The Red Hook: A Manhattan That Took the Brooklyn Train and Got Tougher

Stirred, always. Anybody who shakes a drink made entirely of spirits and fortified wine is telling you they do not understand what they are doing, and the bruised, foamy mess in the glass will agree. You build it in a mixing glass over good clear ice and stir until the outside of the glass goes cold and your patience runs out, somewhere north of thirty seconds. The ratio is the whole point. Two ounces of rye carries the thing, and the half ounce each of Punt e Mes and maraschino are not interchangeable supporting players. Punt e Mes is a sweet vermouth that argues with you, loaded with bitter quinine, and it keeps the drink from going soft. Maraschino brings that strange dry funk, more like a pit than a fruit, that perfumes everything without adding obvious sugar. Strain into a chilled coupe. One brandied cherry, a real one, not the radioactive supermarket kind. Rye matters here. Use a bottling with some rye bite to it, because a soft wheated whiskey gets steamrolled.

The Red Hook lives in the Martini family, and that throws people who expect the Martini family to be pale and gin-scented. Forget the color. The family is defined by structure, a base spirit lengthened and seasoned by an aromatized wine, and that is exactly what is happening in the glass. The rye is the base. The Punt e Mes is the vermouth doing the work that dry vermouth does in a Martini, bending the spirit, adding bitterness and weight, making it a cocktail instead of a shot. The maraschino is just the accent, the third small voice. This is the same skeleton holding up the Bamboo, the Adonis, the Bijou, and the Bobby Burns, all of them spirit-plus-fortified-wine in slightly different clothes. The Red Hook is also one of a whole Brooklyn neighborhood of variations, the Bensonhurst and the Greenpoint and the rest, each swapping one modifier. Once you see the vermouth as the hinge the entire family swings open in front of you.

The Manhattan is the obvious ancestor, and the Red Hook is what happens when somebody who loves the Manhattan gets bored of being comforted by it. Vincenzo Errico built it at Milk & Honey, Sasha Petraske's tiny, rule-bound speakeasy on the Lower East Side, the bar that more or less reintroduced New York to the idea that a cocktail could be made with intent rather than a sour mix gun. Errico's move was simple and a little bit cruel. He took the Manhattan's sweet vermouth and replaced it with Punt e Mes, which is sweet vermouth with a chip on its shoulder, then dropped in maraschino where you might expect the rounder note of a Brooklyn's amer. What you get is drier, more bitter, and considerably more grown up. It launched a small obsession. Bartenders started naming spinoffs after every stop on the way to Coney Island, and for a while you could not work a New York bar without somebody ordering one of these neighborhood cocktails to prove they read the right blog. Ignore the cliquishness. The drink itself is honest. It tastes like a cold night, a long shift, and the particular satisfaction of something that refuses to flatter you.