Eastern Standard

Eastside

The Eastside is the modern classic that tastes like a garden: gin, lime, mint and cucumber, shaken cold and strained silky, out of the early-2000s New York revival and most often credited to George Delgado at Libation on the Lower East Side. It reads as a gimlet that walked through a greenhouse. The mint and cucumber are muddled fresh into the sour frame, the cucumber cooling exactly where the lime sharpens, and the drink lands green, cold and improbably refreshing at full cocktail strength. Names shift by neighbourhood between Eastside, East Side and Eastside Gimlet; the drink underneath is constant. It is also the modern bar’s great gin ambassador, the drink bartenders reach for when a guest says they do not like gin, and the one that most reliably proves them wrong. The botanicals do not vanish. They simply get a garden to stand in, and the glass tastes green before it tastes of juniper.

Southside

Nobody owns the Southside’s origin story, which is half its charm. New York claims it for the 21 Club, the speakeasy where it was the house pour for the well-dressed end of Prohibition; Long Island claims it for the Southside Sportsmen’s Club, where mint from the kitchen garden met gin after the shooting; Chicago claims it for the South Side itself, where mobs allegedly softened harsh bootleg gin with lemon, sugar and mint. All three stories involve gin that needed forgiving and mint that obliged. What emerged is the Mojito’s cooler-headed cousin: gin, citrus, sugar and mint, shaken and strained into a coupe rather than built long over ice. Without soda and crushed ice diluting the frame, the drink is more concentrated and more elegant, the mint reading as perfume rather than salad, the gin’s botanicals and the herb finishing each other’s sentences. It survived Prohibition for the simplest reason: it never needed bad gin to justify itself. With a good London Dry the Southside is one of the finest simple gin sours in the canon, a drink that dresses for dinner where the Mojito dresses for the beach.

Gimlet

The Gimlet is the Royal Navy in a coupe. In 1867 the Merchant Shipping Act made lime rations compulsory aboard British ships, and in the same year Lauchlin Rose of Leith patented a way of preserving lime juice in sugar without a drop of alcohol. Rose's Lime Cordial went to sea, the officers' gin went into it, and somewhere between Portsmouth and Bombay the Gimlet was born. The defining decision is the cordial. A true Gimlet is gin and lime cordial and nothing else, and its character is exactly the cooked, marmalade-edged lime that preservation produces: smooth, rounded and faintly nostalgic, closer to silk than to citrus. Fresh lime and sugar make a bright and blameless drink, but they make a different one, and the traditional position is that the cordial version is the Gimlet and the fresh version is its modern variation. Proportions are the drinker's prerogative in the naval spirit. The classic pour ran as heavy as half and half; the modern palate prefers the drier three to one given here.