New York In The '90s, Drunkenly
El Teddy’s in Tribeca, one of the great places in New York to drink during the ‘90s. (Pic swiped lovingly from Chris Posner’s LinkedIn page — please don’t sue me)
(I wrote this around 2013 for a long-discontinued iPad-only drinks publication whose name escapes me, then posted it on Medium a few years later. And now it’s here, in slightly edited — and improved, I hope — form. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written, so I hope you enjoy it too.)
Hazy Memories Of My Lost Youth In The Days Before Craft Cocktails
When you’re talking about getting drunk in New York in the ’90s, you have to remember that, in those pre-millennial days, the focus was much more on the ends (drunkenness) than on the means (what you drank). Sure, Dale DeGroff had been doing his thing at the Rainbow Room for a few years by then. But for the most part, if you weren’t very wealthy, very old, or a tourist, you didn’t think of setting foot in the place. For us regular folk, “cocktails” were often as not a shot and a beer. Very few bartenders, and even fewer drinkers, cared whether the lime juice in their frozen margaritas came from an actual lime, a bottle of Rose’s, or some chemical-laden mix. And sophisticates drank wine, along with the occasional martini or Scotch and soda.
Not that I was a sophisticate. I entered the ’90s as a 20-year-old NYU student without a fake ID (or, for that matter, a real ID) and cursed with a build and countenance that made me appear closer to 12. But in those pre-Giuliani days, crack murders, wilding, and riots were much more of a concern than underage drinking. Panchito’s, on Macdougal St., was my favorite place to get lit. A large Mexican restaurant with food that seemed prepared for the sole purpose of soaking up large quantities of alcohol, the place had a prodigious menu of cocktails whose names alone could land a diabetic in the hospital. Grasshoppers, Nutty Irishmen, Screaming Orgasms, B-52’s, Sloe Comfortable Screws… how the names mingle memory with desire. Panchito’s had them all, and had most of them both on the rocks and frozen.
All these cocktails may have contained (marginally) different ingredients. But they all did what they were intended to do — namely, to go down quickly without tasting like alcohol, despite containing a lot of it. To this day, when I visualize Washington Square Park in my mind, it’s blurry and spinning just a wee bit as I stagger through on my way back from another Panchito’s bender. The place still stood for decades, a boon for would-be time travelers and cocktail archaeologists, until it finally closed during the Covid era. Fittingly enough, the last time I went was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of my 21st birthday. But to be honest, the drinks tasted better when I wasn’t legally allowed to drink them.
Of course, if you really want to talk about being drunk in the ’90s, you want to talk about the Giuliani years, which began in 1993 — the go-go era when Times Square was transformed from a cavalcade of crime and perversion into a glorified strip mall. When the lawless no-man’s-land of Alphabet City was colonized by daring trustafarians. When i-bankers and Europeans with more money than they knew how to spend started shelling out way too much cash for Manhattan real estate, driving artists and hipsters on a budget into Brooklyn, which itself became a destination spot for the first time in decades.
But the streets were safer. A lot of people were making a pretty good living. We were emerging from the flannel-and-self-flagellation era of grunge. We were feeling good. We wanted to dress up a bit, to go out and splurge. The Rat Pack, kitschy ’50s lounge music, and four-button jackets with narrow lapels were all the rage. And what better accoutrement for all that pizzazz than a martini in an enormous cocktail glass?
A far cry from the civilized two and three-ounce glasses that enabled our parents’ generation to down three martinis at lunch and still make it back to work upright (if barely), these monstrosities held eight, nine, even ten ounces of booze. They were clearly thought up by someone who didn’t drink, who probably looked at a fast food restaurant’s supersized sodas and thought, gee, this could work for cocktails as well. By mid-decade, the oversized cocktail glass had overrun watering holes throughout Manhattan, and martinis were pushing through the $10 barrier — shocking my father, who remarked, “I remember when martinis were 90 cents. I never thought they’d hit a buck.”
When drinking from an oversized cocktail glass, which resembled nothing so much as a birdbath precariously balanced on a long, thin stem, I always experienced three distinct stages. The first was when the damn thing made it to my lips for the initial sip. It was cold. It was tasty. And if it wasn’t tasty, well, at least it was cold. The sense of possibility floated atop the alcohol, like the oil from the room-temperature olives that warmed up so many of my vodka-sans-vermouth martinis during that bygone era.
The second stage: feeling good, getting a little loose, inhibitions subtly evaporating in the night air. It didn’t matter that the drink appeared almost untouched. I was a relative lightweight, and a cocktail glass into which you can fit your face can turn just about anyone into a one-drink drunk.
And finally, the inevitable third stage: The cocktail, perhaps half consumed, is now inexorably approaching bathtub temperature. Myself, usually tipsy-en-route-to-bombed, wondering whether I should a) cut my losses and stop boozing for the night, b) power through the rest of the drink in a few nose-holding swigs, or c) start over and repeat the process with another round until my speech was too slurred to order one more. I usually chose b) or c). It was that kind of town. It was that kind of decade.
Much as people enjoyed martinis in theory back in the ’90s, they hadn’t yet put their mouths where their money was. I mean, heaven knows I loved the idea of an ice-cold glass of Tanqueray or Beefeater with a couple of olives and just a whisper of vermouth (these being the days before it was understood that vermouth actually, you know, tastes good in a martini). But drinking the stuff after years of imbibing Sex On The Beaches (Sexes On The Beach?) was, well, difficult.
The brilliant solution, adapted by bartenders throughout Gotham, was to stick any old drink into a martini glass and add the suffix “-tini” to it. That way, even the most timid of cocktailians could be transformed into modern-day Nicks and Noras. There were appletinis, of course. And peartinis, saketinis and lycheetinis. There was a “martini” that, if I’m remembering correctly through the years and the alcoholic fog, glowed in the dark. My all-time favorite remains a Choco-tini whipped up specially for me one night by Greg, my regular bartender at the long-forgotten watering hole Nola, on Amsterdam Ave. Before pouring a large amount of chilled vodka into a cocktail glass, Greg painted chocolate stripes along the inside of the glass with chocolate syrup. The garnish: a Hershey’s Kiss. And yes, I drank it.
Who to blame for these crimes against alcohol? Bartenders. Distillers. Marketers. Drinkers. Hell, I take a little responsibility myself. It was everyone’s fault, and also nobody’s fault, really. It was just a different world back then. Bartending? That was something you did to pay the rent until something better came along. Even if you approached bartending as a craft, or God forbid, an art, you didn’t have a whole lot to work with. Rye whiskey? There was Old Overholt, Jim Beam, and Wild Turkey, and if you could find a bar that stocked more than one of them you were a lucky patron indeed. Bitters meant Angostura or, maybe, Peychaud. Crème de violette? Old Tom gin? Rhum agricole? They may as well have been starters on a European soccer team, for all anyone knew. And we amateur drinkers simply didn’t know enough — or maybe didn’t care enough — to tell our men and women behind the stick to lose the chocolate syrup.
To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, I didn’t drink a lot during the ’90s. But I didn’t drink a little either. I definitely drank more after I started dating Phil, a 93-pound wisp of a girl with a cast-iron liver. Our courtship began at El Teddy’s, a restaurant and margarita palace in Tribeca with a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown on its roof. El Teddy’s margaritas were to those of Panchito’s as gelato is to frozen yogurt. They used fresh-squeezed juices and premium spirits (I tried Patron there for the first time, back when Patron was Patron), along with a staff that really knew how to mix a marg. It was bars like El Teddy’s, outliers at the time, which opened my eyes and awakened my palate to a world beyond Choco-tinis.
On this night, however, my palate was numb and my eyes were unfocused as I matched Phil drink for drink, and eventually pitcher for pitcher. And after we got back to her place we still had the wherewithal to polish off a couple of gin and tonics before I finally worked up the nerve to kiss her.
We soon became an item, and drank our way through the rest of the decade together. Whiskey sours at Shun Lee West. Burgers and bourbon at the Corner Bistro. Pisco sours at Calle Ocho. Gin-and-tonics (for her) and screwdrivers (for me) at the Art Bar. Matsuhisa Martinis (basically saketinis) at Nobu. Cheap whiskey at the Mercury Lounge. Fezzes (a kind of Cosmo variation) at The Fez. And so on. Certain meals, like a birthday dinner at Lespinasse, remain in my memory only because I was so drunk that my tongue was literally too numb to taste the food (Phil assured me that the place was overrated). On occasion, however, my sloshed-ness worked to my advantage. One night Phil took me to the Oak Room at the Algonquin to hear one of my favorite ‘50s-vintage jazz-lounge singers, Buddy Greco. I was so bombed that I worked up the courage to chat with him after the show — which miraculously began a friendship that lasted until his death in 2017.
At almost the instant the Nineties became the Aughts, the cozy bubble in which I’d been living, loving and drinking popped. Phil and I broke up in early January 2000. The stock market suddenly decided dot-com stocks were worthless. Nobody had quite as much money anymore. I sank far and fast, to the point of betraying my bona fides as a good New York liberal, when, over apple martinis at Chow Bar on 4th St., I unsuccessfully hit on an attractive conservative woman who mocked my allegiance to the recently defeated Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. I don’t know if it was the drinks or my lost dignity that led me to vomit in my bed that night. Probably a little of both.
Living in New York City became worse in a lot of ways in the new millennium. But drinking in New York City has become immeasurably better, even if asking for the provenance of the mint in the julep variation made for me by a 20-something covered in tattoos sometimes feels a little… precious. Every now and then I think back to the misguided concoctions I drank in the ’90s, and chuckle ruefully at my liver’s lost decade. But while much has been gained, much has also been lost — namely, my youth.