On the last Thursday in December, Flavien Desoblin wasn’t counting down to the first moments of 2023. He was counting down the weeks until he finishes his new whisky menu. It’s an ambitious one, but the owner of Brandy Library is no stranger to ambitious undertakings. You could argue that ambition is his legacy, as first evidenced by him having opened Brandy Library, a whisky bar in New York’s ritzy Tribeca neighbourhood, in 2005, a time when whisky was categorically uncool. Later, the zeitgeist caught up: sales of bourbon skyrocketed, American rye rose from the dusty bottom shelf to hot-commodity status, the Irish distilling industry was virtually reborn, Japanese whisky hit unexpected heights, and small distilleries popped up across the US – and the world – like mushrooms after a rain.
Accordingly, the whisky bar became an entity of its own, a genre with a specific set of defining tropes regardless of whether the
