It’s tough to turn heads with a cocktail in a town where people know their mixed drinks like their ABC’s - A is for Appletini, B is for Bellini, C is for Caipirihna - New Yorkers tend to be jaded about even the most exotic drinks, which start looking, to the seasoned drinker, like calculated reiterations in the city’s relentlessly inventive liquor repertoire.
One Lower East Side bar, however, has managed to catch the eye of some of New York Magazine’s most snobbish culinary polyglots who’ve stopped to take a bow (or a stumble) for perhaps not the best, but certainly the strongest cocktail in the city.
The Essex Street Bar, Painkiller, is mixing a cocktail called the Zombie, which NY Mag likens to liquid anesthesia. The $16 drink marries Puerto Rican and Jamaican rums, 151 Demerara, and a sprinkling of Pernod’s fairy-green Absinthe in a dangerous, seductive, boozy union that’s coaxed its critics into cooperation with no less that four ounces of the good stuff.
Painkiller co-owner Guiseppe Gonzalez, a large, bear-figured fellow with the alcohol tolerance of a submarine, says that even he feels tipsy after one Zombie, and limits customers to a single round.
For more on New York’s best lethal drink, visit New York Magazine.
Painkiller: 49 Essex St., bet. Hester & Grand Sts.
