The competition extended beyond the glass. Rooted in Johnnie Walker’s “Keep Walking” ethos, which celebrates personal journeys of progress, competitors were tasked to share the story behind their cocktail and how it reflected their personal progress journey that shaped their craft. A panel of 21 industry leaders, including Adam Fournier, a Los Angeles-based bar director and former World Class U.S. winner; Kyler Nolan, bar manager at Death & Co. New York; and Calvin Marty, owner of Best Intentions in Chicago, selected winners in each city based not only on the originality and quality of their cocktails, but also on the stories they told. Every competitor received support from Johnnie Walker Ambassadors throughout the program, while nine winners earned a one-on-one mentorship experience with Johnnie Walker Master Blender Dr. Emma Walker. 

Without further ado, let’s raise a glass to this year’s winners.

I even spent two years—and a lot of late nights—working on a book on the subject. That is, until I spiraled into the realization that most dives didn’t give a damn about being featured in a book. It was impossible to even set up an interview or a photo shoot at some of these establishments. Despite consistently being listed in annual “Best NYC Dives” roundups, one Brooklyn bar owner took particular offense at my use of the word “dive.” When I asked if I might be able to interview some customers and take pictures, he snapped, “No photos. I’ve got people having affairs in here,” before ending the conversation by turning his back to me and walking off.

He had a point. The sense of anonymity that can often cloak a dive bar is just one of the many factors that makes them so special. These often quirky neighborhood bars welcome and serve longtime regulars, locals and strangers alike, and act as unsanctioned community hubs where people can disappear for an hour or two and feel the connection of being alone in a crowd in a room seemingly lost in time.

As more and more businesses shutter their doors due to rising rents, skyrocketing expenses, labor costs and post-pandemic shifts in consumer habits, every day seems more dire for bars, especially where I live in New York. We always think our favorites will be around forever, until they’re gone, and become, like so many things in New York, just another ghost.

Fans of Montero Bar & Grill, the beloved, nearly 90-year-old Brooklyn Heights dive, thought that might be the case for their favorite haunt earlier this year. In January, news about a planned acquisition from Crew—a hospitality group owned by brothers Alex and Miles Pincus, who oversee an ever-expanding fleet of nautical-themed concepts in New York City and New Orleans—was set to take over.

The original Algonquin cocktail was named for the Algonquin Hotel and its Round Table, a circle of writers and intellectuals that met there regularly. The recipe started popping up in the 1930s, first in a book called Along the Wine Trail (where it’s called the New Algonquin) and then in a 1937 issue of the magazine Esquire.

Despite its name recognition, cool backstory and inclusion in cocktail revivalist sources like Jim Meehan’s PDT Cocktail Book and Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, the Algonquin hasn’t ever gained the 21st-century traction that many of its contemporaries have enjoyed. And that might be because—as Raaz discovered all those years ago—it’s a bit of a challenge. Fast forward 10 years and Raaz has honored the Algonquin with the Weird Al ‘Gonq’ovich, a stirred drink with rye, pineapple gum syrup, tepache, Tokay wine and chocolate nocino, finished off with a spritz of cacao nib-infused peaty Scotch.

Whenever possible, Raaz prefers to use local and regional products at Atoma, where he is now bar director. It was one such product that sparked the idea for him to dig up the Algonquin again: a 90-proof bottling from Woodinville Distillery made with Washington state-grown rye. Its spiced nose and vanilla and chocolate notes on the palate subtly guided the secondary flavors in Raaz’s Weird Al ‘Gonq’ovich.

Perhaps the biggest innovation Raaz made for his Algonquin riff is the use of the traditional Mexican fermented pineapple beverage, tepache, to replace most of the vermouth and some of the pineapple component. Raaz and his assistant bar manager, John Lundahl, thought something fermented might actually be historically accurate. “[We] had joked about that, like dry white French vermouth in the ’20s probably was fermented anyway ’cause of lack of good refrigeration,” he says. He likes the way the tepache’s fermented quality dries the palate in spite of its fruitiness. As a result, Raaz says, “it drinks like a Martini.”

The main draw of the bar’s menu is the selection of Astors, “a drink template we made up,” according to Gibler. These cocktails comprise an ounce of an aperitif, three-quarters of an ounce of a digestif and a quarter ounce of a mix of lemon juice, Maldon salt, phosphate and rotating bitters that “act like a jig to hold everything together,” he says. Unlike most recipes that involve a base spirit with a modifier or two, Astors are, as Gibler puts it, “all modifier.” They call on products like aloe, saffron or lychee liqueur in combination with anything from a Swiss Alpine aperitif to a Mexican tamarind punch to a domestic take on Malört. They’re big in flavor, small in size; he likens them to shared plates.

A quick glance at the menu, which also includes a set of classics “for the majority of people who show up to a bar and aren’t crazy nerds” revealed many bottles I’d never seen or heard of before. So I asked Gibler to outline the ingredients that really make the menu tick. Here are five essentials.

For our Ultimates series, we ask top bartenders to submit their finest recipes, then taste them all to find the best of the best. These are the Daiquiris that have come out on top.

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.