Now, cocktail garnishes are more than just a cherry on top

It’s hard to pin down who thought of putting garnishes on cocktails, but for a long time, it lingered as an afterthought—some mint leaves and lime and orange wheels lying at the edge of the bread plate, almost as perfunctorily as they were added. A shift became palpable when roughly five years ago, cocktail culture’s global boom trickled down to India, coinciding with the rise of sensorial dining in the country. Drawing abstractly from the surprise element of the band’s secret gig at Anjuna Beach in the early 1990s, there’s a drink that’s adorned by an upside-down mini cone squashing a blob of spicy pineapple jam into the carved ice. Similarly, Mumbai-based Mizu adorns their signature coconut-washed gin and Campari negroni with a “coconut macaroon-esque biscuit”; at Mumbai’s Napoli, the savoiardi or ladyfinger biscuit, comes speckled with Parmesan atop their Melodia di Caffe, a take on the espresso martini. At the newly opened Muro in Bengaluru, there’s Eat Your Art Out, which comes with an edible paper printed with tribal Sohrai art from central India, and Heat of the Moment that’s topped with a ball of steel wool and grated Cuban cigar, offering an “olfactory” experience.