COCKTAILS
and other beverages

The Red Hook Cocktail     The Purgatory Cocktail     Seven Widow's Kisses     Sazerac Cocktail
In New Orleans, we drink.

If we are civilized New Orleanians, or visitors who are civilized ladies and gentlemen, we do not drink to extreme excess; that is, we do not stagger down Bourbon Street clutching those proprietary, heavily trademarked tourist drinks that are shaped like a little exploding pineapple that soldiers throw at each other during wars, we do not barf on a fellow tourist (or, God forbid, a native) and then pass out on the street. If all you want to do is get drunk quickly, this page is not for you.

If you want to get slowly and marvelously buzzed while sipping some of the loveliest and finest-tasting alcoholic concoctions in history, then come sit next to me right now.

If you'd like a few non-alcoholic libations -- café au lait and proper iced tea, follow the above link. Otherwise ... may I get you a drink?

Cocktails and Libations of New Orleans

We already know that New Orleans has, ah, quite the reputation for comsumption of alcoholic beverages. A few classics are offered below, and I'll be doing a lot of work on this section in 2001. I've been a born-again cocktail aficionado for the last year or so, and I've got many delights on the way -- both New Orleans-related cocktails plus others we've been working on.

Cheers!

 

The Big Cocktail Index!

The cocktail pages here are under fairly massive renovation, and eventually everything here will be pointed to the site's main cocktail index on my weblog Looka!. All the links below should still work for the time being, but for my main index of hundreds of new, original and classic cocktails, click the above link.

Now, on to the older stuff ...

 

Chuck and Wes' Premium Cocktail Menu

We love cocktails.

Not just the ones from New Orleans (although the Sazerac is my favorite cocktail in the world), but well-mixed new and classic cocktails that include premium quality ingredients, and fresh juices. (LISTEN UP! Lime juice comes out of a lime, not out of a bottle, and the words "sour mix" are not in my vocabulary.)

We consider cocktails to be a cuisine, and we would no sooner pay top dollar for an amateurishly mixed cocktail by a bartender with two weeks of training in a "bartending school" where they teach you to mix with colored water than we'd pay top dollar for a meal in a restaurant helmed by a chef with two weeks of training where he only learned to "cook" with the plastic food you see in the windows of Japanese restaurants. Cocktails have a long, complex and fascinating history, more or less equal in age to what we now know as fine cuisine (the invention of cocktails certainly having predated Escoffier!), and deserve to be treated with commensurate respect and care.

Resist silly cocktails that people order to say a risqué name rather than because of what it tastes like. Yearn for the days when bartenders took pride in their jobs, used their creativity and ingenuity to create new cocktails, and never gave you a blank look when you ask for a Gimlet or an Old Fashioned. These are some of our favorites, and I hope you enjoy them.

Chuck and Wes' Original Creations

We love to create new cocktails, just as good home cooks and professional chefs create their own recipes for dishes. We're not as prolific as some out there, but we're pretty happy with what we've come up with, and fortunately so are the people to whom we've had a chance to serve them! Give them a whirl sometime.

Cocktailian Libations

 

Non-alcoholic beverages

Here's how to make the best coffee and iced tea in the world, in this age of burned coffeeshop-chain espressos and lattes, and the vile swill that is Paradise Tropical iced tea, everygoddamnwhere you go ... feh. (Not in Louisiana, though.)

 
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Chuck Taggart   (e-mail chuck)