Nostalgia has been a driving force in cocktail trends in recent years, with classic drinks making a creative comeback. Tropical takes on the Penicillin, the viral Negroni Sbagliato, and fresh interpretations of staples like the old fashioned and martini—featuring artisanal bitters or infused spirits—show how bartenders are putting a modern spin on timeless favorites. This return to the basics is paired with elevated ingredients and thoughtful twists, breathing new life into familiar recipes.
“The classics are kind of like the road map for cocktails,” says Gabe Orta, cofounder of Bar Lab, a Miami-based hospitality management and consulting company. “They’re timeless, and the original recipes all have a story to tell, so it’s a good way for bartenders to start the creative process.”
Bar Lab operates over 20 venues across the country and has guided many others, teaching the art of mixology and helping bars, restaurants, and hotels craft innovative beverage programs. For Orta and his team, the starting point for any specialty cocktail menu is always the same.
“We say, ‘What kind of food are we going to sell?’ Even if it’s a cocktail bar that doesn’t have food, we’ll get inspired by the food in the neighborhood,” he explains. “Then we start looking in our memory bank. We’re super tasters, and we’ve been making drinks for over 20 years now, so we have a bag of storage in our palettes.”
Margot Bar & Bistro, the company’s newest concept, opened in Miami Beach last fall. The food menu highlights seasonally-driven American favorites infused with a wide-ranging diversity of flavors. The cocktail menu showcases Bar Lab’s twist on classics, with creative takes like the Flamingo Mojito.
For Orta, including a mojito on the menu was an obvious choice. “It just fits,” he says of Miami’s vibrant culture and tropical climate. But true to Bar Lab’s ethos, he wanted to elevate the drink with unexpected layers of flavor.
Traditionally made with white rum, Margot’s riff on a mojito also features a dark Jamaican-style rum, which brings a richer and more complex flavor profile to the cocktail. It incorporates guanabana, also known as soursop, a fruit native to the American tropics and popular in Caribbean, South American, and Southeast Asian cuisines. Known for its blend of sweet and tangy flavors, guanabana adds a tropical flair and a custard-like texture that gives the drink a thicker, milkier mouthfeel.
There are no hard rules about what can or can’t go into a drink at Bar Lab—unconventional ingredients are always on the table. The only guiding principle is that the final cocktail must achieve the perfect balance.
“The best cocktails have those hidden layers that are sometimes very subtle, and that aren’t taking away from the main attraction, which is the spirit,” Orta says. This approach hinges on a deep understanding of the ingredients, he adds.
His advice for others in the beverage world is simple: “The main thing for me is just to understand the ingredients you’re working with,” Orta says. “Do the research. Try the ingredients. Make sure you understand them. Ask yourself how much of a difference it’s going to make if you get really high-quality ingredients. Even if it’s for a syrup, or something that you’re going to cook or ferment, the quality really makes an impact.”
Crane Club, which opened in November in New York City, highlights woodfire specialties from acclaimed chef Melissa Rodriguez, in the same space she helped make iconic during its Del Posto days. At the bar, director Chris Lemperle brings a thoughtful approach to cocktails, ensuring they stand on their own while also complementing the food. “The cocktails should never be too abstract or too conceptual in a way that detracts from the dining experience,” he says. “My approach has always been that it shouldn’t go on this menu if you wouldn’t have it more than twice in the same evening.”
Some of the cocktails on the menu lean more modern, but around half represent “b-side classics” that Lemperle wanted to revisit. “It’s really thinking about flavor profiles that are easy for the guest to understand, and then utilizing the right spirits and products on the back end in a way where we can do all of these cool techniques but still present it to the guests in a way that’s simple and easy to digest, so they spend more time enjoying their friends and the food as opposed to having their heads in the menu,” he says.
One example is the Pisco Punch, a cocktail from a pre-prohibition saloon in California, traditionally made with citrus, gum arabic, pineapple, and pisco, an unaged grape brandy. Crane Club’s version preserves the original drink’s core—pisco, pineapple, and citrus—while adding secondary and tertiary notes from oolong tea and fino sherry. The bar also takes preserved Meyer lemons used for the restaurant’s fennel salad, doing an oleosaccharum-style infusion to create a lemon cordial that mirrors the effect of a gum arabic-based syrup.
Lemperle stuck with the original name of the cocktail for that offering. In contrast, Crane Club also has a cocktail called the Cavalier. It takes inspiration from the fourth regiment, a Manhattan riff, but pushes things far enough that he felt it earned a unique name.
The Manhattan is traditionally a 2-1-2 ratio: two dashes of bitters, one ounce of vermouth, two ounces of the base spirit. The fourth regiment is 50-50, equal parts sweet vermouth and the base spirit, with a blend of Peychaud’s bitters, orange bitters, and most importantly, celery bitters, which Lemperle says is “very distinct” and “really defines the cocktail.” For the Cavalier, he kept the 50-50 proportion, but split up the base spirit with a blend of rye whisky, Irish whisky, and Calvados apple brandy.
“We’re taking the super savory rye and celery combination and dialing down that rye a little bit,” he says. “We’re using apple brandy, and some barley notes from that Irish whiskey with that blend of celery bitters, and we use just a little touch of cane syrup to balance it out, so it’s not rippingly savory.”
Lazy Betty is a high-concept restaurant serving innovative tasting menus in Atlanta. Beverage Director Conrad C. Helms IV has crafted a cocktail program that balances bold creativity with familiar appeal. The menu includes “more wild, progressive” options like the Baby Maker, made with Baby Jane Bourbon, Dola Dira, stone fruit shrub, grapefruit, peach oleosaccharum, egg white, and rose water.
“We really use classic cocktails as a home base or comfort zone to build off of,” Helms says. “A lot of cocktails end up on our specialty list after they’ve been toyed with and messed with so much that they couldn’t even be called a classic cocktail.”
Lazy Betty also offers a second cocktail list featuring more accessible drinks that resemble familiar favorites—but with a modern twist to align with the restaurant’s inventive culinary style. For Helms, the creative process there begins with fresh techniques to elevate and enhance classic cocktails.
“It’s about making sure we can still give people what they want, but in the most exceptional way that we possibly can,” he says. “Fat washing comes to mind for a lot of spirit-driven cocktails, just because it increases that decadence with the fattiness that you get on the palette. In a lot of ways, it really bolsters the ‘wow’ factor.”
Lazy Betty’s take on an old fashioned, the Attitude Adjustment, reimagines the classic with a high-proof bourbon base, fat-washed with A5 Waygu beef to soften its sharper edges while preserving its nuanced flavors. A syrup made from upcycled fruit trim adds citrusy depth, while Angostura and orange bitters balance the profile. The final touch is a smoky finish achieved using barrel wood chips.
The restaurant’s version of a martini, aptly named The Aristocrat, was designed to be an indulgent, over-the-top experience. “We were thinking, how do we make a martini, but make it just the craziest, most decadent experience you can have?” Helm says.
To achieve this, the team revisited the martini’s origins, returning to the traditional 2:1 ratio of spirit to vermouth—a far cry from the bone-dry martinis popular today. Guests can choose vodka or gin, each fat-washed with Chilean truffle oil to add texture and aroma without overpowering the drink. To round out the profile, the cocktail uses an ounce of Bordiga Bianco Vermouth, which is lighter, more floral, and slightly sweeter than the dry vermouths typically used in modern martinis. A garnish of crème fraîche olives topped with Lazy Betty caviar completes the drink.
“It’s not a martini like you’ve ever had, but at the end of the day, it’s closer to a classic martini than one you’ll probably get anywhere else,” Helms says.
Lazy Betty has experimented with different ways to present updated classics on its cocktail menu. For example, the Attitude Adjustment was initially listed on its own, but guests often asked, “Is this an old fashioned?” Now, the restaurant puts in parentheses what classic they’re alluding to.
“If you’re a new guest and you’re looking for something that’s comfortable and approachable—especially in a concept like ours, where you’re going to be enjoying a lot of things that you might not have had before on the tasting menu—it’s nice to feel a certain sense of home,” Lemperle says. “We’re pretty upfront about how this is our riff on an old fashioned, Manhattan, Negroni, or any of the other classics that we’ve riffed in the past. You think about who’s ordering it, and you think about making it known that you’re definitely making a drink that’s comfortable enough for them to try, but has enough of a twist on it to make them happy that they chose us and that they came here tonight.”
