The Age of “Intentional” Drinking

A veteran bartender describes a new consumer behavior called “zebra-striping”: alternating between cocktails and N.A. drinks.Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story For much of my life, my mother’s side of the family—consummate New Englanders, some of them descended from a passenger on the Mayflower—seemed somewhat foreign to me. My father’s side, Russian Jews from New York, organized family life around boisterous gatherings, abundant with oily, salty, garlicky food and spirited philosophical interrogation. The Wasps, meanwhile, wrote carefully worded thank-you notes, nibbled politely on Triscuits, and celebrated a painstakingly traditional, though mostly secular, Christmas. Once, after my maternal grandfather hurt my feelings, bringing me to tears, I awoke in the middle of the night to find E.M.T.s wheeling him into an ambulance—instead of apologizing, he’d developed chest pains. He recovered, and we never spoke of it again.

A few years ago, not long before that grandfather died, at the age of ninety-nine, he and my grandmother downsized from their longtime home in Vermont and invited my sister and me to claim heirlooms. In a cabinet beneath their wet bar, I found a beguiling artifact—a triangular black metal contraption called a Bar Aid, made in Japan in the nineteen-fifties, with a list of eighty cocktails printed on its slanted face. At the center is a dial and a small window, so you can spin through a paper scroll of recipes for the numbered drinks. A Gertie’s Garter calls for three parts dry gin to one part grapefruit juice and one part grenadine; for a Millionaire No. 2 (there’s also a Millionaire No. 1) you need Jamaican rum, apricot brandy, grenadine, lime juice, and sloe gin (not to be confused with gin, though it’s made from it).

I’ve never been a particularly good drinker. I swore off gin in my twenties, when I realized it made me almost instantly ill, and mostly gave up on getting drunk in my thirties, when I decided that the hangovers were not worth it. Still, I’ve always been susceptible to the romantic appeal of mid-century cocktail culture. I was moved to imagine my grandparents, young and a little glamorous, in Manhattan, where they met, fixing drinks at five o’clock—and to imagine myself, decades later, making a new ritual of the same.