Cocktails Are Hard Drinks

True Story: A man walks into a bar and asks for bourbon neat, soda back. Simple order. But the waitress looks confused.

“You mean a glass of whiskey and a soda on the side?” she asks.

“Yeah,” the man says.

She shrugs and walks away. A few minutes later she brings back a tumbler full of whiskey and a tall glass of Coca-Cola.

“Excuse me,” the man says to the waitress as she sets the glasses down, “I think that should be soda water, not soda pop.”

“Oh,” the waitress says, “why didn’t you say so?”

We shudder to think what the waitress would have brought if he had ordered a sidecar or even a margarita.

A lot of people are saying that the Age of the Cocktail is returning to Los Angeles. If that’s true, there are a lot of bartenders and waitresses who will need to be wised up in the old ways of making mixed drinks.

“There’s a whole generation of bartenders who don’t know what the old drinks are supposed to taste like,” says Michael Whiteman, who, with partner Joe Baum, planned and developed New York’s Rainbow Room--where the return of the cocktail is not only a fad but a marketing concept. “They’re sort of mixing blind. Most are used to putting a big pile of ice into a blender and it all goes phhttt. “

Training bartenders was, according to Whiteman, one of the most difficult parts of putting together the multimillion-dollar Rainbow Room project. Today’s drinks are “mostly sugar, fruit juice, crushed ice and foam,” Whiteman says. “If you are off by a lot, (the mistake) is masked by the sweetness and the ice. But in the old days, all drinks were characterized by large amounts of alcohol; if you were off even a little, you botched the drink.”

Whiteman went back to those old days to find the drinks he intends to repopularize (already, the place serves 2,000 drinks a night). “Between-the-Sheets (brandy, rum, Cointreau, lemon) was the signature drink of the Waldorf, but the Waldorf doesn’t serve it anymore,” he says. “And the Stork Club Cocktail (gin, orange, lime, Triple Sec, bitters) was the signature drink at the Stork Club, which no longer exists.”

Margaritas are also on the menu and are made as they were intended. “The margaritas you typically get have nothing to do with what a margarita is supposed to be,” Whiteman says. “It’s really a very fine balance between the tequila and the Triple Sec--not just a pile of sweet foam.”

Here in Los Angeles, it is possible to get a good cocktail, but it certainly isn’t easy. On a recent tour of some of Los Angeles’ likely cocktail bars (not shot bars, where mixers more complicated than ice and water are frowned upon), we ordered the sidecar (brandy, Cointreau, lemon), a basic but not overly familiar cocktail, to see how well this city’s bartenders mix cocktails.

We never got the same drink twice. One West Hollywood hotel with a fabulous view served us something that tasted more like a Kelbo’s tropical drink than a real cocktail; the barman at downtown’s most elegant ‘30s-era hotel needed two tries before he was satisfied enough to serve the drink, which he didn’t shake but blended to a near froth.

At a postmodern Beverly Hills coffee shop that for some reason thinks of itself as a classic steakhouse, we are told, “Sidecar . . . refresh my memory.” “It’s like a margarita with brandy,” another bartender tells him. What we get is vile, brandy-tinged sweet-and-sour mix in what has to be one of L.A.’s hugest margarita glasses.

As we expected, respectable sidecars were served at the Formosa and at Musso and Frank (both lined the glass rims, margarita-style, with sugar), though we much prefer ordering martinis at Musso’s and margaritas--the real thing--at the Formosa, when barman Lindy is tending. We were completely surprised by the more-than-decent sidecar at Trumps; the drink had a healthy brandy color and also came in a glass rimmed with sugar.

Best of all was the sidecar at the West Beach Cafe, where we were served a drink that we actually wouldn’t mind ordering again. Made with good brandy (the place is famous for its assortment of Calvados and other brandy) and real lemon juice, not the usual sweet-and-sour mix, the West Beach sidecar (served in a martini glass, sans sugar) tasted like a real cocktail. Of course, the atmosphere is more 1982 than 1932.