Lke Jazz, the cocktail is a quintessentially American invention. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, it kicked into gear during the twenties, was floored by Prohibition, and slowly managed to regain a foothold after the second World War.
For the next half-century or so, the cocktail witnessed a steady decline, sslowly losing sway over the American imagination. Then, at the dawn of the new millenium, as an ethos of seasonality and regionality thriving in restaurants found its way behind the bar, the San Francisco Bay Area suddenly bore witness to the birth of a California Cocktail Renaissance.
Bay Area Cocktails provides us a useful source of cocktail recipes combined with interviews and insights from some of the savvy spirit makers and wry mixologists of the San Francisco Bay Area.