The older I get, the more I seem to be achieving my ultimate form: a middle-aged guy doing something by himself. This has its ups and downs — flexible movie scheduling is great, attempting to go anywhere for dinner on Valentine’s Day is not — but I had not expected drinking fancy cocktails in another country to make me feel acutely aware of being out by myself. And yet here we are.

I should say this before proceeding: there was nothing about my experience at Experimental Cocktail Club Venice that disappointed me. The bartenders were friendly; the drinks were tasty. The decor, both there and in its sibling restaurant, was excellent. But there was something about the experience of drinking there that snapped something else into clear focus for me: are some cocktail bars better for social drinking?

I don’t think this is the case for all bars. I’ve visited Seattle’s Canon with friends and alone and had an excellent time in each situation. This Venice establishment was a little different from some cocktail bars where I’ve spent time. Their remit is less about reinventing classics or exploring one particular spirit; instead, Experimental Cocktail Club — based on my time there, anyway — was about doing things with cocktails that you wouldn’t expect. 

When I was there (December 2025), the menu consisted of cocktails inspired by other notable bars elsewhere in the world. I ended up having three drinks while I was there. One was the Overground, described as an “Old Fashioned meets [a] carrot cake.” This one had frosting and sprinkles on the rim; another of the drinks I tried also had an unconventional dusting of spices, in this case salt and pepper, designed to compliment a drink described to me as the bar’s variation on a Manhattan.

The third drink I had, the Thalassa, came with a piece of salty candy. My notes from that night include the word “refreshing,” and I appreciated the craft behind all of them. In some cases, trying a cocktail might inspire you to replicate it at home. Unless I’m in the midst of baking cookies, I think at least some of these drinks are ones that I’ll leave to the experts.

But this experience has also given me another way of looking at a bar’s cocktail menu: whether or not a given recipe was assembled with a “can you believe this?” factor in mind. There’s something of an element of that to tiki drinks, I’d say; I also look back fondly on a now-defunct Williamsburg bar called The Drink, whose whole concept was making cocktails at a punchbowl scale. It was great if you went there with a group; you’d have fewer options if you arrived solo.

Presumably someone with a powerful liver could also have tried their hand at an entire punchbowl, much like how I ended up accidentally consuming an entire “Fuck-It Bucket” at a now-defunct Prospect Heights bar. But I can’t imagine that it would be much fun. For many people, there’s a social aspect to drinking; Rosie Schaap’s excellent memoir Drinking With Men is one of the best distillations of this I can think of. And it doesn’t surprise me that New York City has, in recent years, seen some later-night establishments, including coffee shops and bars serving non-alcoholic cocktails, open up.

And perhaps that brings us back around to the idea of cocktails as conversation starters. The trick, of course, is to find the right balance between an interesting taste and an interesting composition. (See also: a recent article by Courtney Iseman in Slate about soup-centric cocktail recipes.) Finding the right combination might well yield a drink that endures on long past the night on which it’s consumed.