Things You Can Count On In This Cockamamie World... And Whiskey With A Stick Floating In It
Hudson Malone — the mere mention of the name mingles memory with desire. (Photo by me)
Maybe the only bad thing about my job is that I don’t get enough of an opportunity to write about old favorites. Part of the job is chasing down new booze and new bars and that’s great, there’s always exciting new things happening and I love that my calendar is usually full with appointments to taste new spirits and visit new watering holes. They’re simply more newsworthy than things that have stuck around for years or decades.
So I’m glad I got to sneak not one but two oldies but goldies into my latest What’s Tony Drinking? , brought to you as always by the kind humans at Alcohol Professor. One of them isn’t actually that old — by my reckoning, less than a decade — and it’s newsworthy for the fact that it recently reopened after a long Covid-related dormant spell. But Hudson Malone, on East 53rd St. in Manhattan, feels like it’s been around forever. Its owner, Doug Quinn, has been a fixture in midtown for decades, previously as head bartender at the century-plus old institution P.J. Clarke’s a few blocks away. Hudson Malone is… well, I’ll let you read about it in the article, the link for which is -> HERE <-.
The other old flame contained therein is the Matsuhisa Martini from Nobu. Plenty of Japanese places have put saketinis on the menu since Nobu opened in 1994 — hell, it may have been a thing before. But Nobu’s version, with junmai sake and vodka in pluperfect ratio, with a couple of thin slices of Japanese cucumber on top, blew me away the first time I had it back in the mid ‘90s. It was so clean, so gentle, and — as I learned after having a second one — so deceptively strong. The original Nobu in Tribeca is long gone, and I don’t find myself at the newer locations very often, but whenever I do, the Matsuhisa Martini still hits the spot.
Oh yeah, I also had whiskey with a stick floating in it. Want to read more? Here’s the link again!