Let’s say that you are in Helsinki, maybe covering an international summit. You need a drink — definitely if you were doing a summit. Is there good bar on hand? Maybe the best bar in all of Scandinavia?
You can go to A 21 Decades. There you can enjoy classic drinks and very Scandinavian ingredients: birch leaves, sea buckthorn leaves, rhubarb, bee pollen. How can you find such a very special establishment?
Straight Up is the latest volume from drink experts Joel Harrison and Neil Ridley. The wrote Distilled back in 2013 [reviewed here] a lovely book, and a tour de force in the creation of alcoholic beverages. This tome is a “where to drink” guide for every continent in 500+ stories. Oh, sorry. No coverage for Antarctica, but plenty for everywhere else.
Continent by continent, city by city, these gentlemen cover the drinking world with laser precision. You’ll find bars explored, drinks — both classic and experimental — suggested, prices explained, bartenders profiled.
The star continents are Europe [113 pages] and North America [57] pages. The authors are British and can easily hop to the cities of Europe to imbibe and catch a quick flight home. They seem to have done just that. The range of ideas is, well, wide. Looking for a great tequila bar? Well, there is Crazy Pedro’s in Manchester, Great Britain. Tequila, not beer or ale.
Want one of the jazz-inspired bars in Paris that don’t exist anymore? It does: Caveau de La Huchette. If you venture to the Left Bank, there is Prescription, a two-story bar that will make anything you might request but will urge you to try one of the classics, classics they have perfected.
If you have visited the Galapagos Islands, you might have wandered around the island named Baltra. If you are in Mexico City, the Baltra bar has a seasonal tasting menu that just might have you visting four times a year.
Straight Up is a thick book, almost two inches. It won’t fit in your back pocket, so you may be taking pictures of pages or xeroxing a few pages before your next trip to Paris, Helsinki, or perhaps Tasmania. If you drink, you want the incredible insights of Straight Up.