The Last Days of G&T

I don't know what reception I'm at, but for God's sake give me a gin and tonic.


—Denis Thatcher

Summer beings with the expectancy of Memorial Day and ends with the grim reality of Labor Day. During this brief, yet sublime time of the year, we wear seersucker and white and drink gin and tonics. 

The gin and tonic is the ultimate summer drink. (Though I was told by an Englishman in college that a gin and tonic may be consumed in the winter so as long as it is on the weekend.) While the focus is on the gin and everyone has their favorite—mine is Tanqueray—most folks forget that the tonic is just as important, if not more so. Nothing destroys a good G&T more than bad tonic. Most tonic is atrocious, nothing more than carbonated sugar water.

But what is tonic water?

British officers stationed in India invented tonic water by mixing soda water with quinine. Quinine is an anti-malarial substance derived from the bark of the cinchona tree. (During a safari in Africa, our guide told me that, based on my daily intake of gin and tonics during happy hour, I had obviated the need for my anti-malarial pills!) Being good Englishmen, the officers countered quinine’s bitter flavor by adding gin, sugar, and lemon or lime. Thus, in the land of the Raj, the gin and tonic was born! Eventually, the gin and tonic made its way back to England, yet another contribution made by the Pax Britannica.

Because Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, there should be no surprise that Schweppes, a London-based sparkling-water company, added "Indian" tonic water to its line of products in 1870 and began the mass production of tonic water. Canada Dry stepped in and began making tonic water around 1890. Since then, these two companies have produced most of the world’s tonic water. And it is a far cry from the original. Until now.

In recent years, Fever Tree has stepped in to halt the malaise, producing tonic that takes one back to the glories of the British Empire. The sun will never set on this tonic. I would buy it in bulk at Costco if I could. Their slogan is "If 3/4 of your Gin & Tonic is the tonic, make sure you use the best." This is perhaps the one point on which I part with the folks at F.T. My ratio is just the opposite. There's a reason why it is called a GIN and tonic and not a TONIC and gin! But I digress. 

It would be helpful to us gin and tonic drinkers if restaurants would take note of this trend in quality tonics. Please stop using that soda gun that looks like a cast-off from the set of Barbarella! This is especially true for high-end restaurants charging me $10 for a gin and tonic. Hell, make your own tonic—gin is a jealous mistress!

Soon I will move on. As the evenings cool and college football heats up, I will stray. Bourbon, the Lauren Bacall of the bar, will call my name.  G&Ts will be but nothing more than a summer fling with a waitress. But like a wayward dog, I will return to her next May and beg for forgiveness. She's a kind mistress, and she will relent to my charms. 

What Happened to Real Food?

From an actual menu in a restaurant in Stockholm, August 2018:

Reindeer heart on white moss

Wild king crab on juniper sprigs

Really? What’s next, bee pollen on winter moss with salmon foam? What the hell is white moss anyway? I thought moss was green, maybe a brownish green, but white?

Before I start sounding like the old man with a moth-eaten bathrobe picking up his paper and yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, I want it on record that I’m not opposed to innovation. But what I am opposed to are chefs who try to be too clever by half. That’s the problem with the “Nordic food” craze these days. All that moss and bark and reindeer meat gathered from the forest. I thought that agriculture vs. foraging was a great advancement for humankind? Call me old fashioned.

The fascination with what I call “foam cuisine” results from the fact that many people who eat in restaurants these days don’t really cook. Cooking should be more than reading about the latest food trend or watching other people cook food, whether it’s on T.V.  or in a restaurant with an “open kitchen.”

Ok, there he goes again with the old man on the front lawn routine…

But for the every day, run-of-the-mill faire, you really don’t need fancy. You don’t need Giada on the Food Network; you don’t need anything that you can’t find at the Piggly Wiggly.  All you need are basic skills and common sense. Go old school. And that means that fusty old culinary school called French cuisine. French cuisine is the latest victim of “foam.” There’s something to be said for the old classics, as Edward Behr suggested in his book, “The Food & Wine of France:” 

I used to think that unaccustomed combinations of ingredients, as opposed to classic complements from the past, would at their best tell you something new about one or more of them. But we’re so used to the unexpected mixtures now that I hardly think carefully about them at all, beyond a simple reaction of whether or not I like what I like what I’m eating.

And so maybe we will come full circle. The old ways of doing things will become the new. We will go home again. I enjoy French cooking because it’s like jazz, another passion of mine. You learn the blues scales; you practice them—over and over. And then you do your own thing, and that thing ain’t the same each time you play. My bolognese is different every, single time. 

So, what should you do the next time you’re in New York, and your sophisticated cousin from “that side of the family” asks you out to the latest trendy foam restaurant? Well, if you have a lick of sense, you graciously accept. And, if as I suspect, you are still hungry a few hours later, and as I suspect you can’t find any good BBQ, you go back to your cousin’s shoe-box apartment, grab what you can from the larder, and make a real meal. Why? Because you know how to cook and not forage for dinner!