I found out recently that those saucer-shaped champagne glasses are known as a champagne coupe. Their shallow, open bowl is accessible and easy to sip from. It's an iconix, luxurious image, from classic Hollywood films to the cascading tower of stacked champagne glasses at weddings. Sadly, the Champagne coupe appears to have faded from the 1960s with the rise of the flute glass. I'm not keen on Champagne flutes, which feel awkward and tend to break easily. That may be why I don't drink much sparkling wine.
Apparently the coupe style of Champagne glass has been undergoing a revival - according to some websites. This may be true, as I've recently been served a classic cocktail in a coupe glass on a couple of occasions. It made a nice change from the traditional v-shaped cocktail glass. In either case, a relatively short stem and broad bowl makes for easy handling. I'd happily sip a martini from a coupe any day.
Monterey. The name evokes northern California, Spanish Mission, jazz festivals and a certain kind of pine. It's also a bar and diner in Newtown, Wellington. Its simple horizontal wooden boards stand out on the street frontage, interrupted by just a perspex sign and a bright yellow door. Inside is a relaxed suburban hangout with blue and white mural walls, long-players spinning on a turntable and sets of Connect Four. Newsprint tablecloths and pencils invite patrons to sketch art, some of which ends up blogged on the Monterey webpage. Menus are pasted into the front of old hardcover books. The service is unfailingly warm and friendly.
The other night I had a Martinborough, an original in-house cocktail, described as a twist on the Gimlet. Served in a little old-school saucer-shaped champagne glass (elegant!), the Martinborough has a gin base (40ml), with savignon blanc (30ml), homemade lime cordial (30ml), and a dash of orange bitters. Named after the town in the Wairarapa that produced the wine, its creator told me the Martinborough had been developed for an Air New Zealand competition for a cocktail on flights between Auckland and London. It came second place to a blue-coloured drink(!). Still, Monterey's Martinborough is more than a fancied-up Gimlet, being sweet-n-dry and limey and, well, perfect for high-altitude cruising.
I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (野良犬, 1949), a classic film noir set in Tokyo just after the war. Filmed in the sweltering Japanese summer, the heat and humidity pervades every frame, as sweat drips from the characters, slowly adding to the building tensions and frustrations.
The legendary Toshiro Mifune, of Rashomon and Seven Samurai fame, plays a headstrong, yet naive, young detective whose gun is stolen on a crowded bus. As his missing gun starts to be used in crimes, he desperately searches Tokyo's seedy underworld to track down the killer before more murders are committed. AllMovie.com notes that "Mifune, young and hungry, is tightly coiled in Stray Dog, a complicated mass of insecurity and bravado".
Stray Dog has classic noir elements, including shadowy lighting, urban crime, a man trapped in a living nightmare and an increasingly blurred sense of what is right or wrong. More than just a psychological crime thriller, it also contains a nine-minute montage that wordlessly captures post-war Tokyo's crowded streets and alleys, with real-life blackmarket figures, hawkers and drifters. All were filmed surreptitiously by Kurosawa as Mifune wandered the streets in Tokyo's sweltering summer.
Cocktailtime was an influential column about classic cocktails on the now-defunct HotWired site. Written by Paul Harrington, a.k.a. The Alchemist, with Laura Moorhead, the column helped revive a wider interest in old school aperitif cocktails. It opened my eyes to rare-but-still-mighty classics such as the Aviation, the Pegu and the Ward Eight, while providing amusing descriptions of each drink's origins, cultural baggage, and receipe, along with suggested serving settings.
- The Gibson - "The not-so-evil twin of the dry Martini... the Gibson subtlely brings the salty brine of its garnish to the fore... one onion goes nearly unnoticed until the drink's end, two raises an eyebrow at the first sip."
- The Old Fashioned - "Old-fashioned, yes, but not weak. At some point the drink transforms from a bouquet of cherry and oranges into the brimstone and fire of whiskey... It's frilly but disciplined."
- The Pink Gin - "With all its bourgeoisie baggage, the Pink Gin is the English equivalent of the Yank's Martini. Bold and biting, it takes the banal - gin and bitters - and makes it distinctive."
Although the site has since disappeared from the web, I saved a screen shot of a couple of my favourites - the Sidecar is pasted below. Read this interview with Paul for more. http://www.frodelius.com/goodspiritsnews/paulharrington.html
