Well look who it is! The bearded fellow was our Thanksgiving party’s MVG (most valuable guest) — his unusual alcoholic offerings, homemade chocolate layer cake, and bravery in the face of gravy duty more than made up for that little mishap.
“A Brotherhood Formed With Cocktails and Ice”:
MAYUR SUBBARAO is a serious drinker. This isn’t to suggest that Mr. Subbarao, a 34-year-old environmental lawyer in Manhattan, drinks to excess — he’s openly disdainful of “binge drinking”— but rather that he drinks cocktails with a seriousness that, even he admits, sometimes borders on obsession.
He makes his own block ice, daily, by freezing water in a loaf pan and then carving it into oversize chunks for use in cocktails, and he sometimes travels to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, to harvest colder, more esteemed cubes of ice from a friend who owns a Kold-Draft ice machine. He also makes his own vermouth, which he occasionally brings along to the handful of cocktail-centric bars that he frequents. And when he gets together with friends at a bar, it’s rarely “over drinks”— it’s about them.
Mr. Subbarao is, by his own admission, a “cocktail geek,” one of a growing legion of amateur connoisseurs who have turned recherché cocktails — whether mixed at home or sought out in bars and restaurants — into a lifestyle, or to hear some tell it, a religion.
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The Great American Cooking Project
Notes from others: