotti recalled a particularly glaring trend from the UK. “In the last three years, every bar had a tomato martini,” he says. “I was judging a competition, and out of the top 50 entries, 35 were tomato martinis. Nobody loves tomatoes that much.” Yabrow, whose Sip & Guzzle operates as two concepts under one roof – the more experimental “Sip” and the approachable “Guzzle” – cautioned against losing sight of the guest. “For us, we’re thinking intellectually about the cocktail, but for the guests, they’re just looking to have a drink and enjoy themselves,” he says. “No one wants to be challenged on a night out. They know what they want, and your version won’t be good to them no matter how delicious you think it is.” For a classic to be considered as one, the panel agreed that the most important factor was that it should call for ingredients that all bars carry. “I think a really great example is Paris where, as a rule, their stuff is everything they can get off the shelf,” Sotti said. “And I just love that, because when there’s limitation, it leads to innovation.” The debate soon turned to the challenge of training younger bartenders who have grown up in an era of Instagram-ready creations and complex culinary infusions. For the veterans, they agreed that a baseline knowledge of classics was the only way to make successful original cocktails. Lloyd shared a practical solution from his time bartending in China, explaining that a database of 100 classic recipes compiled and translated by industry veteran Christopher Lai was offered freely to new bartenders as a guidebook. Putri has noted a shift in how young bartenders learn. “The new generation can find anything they want on the internet, but they do not know how to retain that and go back to it,” she said. Yabrow agreed, lamenting a trend he has observed first-hand. “I can’t tell you how many times a younger bartender has been like, ‘Oh, I made this drink, I just substituted this’ – and they didn’t know [they had made] a Manhattan. It’s crushing.” He added that his bar uses an electronic notecard app that lets staff search for a drink’s recipe if they are unfamiliar with its contents. At both No Vacancy and Archive & Myth, the solution is daily discipline. “We do one classic a day,” Rana said. “Everyone has to learn about it. Where did it come from? What do we have in that?” Sotti added that it is essential everyone learns the classics, rather than have one person responsible for making a specific drink. “If that guy leaves, you see less of it. We make sure we’re keeping those drinks a part of the conversation,” he said. As for classics that deserve a rest, Yabrow had no hesitation in nominating a candidate for retirement. “The Long Island iced tea,” he laughed. “Nobody is drinking it because it’s their favourite cocktail. They’re drinking it under the misconception that it has more alcohol than other cocktails. Just drink a martini.”

How to ruin a classic cocktail and which one people need to stop drinking

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Top bartenders from around the world converged in Macau for guest shifts and a revealing discussion on classic cocktails

Top bartenders from around the world converged in Macau for guest shifts and a revealing discussion on classic cocktails