Restaurants Return to Nostalgic Cocktails

The drinks of our youth are back and better than ever

By Lara Creasy

Let’s face it, the cocktails of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s were pretty fun. Sipping a Mai Tai or a Mud Slide with a bendy straw and a tiny cocktail umbrella just felt like the weekend or vacation. Drinks like the Appletini and the French Martini (which weren’t actually martinis at all) and the Cosmopolitan felt sophisticated but approachable. For those of us who were just old enough to drink then (yes, I am one of them!), these cocktails made sliding into adulthood seem possible. The drinks looked classy and put together, but they still tasted really good.

Somewhere along the way, drinking started to take itself very seriously. The classic cocktail renaissance that began, as all culinary trends do, in New York just before the turn of the century, slowly started to find its way into other big cities around 2004. Once classic cocktails took hold and the mixologist became ubiquitous (again, I was one of them!), the fun and frivolous cocktails of our youth became, well, embarrassing to order. There were drinks that we might have still loved, but that none of us would dare order at a respectable restaurant bar, lest we be rewarded with a generous dose of side eye and a snicker.

Mind you, the cocktail revolution brought us things we didn’t know we needed, like fresh juices, higher-quality vermouths and homemade syrups with no preservatives. Once we tasted a margarita with fresh lime juice or a tiki drink with housemade orgeat, we could never imagine going back to buying flavored vodkas or bottled sour mix with high-fructose corn syrup. Fresh is best!

But is it wrong if we still miss the fun part?

Fun Isn’t Always Frivolous

Whether you are someone who remembers drinking espresso martinis the first time they were all the rage, or whether you are a member of Gen Z discovering for the first time that a cocktail can taste like key lime pie, we are ready to be enjoying a little levity when we imbibe. The last four years have lacked a lot in the fun department, so it makes sense that we would gaze backward to the ’90s and the Y2K era with rose-colored glasses.

“I think people are drawn to nostalgic cocktails for the same reason they do theme parties like ‘Remember the 90s’: It taps into a sense of familiarity and comfort,” says Allison Lovelace, beverage manager for Atlanta’s Little Sparrow and Bar Blanc. 

Allison got me thinking about throwback cocktails recently when we made drinks side-by-side at Team Hidi, a fundraiser event for the Giving Kitchen held in March at Truist Park. We all got our pick of spirits donated by the sponsors, from which we had to make a cocktail to represent our restaurant. I chose tequila and triple sec to represent my Tex Mex restaurant, Superica. Allison went completely off-brand for Little Sparrow by choosing vodka and Hpnotiq, a bright blue spirit created in 2001 of cognac and fruit juices, a fixture of early 2000s club life in the ATL. (The slogan on the product’s website? “Old enough to drink, young enough to enjoy it.”)

When I told Allison I had huge respect for the way she challenged herself, she told me, “I love utilizing off-site events as a way to show guests and other bartenders that in a world of ‘mixologists,’ it’s okay not to take yourself so seriously and just have fun. I decided to lean into the playfulness of Hpnotiq and relive some of the bad drinking habits of my senior year in high school.”

I could relate. When I was part of the opening team at Atlanta restaurant Beetlecat back in 2016, I was already feeling ready to experiment with nostalgic cocktails. I was questioning why I couldn’t take all the work I’d been doing with mixology and re-interpreting classic cocktails, and re-make some long-maligned cocktails into polished gems using those techniques.

Beetlecat has a downstairs lounge that looks like a basement from That ’70s Show, with all of the Farrah Fawcett posters and macramé wall hangings to go along with it. What better place to offer a Tequila Sunrise with fresh squeezed orange juice and real pomegranate grenadine that we made in house? Why shouldn’t we offer a Long Island Iced Tea made with all the usual spirits, but with Pimm’s and actual iced tea instead of Coca-Cola from a gun? We could, and we did!

I might have been a little ahead of the nostalgic cocktail wave, which has mostly crested after the pandemic, when places and things that offer feelings of comfort and security have really taken root in our culture.

But Atlanta bar JoJo’s Beloved is currently approaching cocktails with the very same homage to the late ’70s and early ’80s, when disco was a lifestyle. The bar sets a real mood through its décor, its music and its cocktails.

Maddie McIntosh, bar ambassador for JoJo’s Beloved, says that she and her fellow bartenders do their best to get across the spirit of this era that they love, even if they change the brands and techniques they use.

“Using new ways and modern methods to create those flavors is really fun for us and a fun thing to share with guests,” Maddie says. “They might remember a Fuzzy Navel, but maybe not made exactly with these spirits or in this way.”

JoJo’s bar team ranges in age from 25 to 50. “We have a pretty diverse team in terms of age, but no one is a novice behind the bar,” she tells me. “You are required to have a certain level of cocktail knowledge to be back there, and to understand why we do what we do.“ The bar’s menu tells visitors the name of the drink, the ingredients, the bartender who created it, and also the inspiration, to help guests get their bearings.

For example, “Oh Sheila,” named for the 1985 Ready for the World song, has Ten to One rum, Blanche Armagnac, Benedictine, Xila liqueur (pronounced “Sheila”), lime and strawberry. It was inspired not just by the song itself, but also by the Bramble and the Singapore Sling.

“There is a whole culture around bartending and around going to bars that says there are things you aren’t supposed to order,” Maddie says. She and her team aim to break those stigmas at JoJo’s.

“My favorite shot that we do is called ‘Redheaded Independent Woman Who Don’t Need No Man’. We found a way to take a Red Headed Slut shot (Jägermeister, cranberry juice and peach schnapps), and incorporate what we call Fägermeister. We blend a bunch of really nice amaros to create the idea of Jägermeister. It’s a way to make it acceptable to order something that may not have originally been sophisticated.”

“We don’t reinvent the wheel, but we can take those foundational concepts and tell a story about how they have evolved,” she adds.

Don’t Skimp on Ingredients

Other bars and restaurants around Atlanta are experimenting with their own throwback cocktails. Mr. B Bar at The Burgess Hotel in Buckhead offers its take on the Cosmopolitan, with Meyer lemon vodka, Cointreau, lime and a cranberry citrus cordial. Dad’s Atlanta on North Highland Avenue is making their craft version of an Appletini with rye vodka and acid-adjusted granny smith apples. They also offer an Espresso Martini.

Allison made a fancied-up Grasshopper for Bar Blanc’s menu, and she says she had a blast creating it. She’s also working on dialing in an updated Midori Sour that will be worthy of the menu.

“The advice I would give to a bar manager trying to offer fun nostalgic cocktails in a modern-day world is not to skimp on the ingredients,” she tells me. “I am a huge fan of the disco drink era, but I am well aware that a lot of the cocktails utilized cheap products that were made to be shelf stable and save on cost. I would always recommend using fresh ingredients and tweaking the recipe to align with the modern palate.”

Whereas the bars and restaurants of the 1970s may have only had a few brands of bottom-shelf cordials to choose from, today’s bars and restaurants have plenty of options that enable them to offer the flavors they want with better quality. Cordials lines, such as Marie Brizzard (available from Winebow) or Giffard (available from Prime Wine & Spirits) offer bottlings of Blue Curacao, crème de menthe or apple schnapps, which enable drinks like the Blue Hawaiian and the Appletini to be made respectably.

Or better yet, experiment with your own ingredients to get across the spirit of the cocktail you used to love, but perhaps not so literally. Pretend you are a jazz musician, riffing on a melody and making it your own.

No matter what cocktail you loved in your youth or saw your parents drinking and longed to try, you can find a way to make it work on your restaurant’s menu. All it takes is sourcing quality ingredients, not worrying if it’s cool enough and having some fun with it. Trust me, if you have fun with it, your guests will, too.