The PDT Cocktail Book: The Complete Bartender's Guide from the Celebrated Speakeasy [Hardcover]

A lot of cocktail books are published every year, some of them containing thousands of recipes, some of them focusing on only a few dozen. Many of these books aren't especially useful, presenting recipes chosen with little care or attention to detail. With books like that, it's caveat emptor and bibitor.

Not so with Jim Meehan's PDT Cocktail Book, an essential volume from one of the cocktail world's brightest stars. Meehan is the manager of PDT, one of New York's most celebrated cocktail bars. Prior to that he worked under Audrey Sanders at Pegu Club. His credentials are impeccable.

As soon as you pick it up, you know this is a quality book; substantial and well bound, with thick glossy paper. The illustrations (by Chris Gall) are bright, colorful, whimsical and eye-catching.

The PDT Cocktail Book shares Meehan's advice on designing a bar, stocking spirits and choosing the right ingredients and glassware, along with his tips and techniques for properly mixing drinks. A novice mixologist can pick up this book and gain a solid introduction to the subject, even if they have little or no knowledge to begin with. But the experienced bartender will also find much to learn from here.

The heart of The PDT Cocktail Book is, of course, the drinks. It contains over 300 recipes: about half of them original drinks served at PDT, along with many classic cocktails, plus some new suggestions from friends and colleagues. This isn't a hodgepodge of random recipes either. These are hand-picked and tested; the real drinks as served in a world-class bar.

The ingredients and instructions for each drink are clearly spelled out. But Meehan goes one step further, including (where possible) the provenance of the drink, giving credit to the person who invented it. As such, The PDT Cocktail Book represents a valuable volume of cocktail history, helping those who are interested to trace the origins of various cocktails. (Along those lines, it also contains an excellent bibliography.)

Another interesting thing Meehan does is recommend specific brands of spirits for all the recipes. Thus we see that he makes his gin and tonics with Tanqueray, his Martinis with Plymouth, and his Aviations with Beefeater. These aren't hard and fast rules; they're simply guidelines, telling us how they make the drinks at PDT. They represent a starting point for building the flavor profile of the drink. You can (and should) try combinations of your own.

Meehan's book will appeal most to those who already have an interest in and facility with mixology. Any bartender would be strongly urged to buy this right away. But even the amateur will enjoy this beautiful book.

If you have any interest in drinking well, you will appreciate thumbing through it. There are so many interesting ideas for ways of combining flavors here. It also teaches a lot about spirits and how to use them. If you don't have the ingredients to make the drinks at home, copy the recipes down and take them to your favorite bartender and let him/her mix them for you.

The PDT Cocktail Book joins Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology and Dale Degroff's The Craft of the Cocktail as the indispensable monographs on modern cocktails and spirits. It belongs on every cocktail lover's shelf.

For more reviews like this one, please visit ProfessorCocktail.com.

I am a big fan of Meehan's, and I was very excited to see this volume published. Meehan's is one of the most authoritative and inventive voices on the subject of cocktails, both classic and modern, and this entry into the crowded world of cocktail books is decidedly highly anticipated.

To be fair, this is, undoubtedly, an excellent cocktail book. It contains interesting twists on some classic staples (Benton's Old-Fashioned, with bacon-infused bourbon, por ejemplo) as well as some interesting original concoctions from the PDT menu. Some of the boutique items, such as complicated syrups and infused versions of liquors, have detailed instructions on how to go about making your own version at home -- which is quite thoughtful and a mitzvah. The illustrations are whimsical and fun, and the book has the feel of something worth having -- it is nicely bound and solid in a way that few books are these days. It even has a nice satin-feeling bookmark so you don't have to dog-ear pages to remember where you want to go for the next round once you're a few drinks in.

There are, however, several downsides to this book, in my opinion. First, and probably most relevant, is that specific makes and models are suggested for each liquor in each drink. This would be fine, if the authors indicated the rationale for the suggested bottle and provided some guidance on substitution suggestions. Because they fail to explain WHY they choose a specific vintage (Beefeater gin for this drink, Hayman's Old Tom for that one), the reader is left with the impression that one needs 30 different bottles of gin to make 30 different drinks. This approach may make sense for a fancy cocktail bar in Manhattan, but the authors have now ventured into non-enterprise cocktail making, and they need to be more reasonable about what the amateur cocktailier knows and can reasonably access as she or he plays with these very inventive recipes.

The other somewhat major challenge with the book is the fact that the drinks themselves are never pictured. Over the past year I've been working my way through many of the recipes in Esquire magazine's classic "The Drink Book", and this has been my biggest frustration -- for some obscure drinks with boutique ingredients, one never quite knows if you've gotten it "right". In the absence of lickable paper or a buddy who makes all the classics and can critique your technique, the best way for a novice to benchmark their end results is to have a picture of what a finished version of the cocktail looks like (well, that and drink it and see if it's delicious). Those images, even in illustration form, are decidedly absent from this book, which feels like a bad editorial decision.

There are other minor items that could have transformed this good book into a great book. When I blog about cocktails, I often try to provide some context for the drink to help guide people to something that they might like -- this drink is on the sweeter side, that one has a more tropical feel, this other is probably most appropriate for someone who loves a good belt of Scotch early in the morning, whatever, just something to give people a little organizer in their heads around what they might experience in the drink. Those discussion are missing from this (and most) cocktail books, much to my chagrin.

Overall, these little oversights (or editorial omissions) add up, and by the end the book sums up to less than it could have been. And yet...despite the challenges, it remains a good book with great recipes that will no doubt distinguish itself among the din of cocktail books entering the market this year. Its definitely worth having, but if you're a true newbie in this space, I'd start off with Dale Degroff's book and work your way up to this one.

After reading the review "Good, but not great, cocktail book" by Jude I decided to write my own review of this book to set things right. As stated in the foreword that David Wondrich penned, this is the book that others wish they had written. No level of detail is spared; no secrets held back from this celebrated cocktail haunt. The content, format and illustrations are transcendent. To give it 3 stars because it lacks pictures of cocktails or descriptions of how a cocktail tastes, is like saying Shakespeare should have included cliff's notes, illustrated each scene and made a note about how the audience should feel. If the world came to and unfortunate end and cocktails revered to vodka martinis, a millenia later this book would be the Rosetta Stone that would bring back a cocktail renaissance.

Dave Catania