Someone named Lesley M. M. Blume writes a column called "Let's Bring Back" for the Huffington Post in which she apparently waxes nostalgic about things. I'm not entirely sure about it as I couldn't find many examples of such columns. Nevertheless, she has expanded the idea into at least three books that I can find, the latest being the one I heard about on NPR this morning called Let's Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition (subtitled, "A Compendium of Impish, Romantic, Amusing, And Occasionally Appalling Potations From Bygone Eras.")
Having resurrected for myself the WWI-era sidecar, I had an empathic moment when listening to Ms. Blume's interview on the radio as she lamented the neglect of vintage cocktails such as the gin fizz and the DuBarry.
Well, that's fine, but if it were up to me, I'd want to bring back cocktail lounges, which are disappearing like buffalo. I'm not talking about a tavern, or a bar, or a restaurant that serves liquor, but a real honest-to-God cocktail lounge where the lights are low and so is the decibel level; where there's no juke box, no piped-in music, no one-man-band, no live entertainment except maybe, just maybe, an unobtrusive piano player; a place where you sit on comfortable chairs, not stools, at tables of regular height, and where there are no pool tables, no video games, and no food served except perhaps a dainty bowl of high-class snack mix on each table, and where bartenders actually know how to make a sidecar, a really cold martini (up), and a vodka sour that doesn't taste like vodka and lemonade.
Ms. Blume (and don't I wish I was cool enough to have two middle initials) did mention a cocktail called a Godmother that sounded interesting. It calls for equal parts of vodka and amaretto stirred (not shaken) over ice, strained into a cocktail glass, and served with a list of wishes to be grand by, one presumes, your fairy godmother.
I may try that. Maybe I can wish up a cocktail lounge.
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