A Love Letter to the Airport Cocktail

It’s a tipsy, common fact that some drinks simply hit tougher relying on the state of affairs. An ice-cold soiled martini on a Friday evening after a maddening day at work, or a pina colada on the seashore with a type of lovely little toothpick umbrellas protruding? You actually can’t do significantly better. How a couple of foamy pumpkin beer whereas there’s a chill within the air, throughout the one time of yr it’s acceptable to decorate in flannel? Nothing tops that. However there’s just one location on earth the place having fun with a drink actually looks like a present from the Gods. It’s an upside-down place the place nothing issues—neither time, nor cash. A cocktail Camelot, if you’ll.

I’m speaking concerning the pleasure of drinks on the airport bar, a form of Twilight Zone the place there are not any guidelines, the tasks are nonexistent, and the probabilities are limitless. The place else does a easy drink embody a lot promise and optimism?

It’s very true in the midst of the summer season journey season while you’re about to embark on that long-awaited trip. After braving months of Google flight alerts, the puzzle of determining checked baggage insurance policies, and all that prerequisite penny-pinching, the day lastly comes while you head for the airport by means of both nightmare site visitors or the labyrinth of public transit. When you do lastly make it to a curb stuffed with idling Ubers and employees greeting passengers by screaming everybody to “transfer!” it’s time in your subsequent battle: these hellish TSA strains, which quantity to placing all your Most worthy possessions into battered plastic bins and participating in that delicate dance of determining if you want to take off your sneakers or not, a guessing sport the place all people comes out on the shedding finish. Then, when you collect your stuff and clumsily tie your sneakers whereas splayed out on the ground like a toddler, candy freedom! A drink is lastly inside your attain. You earned it, champ.

In fact, not all locations on the airport that serve these blessed libations are constructed the identical. At JFK, iPads are affixed to lengthy counters as if it’s the Apple Retailer and also you punch your order, real-life bartenders be damned. In the meantime, at Hollywood Burbank, the bars tackle the environment of a mall cafeteria: packed and loud underneath fluorescent lights, some vaguely branded with Wolfgang Puck insignia. Down at Miami Worldwide, the cocktails naturally include a facet of Cuban meals. I as soon as sipped wine at Denver Worldwide Airport in a spot that so needed to be a trattoria, however as an alternative was like a tragic, AI-generated model of the idea with obscure art work of a vineyard and “pizza” which was a bit of microwaved bread and ketchup. In fact, there are these bougie airline lounges too, the start of which is up there with the miraculous invention of flight itself.