Holy shit!  Who brought these glasses?

Joe, January 8, 2012

If you get into cocktails, sooner rather than later you get into glassware.  Cocktails and glassware are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  Form follows function but perception follows form.

I am a bit obsessive over glassware.  But just a bit.  I own maybe a dozen different types of glasses.  I pick them based on look, feel, and just the tiniest bit around what I can actually store.  I know they are fragile and I don’t expect them to endure.  I accept that and don’t give it a second thought.  The only time it really comes to mind is my glassware that has a personal lineage.  The glasses connected to my family, passed down to me from people that I’ve never met in the flesh, mean that much more.

OK, so perhaps the obsession isn’t around owning the glassware but selecting the right one for the right time.  Last weekend was one of those times:  a football tailgate.  I tailgate with friends that I’ve known longer than most anyone else in my life.  Last weekend was a little more special.  Not just a football game, but a playoff football game.

To step up my game for the game, I decided to bring a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.  The dilemma here though is in the glassware.  Tailgating, like football, is frenzied.  I went through my mental Rolodex.  Flask?  Too small, I know Freddo will have some Scotch.  Plastic tumbler?  Perhaps, but I can do better.  Finally, I hit on it.  Sometime last year I bought on eBay a collection of six NY Giants glasses from the late 60′s or early 70′s.  I had a couple of Jets glasses from the same time frame that were passed down to me through friends of my parents, but no Giants glasses.  It turns out that Shell Oil gave away this style of glasses at their gas stations for every team in the NFL.  So I packed three Giants glasses in a cardboard tube designed as a gift box for a bottle of wine and was ready.  Fragile yes, but I accepted that they might not come home.

Sunday was gorgeous.  Sunny and warm, I unpacked the glasses and poured some Johnnie Black for me and Freddo.  Joe and Brendan came with their kids.  We were having a great time.  Suddenly, out of no where, Joe sees my glass.  I answered his question on who brought them.  I didn’t expect what followed.

As kids Joe and his brother Tom each had one of these glasses.  Joe’s was a Giants glass and Tom’s was a Jets glass.  As brothers they rooted for different teams.  They wouldn’t touch the others glass.  It was an unspoken rule.  We spent a few minutes talking about the connection between these glasses and just being kids ourselves.  When I told Joe I would send him a couple of glasses, he almost couldn’t believe it.

The next day, I boxed up a Giants and a Jets glass and out they went.  I enclosed a note saying “Sometime the little things mean a lot.  Enjoy.”  A few days later I got an email from Joe thanking me for the glasses.  He told me they reminded him of his dad.  That made my week.  Joe’s dad was killed in a New York City terrorist bombing in 1975.  Joe and I were in the same third grade class.

Sometimes the little things really do mean a lot.

Johnnie Black - neat

• Johnnie Walker Black – neat

When I had Freddo take this photo I had no idea what was ahead.

That evening I went to my favorite bar.  One of the bartenders that I’ve only met briefly was experimenting with a new cocktail he’s working on.  He brought it over to Del to try and they went back and forth for a moment.  Finally Del gave a nod to me and said “Let him try it, he’s pretty good”.  He added “He’s better than me” as he turned away.  I realize that last comment isn’t true at all, but I have to admit, I felt a lot better getting a compliment on my cocktail palate than I did getting my test score earlier in the day.

I’ve been requesting more and more bitter cocktails when I’m out.  Maybe I’m developing that area of my palate.  I was pretty excited when the latest Imbibe Magazine arrived and when I flipped through I found a cocktail called the Bitter Old Coot.  Bitters and Fernet Branca; how could I go wrong.  It’s been in my cocktail heavy rotation at home ever since.

Bitter Old Coot

• 2 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye

• 1 oz Drambuie

• 1 oz Fernet Branca

• 4 dashes Fee’s Whiskey Barrel bitters

• Mix in a double old fashioned glass with a big ice cube

It’s a simple drink with a complex taste. I bumped up the amounts a bit here but kept the ratios the same. Fernet is such a distinctive taste and it can’t really hide in any cocktail. True to the test, it is the dominating taste here. That’s not a bad thing for me, but probably won’t work for most.

Urban Dictionary

Eric and I have been friends for I’d say about forty years, give or take a few months.  I hate the words best friend, but if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name them, Eric would be one.  Eric and I grew up blocks apart.  I went to his Halloween party when I was in first grade.  I don’t remember my costume, I may have been a hot dog, but I do remember being in his basement.  We grew up together, doing that stupid fun shit that you do when you grow up together.  But while all that is going on, you don’t realize that you are becoming part of another family.  Eric’s mom would make us snacks after school and there was one particular late night drive home from a concert with Eric’s dad that will be burned in my memory forever.

Eric moved out to California with his then wife years ago.  I’ve visited him in both the San Francisco and San Diego areas where he has lived.  He gets back to the east coast from San Diego once or twice a year to bring his kids to see his family here.  Last summer we got our dad’s together and the four of us watched a ballgame on TV at Eric’s house.

This past week I got the phone call.  Eric was in town and we left messages back and forth.  When we finally caught up, Eric told me that his dad was now living in an assisted living center.  His mom had passed away a few years back, just like mine, but the news of his dad had an impact.  Eric told me that the house was on the market.  I could immediately feel it in my bones that this would be my last visit to that house.

I went up to see Eric.  He and his kids were staying in Eric’s childhood house.  After a dinner of Chinese food, we all went back to the house so Eric and I could have a few beers and catch up.  But it became apparent to me that this would be the last time I would be in the house.  Much of the furniture is already gone, but the house still has the memories.  Eric took me through the entire house; even into rooms where I’d never been before.  The furniture was gone but the echos were there.  This place is like my second childhood home.  This was the house where Eric had his wedding reception, and it was the place he told me that he was getting a divorce.  It was the place where we got away from our parents to drink in high school and the place where we drank in front of our dads six months earlier.  Eric started pulling things out of cabinets and sharing his own memories.  I made an offhand comment to him about taking whatever he wanted, this would probably be his last chance.  He agreed.

We went through the liquor cabinet.  Everything was at least 30 years old.  The tax labels were still present on the bottles.  Eric pulled out a bunch of different decanters.  He was guessing their origin.  Maybe they were gifts to his dad, maybe they were his grandmother’s, he wasn’t really sure.  We searched them out on eBay; checking values like we were on some reality show.  One was cooler than the next.  When Eric finally took stock of the situation, he told me to take two of them.  He realized he couldn’t bring them back with him and he knew that his brother would just toss them when the house sold.

A friend of mine, a collector, once said “we never really own anything we collect, we just hold on to it for the next guy”.   I’m happy to say that while I hold on to these two decanters for the next guy, I’ll be reclaiming memories of my past.  Boring stories to all but me and Eric, but if you pull up a chair and a glass, I’ll share them anyway.

Jack straight no chaser

The Stage Driver is still filled with whiskey. It has a date of 1976 on the bottom. The fire extinguisher is empty, but the music box on the bottom will still play “How Dry I Am” if you wind it. It also dates back to the 70′s. I decided not to open the Stage Driver, it means more to me the way it is. I did pour some Jack Daniel’s into the fire extinguisher. It seemed apropos.

I made a resolution to myself today to get out to California this year.  I have lots of reasons to go.

And then ZAP, Christmas stings like a bee.  It hits me that it really is here, not coming, but it is truly the season.  That happened to me a couple of weeks ago.  My friend Jan was too kind and invited me to crash her outing with her college friend Laura and join them for drinks at the Campbell Apartment.  It’s a bar in Grand Central Terminal.  As Jan, Laura and I discovered while reading the wikipedia page, the Campbell Apartment has a long and varied history.

The 3,500-square-foot space was first leased in 1923 by John Campbell from William Kissam Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original owner of the New York Central Railroad. The family built Grand Central Terminal. The space was a single room 60 feet (18 m) long by 30 feet (9.1 m) wide with a 25-foot (7.6 m) ceiling and an enormous faux fireplace in which Campbell kept a steel safe. At that time, it was the largest ground floor space in Manhattan, Campbell commissioned Augustus N. Allen, an architect known for designing estates on Long Island and town houses in Manhattan, to build an opulent office, transforming the room into a 13th-century Florentine palace with a hand-painted plaster of paris ceiling and leaded windows. It also featured a quatre-foil designed mahogany balcony, that still exists today.  After Campbell’s death in 1957, the rug and other furnishings disappeared from his office and the space eventually became a signalman’s office and later a closet at Grand Central, where the transit police stored guns and other equipment. It also became a small jail, in the area of the present-day bar.  After falling into disrepair, the space was restored and renovated in 1999 as the Campbell Apartment. The name misleads some into thinking the space was used as a residence, rather than as an office, but “apartment” is used in the more traditional or British sense as a room set aside for an individual’s private use. The walls and ceiling were brought back to their former glory and the original steel safe, once hidden behind a wall, now sits in the massive fireplace as a reminder of Campbell’s wealth.

So what was the sting?  I made my way to the bar to order a drink and I noticed the Christmas decorations.  They didn’t seem commercial like at CVS or obligatory like at work.  It was simply and wholly festive.  And then it hit me that Christmas was on its way.  It was a nice comfortable feeling.

Jan, Laura and I had the good fortune to get a table in the balcony.  Our server could only have been more attentive if she had sat at our table and relayed our drinks to the bar by semaphore.  Looking down over the crowd at the bar I could feel what it must have been like decades earlier.

The Campbell Apartment

One of the drinks I ordered was the commodore.  It was on the Campbell Apartment’s classic cocktail menu.  It was a pleasant cocktail.  Not a drink I would go out of my way to find, but it had a nice balance of tart and sweet.  And the reality is that an evening shouldn’t be just about the cocktails, it should be about the conversation had over those drinks.

The Commodore

• 1.5 oz Elijah Craig 12 yr. bourbon

• 1 oz creme de cacao

• 1 oz lemon juice

• dash of Scrappy’s grenadine

• shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass

Merry Christmas!

I have written about my Dad here; how his habit for as long as I can remember has been to make a martini before dinner.  Mom would put two rocks glasses in the freezer before dinner and Dad would use them to serve the drinks he made from himself and for my Mom.  I think it was a rather lovely ritual.

I recently made mention to my dad that on the holidays when we visit my sister for dinner he doesn’t get his usual pre-dinner cocktail.  I suggested that we bring some gin and vermouth to my sister’s house and make his usual martini.  He tossed it around a bit in the way that someone does when they aren’t seriously considering the proposal.  He made a few comments about it being too much trouble and finally ended with “maybe to make it easier I’ll just make my drink the way your mother had it, straight gin.”

A throw away comment by Dad was a revelation to me.  I had no idea that Mom had her “martini” as straight gin.  My immediate thought was “how cool is that!”  What lingers though is how much I like women that enjoy their gin.  I had no idea that my Mom was doing just that for all those years.

Here is Mom in her youthful days.

And here is a toast to her with her favorite cocktail.