Jim Meehan as the bartender He hasn't run a bar in a while. He's been a “cowboy without a horse,” as he puts it. It's been that way, to varying degrees, since he moved to Portland from New York a decade ago. It was, he says, an attempt to lower his profile. He opened a bar called PDT in 2007, and by 2011 he'd published a highly acclaimed book about its drinks, winning a James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program a year later. He was a partner at PDT until 2019, during which he opened and consulted on multiple bar projects, including Takibi in Portland and, now, menu development for American Express' Centurion Lounge. He's also written two books, including his latest, The Best of the Year. Bartender's Pantryco-written with Emma Janzen and illustrated by Bert Sasso, will be released on June 11. But despite his success outside the traditional bartending environment, he still feels uneasy about interviewing in someone else's bar.
“It would be a lot easier to talk about myself, my worldview, my values if I was sitting at my own bar,” he said in May, sitting in a booth at the Teardrop, a pioneering cocktail bar in Portland's Pearl District. “At PDT, I can sit in my space, listen to my music, meet my colleagues, drink my drinks, eat my hot dogs.” (Entry to PDT was via a phone booth inside an adjacent hot dog shop.)
He asked the bartender for “something nice and NA” — he's not sober, but at 48, he says he's abstaining from alcohol — and recommended I order a Windsill Spritz, a peach, almond and prosecco riff on a Bellini. It was described on the menu as “boldly bouncy.” It was a little cloudy (it was white peach) and, at least as I recall, was served in a foot-tall square flute glass, which I think enhanced its deliciousness.
Jim Meehan
Recipe for Window Spritz Bartender's Pantryby former Teardrop Bar manager Sean Hoard. It's in the “Fruit” section, and it's one of 10 chapters outlining the somewhat modern wave of culinary ingredients finding their way into cocktails. The book serves as both a sampler and a manual of who's doing this, how and where. But it also contains an encyclopedic amount of information on the origins, classification and cultural history of ingredients, including chapters on dairy, grains and nuts, vegetables, flowers and herbs, spices and ferments. You'll no doubt come away with a few new ingredients (the Indonesian spice, cubeb berries) and recipes (Borodinsky rye kvass, a drink made from fermented bread; the recipe is by Katika chef Bonnie Morales) while also deepening your understanding of ingredients you thought you were familiar with. For example, it details 10 types of sugar.
Meehan runs Mixography, a cocktail consulting firm whose clients include app and leather goods companies, from his home in Portland. He lives with his wife and two children, ages 6 and 11. The company's philosophy is to promote “the idea that cocktails are culture, and that this culture is something you experience, not just something to eat and drink,” Meehan said.
In this new book, through the same lens, the cocktail becomes a Trojan horse: an innocuous, fun drink that starts conversations about how corn subsidies and the advent of high-fructose corn syrup affect obesity and diabetes rates, how commodity spice trade has made it virtually impossible to trace the origins of commercial spices, and how the 1970s agricultural mantra of “get big or get out” promoted the monoculture of disease-prone crops for easier commercialization. Viewed through a magnifying glass, the cocktail quickly becomes political.
But Meehan didn't set out to write a politically informed cocktail manual, and it doesn't need to be read as such: He decided to write the book in 2017 while touring for his second James Beard Award-winning book. Meehan's Bartender ManualIn a Philadelphia bar “masquerading as a cocktail bar,” he found a pack of frozen, pasteurized lime juice, a cardinal sin, in a place “masquerading” as something on par with his own work and that of his contemporaries. He wanted to write a New Age text documenting the culinary wave of cocktail culture, bringing the standards he had long held to into the present. As he wrote, he learned he still didn't have the full picture. “There's a generation of bartenders who don't think freshly squeezed juice is necessarily the best,” he says. Exploring why has transformed his sense of self. “The person who was skeptical of lime juice at that bar is not the same person sitting here.”
His first book was Savoy Cocktail Bookis a collection of classic cocktails by Harry Craddock, a bartender at the Savoy Hotel in London. The second book is a modern take on a 19th century cocktail manual. Harry Johnson's Bartending Manual (1882). Both projects had templates and dealt with subjects with which Meehan was famously familiar. Bartender's Panties ” Meehan's Bartender Manual and PDT Cocktail BookI am not the subject of this story, I am the narrator.”
This time, his process was highly journalistic: He read lots of books, interviewed industry experts, made kombucha for the first time, and studied the Latin etymologies of common grains. A few years into the project, he sat down to put the book together and “started spinning the yarn.” He wasn't stuck; but just as he had to consult a wide range of sources to piece together the information, he had to hone in on his bloated research with the help of the book's co-author, journalist and editor Emma Janzen. The result is, in the best sense, like an insatiably curious person diving deep into an intriguing topic and following notes to try to piece together a 360-degree understanding.
As I sip my Windsor Spritz, Meehan tells me it's made with frozen peaches — IQF, or individually quick frozen, a quick-freezing method that perpetuates the “seasonal” peak of peaches. Another recipe in the book uses canned corn instead of fresh, following the advice of modernist chef Wylie Dufresne.
The book isn't full of five-minute recipes or cocktail “hacks,” but it's committed to finding the best approach to working with ingredients, whether that approach subverts long-standing traditions. In doing so, it exudes an accessible vibe, meticulously defending the reasons it calls for certain methods and ingredients. In contrast to many recipe books, you're unlikely to find yourself cursing the author and wondering why he steeps his gin in butter for 48 hours (this, of course, is to make a very balanced martini; the fat blunts the alcohol's sharpness and the lactic acid provides a gentle tartness).
Meehan's previous books have been aimed at a professional audience; somewhat by coincidence, this is his most homely to date: “I'm writing for the curious, for people who want to be taken on a journey, and for people who are completely new to the subject but who are willing to put in a little effort, probably a lot of effort, to catch up,” he says.
As for his own journey, Meehan remains steadfast in his plans to return to the bar, horseback or even spaceship: “I think that's the plan, if I can continue my career in carbonite like Han Solo and then once my kids are a little bit older and I go back to the military, I can basically thaw myself out.”
