Review: Smugglers Cove
Step back twenty years (or forty or sixty, if you prefer), and a bar book is a book of drink recipes (probably unattributed), perhaps with a little technical preamble, a smattering of jokes, and a burgundy cover that is recognizable next to years-old vermouth. The bar book of the late twentieth century is almost perfectly analogous to the phonebook, both being unassuming collections of useful data. But in an era of diverse and bountiful drink-writing, straightforward recipe books have widely replaced the word “bar” with the word “cocktail.” This is a welcome change because it liberates the term “bar book” to reference one of my favorite categories of drink writing: books about specific bars.
The modern lineage of (actual) bar books is relatively brief compared to other types of drink publications, no doubt because each book requires a drinking establishment of stability and splendor to serve as its foundation. The PDT Cocktail Book led the way in 2011; Death & Co., The Canon Cocktail Book, and The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual are among the best of those that have followed. For a rum connoisseur, however, the bar book to turn to is almost certainly Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki, written by Martin Cate with Rebecca Cate and published by Ten Speed Press in 2016.
