Meet the Business Owners Spearheading Alcohol's Avant-Garde
Where others see an empty glass, Dave Arnold sees a blank canvas. Each cocktail Arnold creates at his trendsetting New York City bar, Booker and Dax, is a work of liquid artistry: His Manhattans, martinis and margaritas are shaken and stirred to painterly perfection, revealing new complexities and nuances with each sip.
But a Booker and Dax drink isn’t simply a masterpiece of mixology. It’s also the product of mad-scientist experimentation. Consider the absinthe-based French Colombian, which contrasts conventional ingredients like simple syrup, lemon juice and grated cinnamon with a most unconventional flourish: a 1,000-degree red-hot poker used to caramelize the sugar. Other weapons in Arnold’s arsenal include a centrifuge for separating liquids from solids, a rotary evaporator for low-temperature distillation and a steady supply of liquid nitrogen for precision stemware chilling.
“Our cocktail techniques are not
