Enter a new age of cocktails

Guests may not be able to tell from where they are standing, but this is what a bartender at Miss T has within arm’s reach behind the counter: five bottles of in-house liqueur, 25 bottles of fresh house-made syrups on ice, about a dozen infusions, seven-eight tinctures, and two oak barrels in which signature versions of classic cocktails are being aged. “The beverage director doesn’t only design the menu,” says Dimi Lezinska, a mixologist and bar consultant who has designed the cocktail menus at KOKO and Foo in Mumbai. “A good beverage programme is not about what’s in the glass, it’s about everything,” says mixologist Arijit Bose, partner at Bar Back Collective, a consultancy that helps set up bars, trains bartenders and creates programmes. Arijit Bose of Bar Back Collective “It’s what makes the same beer taste better in one bar than it does in another,” says mixologist Yangdup Lama, who founded Cocktails & Dreams Speakeasy in Gurugram, as well as a beverage management company by the same name. COMORIN This six-month-old all-day restaurant, café and cocktail bar features a beverage menu that complements chef Manish Mehrotra’s eclectic take such as bacon bread pakoda and arbi galawat with strawberry and green chilli chutney.