Last Call: Bartenders on Their Final Drink

Drink experts offer end-of-life planning with a twist—or sometimes an olive—in this ambitious cocktail guide that doesn’t live up to its promise. “As I approached my fiftieth birthday, my own mortality and sense of legacy weighed heavy on my mind,” writes James Beard Award–winning Parsons (Bitters and Amaro) in the introduction to this travelogue cum collection of recipes and bartender interviews. Visiting nearly three dozen bars throughout the country, Parsons asks mixologists for the recipe for the last drink they would like to have before they die. Given the premise, the book is disappointingly not quite edgy enough to captivate, nor especially epiphanic. Parsons’s project is instead workmanlike, with straightforward prose, informative Q&As, and moments of serendipity. At Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar, he meets Toby Cecchini, the man who, while working at Odeon in the 1980s, perfected the cosmopolitan. As a cocktail collection, the book’s 40 recipes are a mixed bag: some bartenders want to meet their maker with a classic Manhattan (two nearly identical recipes are offered) or martini. More intriguing are the craft cocktail options such as the grilled apricot iced tea, using apricot-infused Irish whiskey, found at the Service Bar in Washington, D.C., or the Kona swizzle, with rum and coffee liqueur, from the Fox Liquor Bar in Raleigh, N.C. While there are certainly gems, unfortunately, too much here feels watered down. (Oct.)