Toby Cecchini: Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life

Reviewed by MATT MARTEL

Disclosure of interest: I like booze. I'm very fond of bars, too.

So Toby Cecchini should be my type of guy. His book is all about things I like: drinking, nightlife and women.

But where I like a good drink, Cecchini is guilty of being a liquor nerd. He takes the pride in a good single malt that most of us reserve for our kid becoming an All Black, or our first Nobel Prize.

And it makes him a bit disconcerting. He has his own bar, which he loves. LOVES. And he clearly values his own opinions.

Cecchini is attempting to do for bars what Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential did for cooking. (In fact, Bourdain's books have spawned a whole genre of culinary tell all books.)

But there's a key difference. Bourdain railed against incompetent bosses and owners and revelled in the food, companions and good things about the trade.

Cecchini, who owns a successful, hip New York bar, can't quite make the formula work. He can take a tilt at bosses from his old life, but in reality is bitter about his own staff, customers and environs and it comes across somehow wrong.

And whereas Bourdain is an excellent chef and raconteur who truly loves life and food on the edge, Cecchini spends chapters talking about his delight in the posh life and surroundings of up-market hotel bars.

Where Cecchini does excel is in his anecdotes, drawing lovely pen portraits of the drunks and miscreants who populate his smoke-filled world.

There's Stephen: "He's grumpy about the crowds and the noise, so he slurps with an alarming efficiency ... It's gruelling to witness how badly he craves female company, smiling with tobacco-stained teeth and gesturing with shaky hands at some wary girl".

And then there's the bludging English duo of Frick and Frack. "Frick is older, perhaps in his mid-sixties, though the combined ruinous effects of alcoholism and perpetually bowing and scraping his way up the food chain have weathered him mightily."

The book is littered with thoughtful, illustrative vignettes of bar life, from naked women to professors of neurosurgery.

Cecchini writes well.

He devotes chapters to how he loves bartending, how it is an art, a noble profession.

He invented the Cosmopolitan, for goodness' sake. But he whines like your nana.

He hates the alcoholics he is partly responsible for creating, he gripes about most of his customers. He bitches about other bartenders not making his Cosmopolitan right. He comes across as mean-spirited.

And God forbid anyone who doesn't leave him a tip. Or anyone who asks him for a bevvie he thinks is beneath him.

Quite frankly, it's enough to make me want a drink.

Toby Cecchini's Cosmopolitan

5 part lemon vodka

5 parts triple sec or Cointreau

4 parts fresh lime juice

Dash or two of cranberry juice

Cecchini writes:

Pundits will pretend you're not being scrupulous if you don't pour the obscenely expensive triple sec doppelganger, Cointreau, into drinks like Margaritas and Cosmos. This is uninformed posturing.

Just slightly less fresh-squeezed lime juice than vodka and triple sec is a lot of lime juice.

The cranberry juice is just a stain, really, a dollop to make the thing fresh-looking and cheeky. Any more than a splash and it throws off the balance.

Shake it like mad, in a full shaker of ice, for at least 10 seconds.

Strain it into a chilled cocktail (Martini) glass and garnish with a fat twist of lemon.