Specifically, Aryucharoen takes inspiration from the Boston Flip, a variation that sprung up around the turn of the 20th century. The earliest-known published recipe dates to 1904 in Frank Newman’s American-Bar: Boissons Anglaises & Américaines, where the recipe calls for equal parts rye and Madeira, a touch of sugar and a whole egg. In the 1930s and ’40s, the drink also appeared in the Mr. Boston Deluxe Bartender’s Guides and The How and When by Hyman Gale and Gerald F. Marco, featuring similar proportions but calling only for an egg yolk rather than a whole egg.

Like the original, Aryucharoen calls for a whole egg, but she takes that portion in a surprising new direction. Instead of just cracking a whole egg into the shaker, she created a proprietary “custard base” that does the triple duty of sweetening, flavoring and thickening the drink. It’s made with roasted pistachios, whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, spices, brandy and egg yolk powder; the latter ingredient is dehydrated in-house and was originally created as a way to use up the abundance of leftover egg yolks from the restaurant’s popular pavlova dessert. Since the bar team has egg whites on hand to make sours, bartenders at Tomat add the egg white to the tin separately.

Aryucharoen also opts for a much more spirit-forward profile (5:1) than the original ratio (1:1). She feels that, in this drink, the rye should be the star, but in a way that shows its softer side. “Usually when people see rye,” she says, “they don’t think that it has the capacity to be creamy and gentle.” She favors Rye & Sons, which she says has a good amount of spice and, at nearly 100 proof, stands up to the rich custard in the drink.

I am here, as are a dozen other people, to learn how to dance at the club, or Dancefloor 101, as the colorful Instagram flier suggested. According to recent headlines, this is a much-needed endeavor, with young people in particular either unable to let loose or nostalgic for bygone eras of more ferally “getting crunk.” “Suddenly Everyone Is Scared to Dance at Concerts and Clubs,” the Wall Street Journal declared last year, blaming a new fear of “looking goofy” on camera. So when the flyer asked, “want to move but don’t know where to start?” I thought, Yes, feeling sheepish at even acknowledging that impulse. For so many people, dancing comes naturally, but for so much of my life, I have tried to resist the wiggle and the shimmy and the bop, writing dancing off as something not for me. 

See, integral to my family lore is the idea that I can’t dance. When rhythm doesn’t evade me, it’s the coordinated motion; even a box step hates to see me coming. “When everyone went left, Bettina went right,” my mom has often said, retelling a story from a school performance when I was child. While I appreciate this as a metaphor for my desire to go my own way or my ability to resist societal pressures, it, coupled with the psychic trauma of awkward middle school dances, has made moving my body to music in public a mortifying act; that I go to so many concerts at which moshing and jumping are the preferred movements is no coincidence. And yet, the body wants what the mind tries to resist: I do, often, feel the music and want to let it move through me. I want to dance in a room with other people, even if it feels embarrassing to acknowledge that, much less do it.

And so, here I am, embarrassing myself. In this loft in Bushwick, I’m trying to see if dancing intuitively is, however unintuitively, something that can be learned. First, the instructor—a dancer and puppeteer who wears neon colors and is described as specializing in “expressive storytelling and tomfoolery”—teaches us about “catching the beat,” as the DJ in the corner gets to work. This, I breathe with a sign of relief, is something I can generally do. The beat, the instructor says, is the collective experience, connecting us to everyone else in the same space. There is a lot of talk of energy: of putting it into spaces through dancing, or of sucking it out by standing still on the dance floor.

We’re to catch the beat in our heads first, and then send it down our bodies, part by part. I can feel it in my head and then kick it to my shoulders and then to my hands and hips. It’s when we’re instructed to connect the beat between body parts that I feel the familiar breakdown, like the glitch if I try to pat my head and rub my stomach. I feel like a robot: unnatural, my body parts too clunky. Can everyone see this? I think, though of course it does not register to me that other people might be thinking the same thing. We then go over how to time our movements to the beat: riding it, versus being “in the pocket” of it. Moving my shoulders and arms, I feel the nuance.

Here, we’ve rounded up some of the best ways to mix with mezcal. Some recipes, like Employees Only’s Mezcal Margarita, simply swap the spirit in for tequila, while others, like the Fumata Bianca, build something entirely new, calling on the ingredient to lend its signature profile between layers of flavor. Take a crash course on the spirit, then find our favorite easy mezcal cocktail recipes below.

Jakob McCabe-Johnston | Atlanta, Georgia

Locality and seasonality are central to Jakob McCabe-Johnson’s work. For the Blueberry Bijou, a seasonal riff on the classic, he maintained the original’s gin and green Chartreuse but swapped in his own ingredients, like wormwood extract and a blueberry cordial made with local, in-season fruit, acid powders and crème de mûre. With the leftover pulp from the cordial, he also makes a vinegar to accent the drink. The finishing touch to the recipe is a flower garnish from the restaurant’s garden.

I recently attended a fantastic event there: a listening session of the Stonewall Jukebox Project, an all-vinyl set curated by Honey Dijon and Chris Cruse replicating the jukebox at the Stonewall Inn. Afterwards, I sat down with Michael Falco, the executive director of the QNCC, to talk about the organization’s mission.

This is an excerpt from Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more stories like this.

Al Culliton: How did the Queer Nightlife Community Center come to be?

Michael Falco: This project and its idea stretches back to like 2016 or 2017, when the mayor’s Office of Nightlife was formed in New York. Ariel Palitz [the director of that office] was doing a listening tour when the department launched. And one of our co-founders, Seva Granik, was on these listening tours and at some point said something to the effect of, well, what about the underground spaces? They were so focused on bars and more traditional nightlife spaces that there hadn’t been much conversation about the underground. So eventually the city took this request seriously and started to do a study of what it would look like to give over a city building to a kind of durational cultural space. [They looked to] Berlin, Milan, London, to see how, in those instances, those cities have handed over buildings to produce nightlife-type programming and cultural spaces.

So this study came out in 2019, and then the pandemic happened, and the Office of Nightlife shifted to small business services. The focus shifted [toward figuring out] how to save nightlife in general; bars were really struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic. The idea kind of got mothballed and went away for a while. Meanwhile, I had been [the founding Executive Director of an institute called INCITE] at Columbia University for 15 years, and around [2019-2021], had started to support more experimental programming and had started doing a party with Pornceptual. I eventually had Seva as a panelist at one of the talks. Afterwards, I asked him, “What’s an idea that you had been working on that never happened?” And he mentioned the city idea that had had all this momentum and traction but dissolved, as so much did during the pandemic.

So Seva and I began to think: Okay, well what would that look like? [We decided] it’s a community center; it’s a nonprofit. Along the way, this person Breakfast [Garbowski], who’s one of our co-founders, had been producing sets for some of the events Seva was doing [and] got in on the idea. We met this fundraiser, Kyle Dacuyan, who helped us strategize how to move from a concept to actually getting money for it. We formed the nonprofit in January 2025 with the idea that maybe we’d be in a building eventually. Before we knew it, we had leased a building for five years in East New York with a lease that started in September, and we began programming in October.

How does QNCC operate?

Our model is: How do we create the infrastructure that other arts organizations [like those involved in visual, performing, or theater arts] have? How do we build those nonprofit, donor-based guardrails around a nightlife object and a community of workers who make nightlife happen? [The goal of the project is to] redistribute institutional resources to nightlife. 

What’s the state of nightlife, specifically the type you’re talking about that is more underground? What are the biggest challenges to the people working in that sector right now?

If you talk to anybody in this sector who’s producing events and programming clubs, they would say New York—although this is hubris—is as hot as it’s ever been. There is so much happening in club and underground life. Every weekend there are dozens of things that people can choose to go to. There’s a really vibrant scene in New York right now that is kind of unparalleled and in many ways competitive with places like Berlin [based on] the volume of things happening and the quality of the programming that’s happening.

At the same time, I think the economic pressures are intense. Doing something underground was easier 20 or 30 years ago. The real estate is so expensive that the baseline of even doing a program [is that] you have to make often $10,000, $12,000 just to break even on rent, without including lights and the sound system and DJs and staff and door people and things like that. The economic model is challenged. [There are] the same pressures that I think a lot of the industry are experiencing with regard to reliance on liquor sales, [which] are drying up. 

[Underground nightlife today] requires much more expensive ticket prices, and the people you want to be experiencing this can’t afford expensive tickets in the first place. I don’t know many people who are producing, in particular, programs in non-traditional locations like warehouse rentals that are making money off of these things. 

One of the challenges is like, how do you make this more sustainable? The hours are upside down. The work is often [offered as] independent contractor [work, rather than full-time]. [There’s also] the grind, the need to probably supplement your income with other labor. So our objective really has been to figure out how to introduce things into the nightlife economy that make it more feasible for people to do this work. Sometimes that’s just education. If you have a sense of how to get insurance or you have a better sense about how to handle your finances, or you have basic access to certain healthcare things that you might not otherwise access, it just makes doing this work a little bit easier.

The bar is proof that glassware is no longer a one-size-fits-all deal. As bars work harder to stake a claim in a crowded field and collect awards along the way, they’re also looking for more ways to show off the care they put into every detail of their concept—coupes and Collinses included.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t trends, though. You can spot them: the minimalistic vessel everyone’s serving Japanese-style highballs in, or that sleek, extra tall Martini glass shipped in from Stockholm that seems to have landed behind every bar in New York City—you know the one.

This new roster of trendy glassware has taken over the country’s best bars, and the styles have become a shorthand for a certain level of hospitality, signaling to a guest that they’re in a bar that cares enough to serve them from a hand-blown coupe or weighty crystal rocks glass. Want in on the trends? Here is the glassware that leading bars are reaching for right now, and why each piece earned its spot on the rail.