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Unless you’ve been under a rock—or up to your eyeballs in uninspired Cosmos—you know that New York cocktail consciousness has been on the rise. Bartenders (bar chefs, if you must) are nightlife’s new celebrities. And everything old (as in classic) is new again. When Audrey Saunders opened her long-awaited Pegu Club in its second-story perch above West Houston Street, connoisseurs had even more cause to celebrate. Saunders, a protegé of Dale DeGroff and avid student of the art of mixology, worked her way up through the bartender ranks from Blackbird to Beacon to Bemelmans, where she honed its cocktail program into a work of potable art. At Pegu—a collaboration with the owners of Flatiron Lounge and Zinc Bar—she aims even higher. Named for an actual British officers’ club in Rangoon (and its tart and snappy house drink), Pegu has a vaguely Indochinese air, a surplus of hand-carved wood, and an Asian-inspired snack menu. It also has, according to Saunders, “the biggest ice cubes you’ll find in New York”—a critical distinction, since big ice is denser, stays colder longer, and reduces dilution, the bane of all cocktails. There’s a drinks database of original recipes from spirits savants like Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh and David Wondrich. Most intriguingly, there’s a line of dasher bottles behind the bar, each filled with a different tincture or extract meant to foster experimentation, an impulse that extends to customers as well: Saunders has filled dropper bottles with fresh juice, bitters, and simple syrup for tableside alterations. In time, innovations like these might become tools of the trade. For now, here are some of the defining artifacts of this moment in cocktail culture. — Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

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