- Jason Little
A couple of months back I interviewed Paul McGee, now of Lost Lake, for the Reader‘s bar issue—he was one of six prominent mixologists we asked to name a favorite drink. We disposed of the assignment at hand in a couple of minutes, so I took the opportunity to ask him a question that’s long been on my mind. The cocktail revival was like a lot of food movements have been—all about improving quality by getting rid of crappy shortcuts that had invaded the P&L sheets of bars all over America. No more bottles and packets of industrial-grade mixers; it was about making great cocktails by having good ingredients, squeezing your own juices, making your own bitters, and so on. My question was: Did Chicago have any great old-school places that had never made that deal with the efficiency devil in the first place? Was there some old time bar where they predated doing it badly and had kept up doing it right all these years?
But he could at least speak to my suggested possible example—he and his wife had gone to the bar at the Drake Hotel last summer. “We had really good drinks there,” he says. “I will say—it’s not Chicago, but have you ever been to Bryant’s in Milwaukee? It’s a cool place, and when you go there—and I had no idea of this, not being from the midwest—and order a brandy old-fashioned or a Wisconsin old-fashioned, they make it old school, basically a brandy and ginger ale drink. It’s got some bitters, it comes in a big snifter filled with ice, and it’s very refreshing—but it’s not what we know as an old-fashioned today.”
