Drinks – Flung

A Look Back at the New Yorker’s ‘Bar Tab’

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 19:32:46 +0000

Way back when I was too young to legally get into one, I went to my first bar. It bestowed an immediate sense of a door opening, of magic being unleashed. Going forward, I’d sidle up to any one that would have me—a suburban Chicago spot that didn’t start carding until 9pm, a honky-tonk place on the outskirts of Tampa, the bar in my college town where I was friends with the bouncer. Little alternate universes, all of them, with […]

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Vesuvio Cafe: Not Missing a Beat

Sarah Stodola — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 20:35:35 +0000

There are very few tourists to San Francisco for whom Vesuvio Cafe does not show up on the radar. Opened in 1948, just in time to host all of the Beat writers that would flock to the City Lights Bookstore when it opened next door in 1953, Vesuvio is now a countercultural landmark. I haven’t looked in the Lonely Planet San Francisco, but I’d bet money it’s listed in there. Yet, when I went in on a recent weekday mid-afternoon, […]

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Bar Room at the Beekman Hotel: Fashion and Financiers

Sarah Stodola — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 20:14:49 +0000

When I happened to stop by the Bar Room in the Beekman Hotel last week, the Dow had just fallen another 1,000 points and Fashion Week was underway. I took a table for one in this perfect storm of Manhattan-ness, five minutes by foot from Wall Street, just as the afternoon runway shows wrapped up—one of them in the basement below me. Normally, the convergence of financiers and fashionistas would send me running, or at least rolling my eyes, but […]

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In Search of a Decent Cup of Coffee in Sumatra

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 19:26:47 +0000

Before I started researching a trip there last summer, the only thing I knew about Sumatra was that it produced a lot of coffee, or so I assumed after a thousand visits to third-wave coffee shops back home in Brooklyn and also Starbucks. As I poked around the internet, I learned that this Indonesian island just across the Straight of Malacca from Singapore is also a place of staggering beauty. This fact, plus its proximity to Singapore, where my fella […]

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Who Makes the Best Bloody Mary in Brooklyn?

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:34:40 +0000

There are plenty of articles out there listing the best, but I recently decided to take the quest for Brooklyn’s finest Bloody Mary a step further. In the video above, I get together with Liza–star of the very funny podcast Truth or Liza Dare–and head out to the spots in Brooklyn that are renowned for a great Bloody Mary. Can we determine the best of the best? Will Liza ever find a bloody she likes? Are the Williamsburg joints resting […]

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Our Two Favorite Cocktails at Dick and Jane’s Bar

Flung — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:46:22 +0000

A History of Hennessy, from Ireland To France To America

Sarah Stodola — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 16:57:06 +0000

At the tail end of a vacation in France a few years ago, my boyfriend and I had a couple days in our rental car to get back to Paris from Bordeaux, where we’d been enjoying the countryside and the ocean and the wine and the perfectly ripe avocados. We had no plan, just a general direction we needed to pursue, waiting along the way for something to pique our interest enough to stop. I remember whirring past windmills and […]

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Exploring Croatia’s Wine Country with Fresh Eire Adventures’ Padraic Doorey

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 19:58:28 +0000

Last September, I joined tour guide extraordinaire Padraic Doorey on a “bike and sail” trip he was leading through the Croatian Adriatic for his company, Fresh Eire Adventures. We lived for the week on a beautiful wooden sailboat, and spent our days exploring the land largely via bike. It was during this time, hopping from impossibly gorgeous island to impossibly gorgeous island, that I got a close-up view of the gruffly charming, arcadian wineries that dot both the islands and […]

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6 Fascinating Facts About Bourbon from ‘Bourbon Empire’

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:41:43 +0000

As is my wont, I only took an interest in Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey, Reid Mitenbuler’s engrossing book on the history of America’s quintessential liquor, after returning from a trip to Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail earlier this summer—it’s a repeat of my approach to guidebooks in general, which I always buy before the trip, but fail to read mostly until I get home from it. And so Bourbon Empire is a guidebook of sorts, sifting through an […]

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Drinking Pulque in Mexico City: The Ancient Aztecs’ Beverage of Choice

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 18:04:08 +0000

A couple millennia ago in the ancient Aztec culture based in what is present-day Mexico, there was no beer or wine. Instead, for religious rituals and leisure time alike, the Aztecs produced a beverage called pulque, made by fermenting the nectar of the native agave plant. Amazingly, the drink survived the Spanish conquest in the 16th century and remained a popular working man’s drink in Mexico well into the 20th century, when it began to fall out of favor. Recently, […]

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