What’s your go-to cocktail order? Well, if you’re in Milwaukee or somewhere in Wisconsin, there’s a good chance it’s a brandy Old Fashioned. But even where the Old Fashioned reigns, Milwaukee has a strong cocktail bar scene where you can get endless combinations of cocktails.
Even for cocktail writer and author Robert Simonson — who covered the scene for the New York Times for decades — Wisconsin has always held its own in the cocktail world. While some towns' bar scenes offer mostly boring rail drinks, spots like Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, At Random, Lost Whale and Agency have ridden a wave of cocktail revivalism since the turn of the century.
“I think Wisconsin is kind of the best of all worlds,” he says. “There were a lot of places in the United States that kind of forgot about cocktails in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s — Wisconsin didn’t.”
Simonson recently returned home to Milwaukee, where he continues to write about food, drink, history and regional culture on his Substacks, The Mix and The Milwaukee Mix. "There's nothing that gets me more excited as a journalist than writing about regional food trends. I mean, just going to a place in the country where they eat or drink something that they don't eat or drink anywhere else. And not everyone has this ... but Wisconsin is just rich in this kind of thing," he notes.
He joins Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski to share more about his how the Midwest’s cocktail culture compares to the East Coast.
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