10 Incredible Excerpts from the Saddest “Cocktail” Menu I’ve Ever Seen
Photo via Getty Images, Matthew Horwood
It’s funny how quickly one gets accustomed to a certain baseline of dignity, when you become a cocktail fan. Oh sure, there’s always room for a well-made G&T, or even a rum and coke, but as one’s exposure to well-crafted cocktails in good bars increases, one’s expectations for what constitutes a real cocktail or mixed drink tends to increase along with it. Eventually, you start to assume that most drinkers, like yourself, care about basic standards of quality and tact in their drinks. You doubt that anyone, outside of drunken frat boys, is voluntarily consuming large amounts of Everclear.
And you are WRONG, when you make that assumption. Because people are getting drunk off pure grain alcohol—in actual business establishments, not just in dorms—on a daily basis. And I have the incredible drinks menu to prove it.
I stumbled across this establishment’s menu the other day while looking up something cocktail-centric on the web, and it immediately captured my imagination. To think that the clientele of this bar are sidling up to the rail and ordering THESE DRINKS on a daily basis is both sad and illuminating—a glimpse into how the party crowd actually lives. Suffice to say, the drinks here are largely disgusting, and most of them heavily imply they’ll aid you in either blacking out or doing something profoundly illegal. All would be perfectly at home on Bourbon St. in New Orleans, but instead this is in the middle of an average American city. Their names and descriptions are tawdry, full of misspellings and brazen innuendo. The entire menu reads like it was written by someone who’d just had half a dozen of the drinks featured on it, and then typed the descriptions with his feet.
Amusingly, the food side of the menu is almost completely normal.
For the sake of not being pointlessly cruel, I won’t list the establishment’s name. Suffice to say, it has a tropical theme, an extreme lack of understanding about what constitutes a “daiquiri,” and their single favorite ingredient appears to be maximum strength grain alcohol. This is going to be fun.
Check out some of these drinks, which I remind you are coming from an actual bar, where people are buying them with actual money.
1. Strawberry Daiquiri
This isn’t so bad, right? Sure, the main selling point is the amount of rum involved, but at least it’s made with real strawberries, right? It’s something a human being might conceivably want to order, right? I’m overreacting, right? Well buckle up, folks. I’ve only included this one as an admission that there are one or two vaguely “normal” things on the menu.
2. Blue Mutha’ Shut Yo’ Mouth!
Ah, here we go. Vague reference to “blue” without any indication of what flavor this might be trying to emulate? Check. Exclamation points? Check. A promise to provide “plenty of 190% grain alcohol”? Check.
This entry establishes another precedent: Most of the mixed/frozen drinks here are the bar equivalent of frat house hunch punch/jungle juices, and the majority of them proudly feature plenty of neutral, maximum-strength grain alcohol. Have you ever seen a bar brag about serving you Everclear before? Because I have not. Most bars keep their bottles of pure grain alcohol hidden, feeling a sense of shame at even admitting they exist. It’s made all the more amazing by the fact that whoever wrote this menu seems to have no idea of what Everclear actually is, calling it “190% grain alcohol” in every entry. I’d love to sit down with this person and listen to what they think “proof” vs. “alcohol by volume” actually means. I’m sure it would be enlightening.
3. Sour Apple
No apples were harmed in the making of this drink. Also, if your vodka is for some reason “sour,” then something might be wrong.
4. Purple Rain
Now we’re cooking with gas—which conveniently may be an ingredient in “Purple Rain.”
Show of hands: Who has seen “a lot of imagination” listed as a cocktail ingredient before?
