Enough with cocktails that taste like food

A year ago, on the frenzied floor of Bar Wars, an all-India cocktail competition held in Goa, the standout drink came from a bar in Pune. It was inspired by a steak. This was a cocktail that championed the global trend of savoury cocktails: smoky and meaty with sweet notes that hinted at a barbeque sauce. A year later, the same competition featured a Parsi dhansak drink that made us feel very strongly that the time had come to say goodbye to this trend. 2025 was the year we got bombarded by cocktails that tasted like food: from biryanis to butter chicken, palak paneer to pizza, rasam to ramen, and Maggi to Mysore pak. 

“Internationally, this trend has existed for two or three years, but in India it’s only caught on more recently. So, I feel it’s going to stay for some time,” says Pankaj Balachandran, co-founder of Countertop India and the man behind bars like Boilermaker and Quinta Cantina in Goa. “Personally, I’m not a big fan. It just seems like we’re emulating what the West does without any context,” says the mixologist about the story of how we crossed the thin line between ‘wow that’s so creative’ to ‘wow this makes no sense, please stop’ and why we need to do something before it’s too late.

There was a time not too long ago when making cocktails was simple. Two parts booze, one part sugar, one part lime. Whiskey sour? Bourbon + lime + sugar. Switch the bourbon out for tequila and you had the foundations of a margarita. Use white rum or gin, and you were sipping on a daiquiri or a gimlet. The more premium the base spirit, the less sugar and lime you needed. This formula worked wonderfully for decades, only breaking form for briny martinis, fruity tikis and tall summer drinks. 

Then creativity walked into the bar. And the cocktails we grew up with got prefixed with ‘Classic’ and were relegated to page two of the drinks menu. These were exciting times— bartenders had started experimenting with flavours, and simple swaps came first. Tamarind instead of lemon as the sour element. Jaggery for sugar. At these bars, you’d find at least one cocktail served in a brass mug, and one in a tall bamboo cup with tribal art etched on it. This, incidentally, was also the time we started seeing the words “lavender” and “elderflower” a lot on cocktail menus. 

Soon, every bar was serving cocktails with lavender and elderflower. This triggered a gradual ratcheting up of complexity—we were now bang in the middle of the era of infusions and house syrups. Pandan vodka. Bacon bourbon. Curry-leaf gin.

Today, the trend of turning food into drinks helps bars stand out in a crowd, according to industry veteran Vikram Achanta of the India Bartender Show, a platform for bartenders to learn and exchange ideas with top industry professionals from around the world. Achanta feels that these eccentric cocktails need to have a place on the menu, even if it is limited. “It helps get people through the door. It helps to catch the attention. But at the end of the day, a cocktail needs to be smashable. That’s the only kind of cocktail that works for a bar,” he says, adding that he’d recently knocked back a few biryani cocktails (yes!) at Singapore’s The Elephant Room, which is on the World’s 50 Best bars list. The description on their menu reads: ‘Ghee Sake, Basmati Makgeolli, Biryani Tincture’.

Mixologists have been fat-washing alcohol for over a decade, but of late it’s become fashionable to explain exactly what fat is being used to wash the liquor. Blue cheese? Duck fat? Pork fat? Check. Check. Check. Drink descriptions on the menu that used to be a few words (“vodka, green apple, lime, soda”) have metamorphosed into full-blown paragraphs today (“this drink is a nostalgic meditation on monsoon evenings and forgotten street food, where tamarind weeps into palm jaggery, and smoke from a roadside grill mingles with memories of your first heartbreak”). Which is to say, the cocktail isn’t a cocktail anymore. It is a story in a glass.

The bar too has upgraded. It has now become a laboratory, complete with beakers and vacuum chambers, and bartenders have traded in their aprons for lab coats. The process of making these exotic drinks has become much easier—what used to take hours now takes minutes thanks to equipment like rotovaps and centrifuges and sous vide machines. But while they’re having fun, we’re having dhansak in a glass.

It’s not to say that all food-flavoured drinks suck. We’ve had a few great savoury cocktails this past year. Noodlin Around at Supa San in Mumbai brings sake, shiitake broth and seaweed together for a relevant, well-balanced signature drink. Cheese-Cherry-Pineapple at Soka in Bengaluru triggered all the right memories of ’90s parties. Our New York correspondent discovered her scepticism about Manhattan bar INDN’s savoury cocktail menu—sparked by the presence of spiced ghee, garam masala, and saag in their drinks—was misplaced. The drinks hit the spot. From the just-like-masala-dosa Bombaat rum cocktail at One8Common, the Liquid Curd Rice at Pablo’s in Goa, the pizza-inspired Papa’s Hut at Papa’s in Bandra, the Tom Yum Cup at Koko Asian Gastropub, they all have their fans. Coming soon at Indian Accent’s new bar, Upstairs, is a Bone Dry Martini made using bone-marrow-washed vodka and nihari-spiced vermouth.

But after a long reign of craft cocktails and coaxing customers to try something new and innovative, it feels like the pendulum may be swinging back to something less pretentious. Restaurateur Sameer Seth of Hunger Inc predicts cocktails in 2026 will be all about simplicity: “It’s a personal take—I now opt for a simple martini or Vesper as my drink of choice,” he says. “It may have something to do with the problem of plenty that we have today. I foresee this movement back to simplicity where we go and order the martinis and the palomas. They are classics for a reason—they are delicious on their own,” he adds.

Like him, Balachandran, who is at the forefront of high-end mixology today, has a simple philosophy when it comes to drinks. “If a customer is not able to finish your drink and order a second of the same one, it doesn’t work,” says the mixologist who made the Smack Cucumber Salad on the Siren menu in Bengaluru and the Margherita Pizza drink at Papa’s. Balachandran knows that with great technology comes great responsibility. Just like you can’t blame AI for the millions of people generating AI slop, you can’t blame the rotovap because someone decided serving pani-puri water as phuchka picante was a good idea. Basically, the line between smashable cocktail and gimmick-gone-wrong is too thin. The rate at which we’re going, a baingan bharta cocktail is just around the corner, and, really, nobody wants that.