Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I saw a comment last week asking for “what to have in your tiny little at-home bar”. It’s a reasonable question. I’ve been thinking about it. I finally concluded that it’s a bad question. You don’t need a tiny little at-home bar. You need a bar cart. Let me explain (and rattle off some recipes along the way, because it has, yet again, been a hella week).
American bars are, culinarily speaking, fairly odd places. A decent bar is expected to produce just about every alcoholic drink possible. Okay, okay, dive bars aren’t in that category; when you’re in a dive, you get a cold beer, and you’re grateful for it. But Hemingway’s has a menu of twenty cocktails. Most people order one of those twenty. But sometimes they don’t. And no matter how buck-wild those off-menu requests get, we’re expected to pull it together. Just last week, a customer asked for sangria. I pulled this together on the fly:
Quick Sangria
1 oz. lime juice
1 oz. pineapple juice
½ oz. lemon juice
½ oz. simple syrup
1 oz. brandy
Whatever red wine is open and isn’t too expensive
Shake all ingredients but the red wine. Strain into an iced wine glass. Top with red wine. Garnish with every piece of fruit you have in the garnish tray. Serve.
And that isn’t even the craziest thing I’ve been asked to serve. One bright-eyed, bushy-tailed customer asked me for a Ramos Gin Fizz. I did not hit them. I did turn to Alex - a beautiful, talented bartender who’s built like an Amazon - and whimper slightly. Two solid minutes of shaking is a bit much to ask for at this point in my career.
Ramos Gin Fizz
2 oz. Citadelle gin
½ oz. lemon juice
½ oz. lime juice
1 oz. heavy cream
1 oz. simple syrup
1 egg white
Club soda
Pour 1 oz, heavy cream into a Collins glass. Put the remaining cream in the freezer to chill.
Add all remaining ingredients, except for the club soda, to a cocktail shaker. Shake the cocktail for 30-35 seconds. Strain the cocktail into the small tin. Dump the ice out of the other tin.
Look at Alex with puppy eyes and ask her to shake the cocktail for 1 full minute. Remove the Collins glass from the freezer. Pour the cocktail into the glass with one hand, while pouring club soda into the glass with the other hand. Ideally, two equal streams of fluid should meet and merge before they reach the bottom of the glass. Swearing is permitted.
Stop pouring when the foam reaches the top of the glass. Put the glass back into the freezer for 2-3 minutes. Poke a hole in the foam with a straw and slowly pour soda water into the hole until the head reaches an inch over the lip of the glass. Sigh in relief.
My point here is that a good bar is built to do it all. You don’t go into a Greek restaurant and order tacos, but a bar’s expected to make margaritas, Manhattans, and everything in between. We’ve got hundreds of bottles, and a huge amount of talent. We can do pretty much everything. Your home bar cannot, and should not, try to do everything. I suppose that you could build a decent rail bar at home - one bottle each of cheap tequila, rum, bourbon, gin, and vodka so you could make one-and-ones for unexpected guests. But it’s 2026. Who the hell has unexpected guests anymore? More to the point, why should you have the ingredients for every possible drink at home? Your pantry’s stocked to make your favorite foods. Your bar should be built the same way.
Instead of a “tiny little at-home bar”, I’d suggest building a bar cart for your day drinking. Bar carts are the epitome of upper-crust mid-century elegance. They were probably descended from English tea trolleys; unsurprisingly, Americans took a genteel tradition and inserted booze into it. For a brief, shining moment, it was considered the height of civilization to wheel out a little cart and assemble a martini for a lady guest at the drop of a hat. Bar carts died in the ‘70s with the death of cocktail culture. It’s time to bring them back.
You aren’t obligated to go all out on your bar cart. You aren’t even obligated to make martinis - a margarita cart sounds amazing. You just need to be focused. Don’t try to buy the supplies to make all the drinks for everybody. Buy the booze, fixings, and tools needed to make your favorite drink, in any room of the house, whenever the mood strikes you. You won’t break the bank buying booze you’ll never drink, and you’ll find it easy to experiment and upgrade the cocktail you love best.
If I were building a martini cart from scratch, I’d start by thrifting a bar cart, mostly because that would be fun in its own right. To my immense surprise, you can buy a nice bar cart online for under $50. Grab yourself some nice tools - an ice bucket and tongs are a must, as well as a good bar spoon and stirring vessel. For ingredients, I’d roll with something like this:
Bombay Sapphire Gin
Citadelle J’Ardin Gin
Tito’s Vodka (pint)
Dolin Dry Vermouth
Olive Brine
Sea Salt
Lemon zest
…and see where the spirit moves you from there. The point is to focus on what you love and give yourself the tools to experiment. Make your favorite drink. Make it better. Serve it to your friends. Show them why they should love it, too. Don’t try to please everyone. Please yourself first, and bring your friends along for the journey.
My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make this drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.
OPEN THREAD!
Busy questions go.
Update on semi-feral cat - she still keeps her distance when she’s outside, but she will let us pet her through the door. Like a prison visitation - I guess we’re the inmates.