The Bartender's Pantry

A beverage handbook that surveys and celebrates cocktail mixers, with more than 100 recipes from the world’s most culinary-minded bartenders and the James Beard Award–winning author of Meehan’s Bartender Manual.

Jim Meehan is a revered figure in the hospitality world whose achievements as a pioneering bartender at Gramercy Tavern, The Pegu Club, and PDT in New York City helped pave the way for this generation’s craft cocktail industry. Now he’s partnered with artist and designer Bart Sasso of Sasso & Co. and Atlanta’s beloved Ticonderoga Club, award-winning author and journalist Emma Janzen, and renowned photographer AJ Meeker on a handbook focused on the zero-proof components that drink books typically relegate to the back.  

The Bartender’s Pantry includes primers on ten categories of ingredients—sugars, spices, dairy, grains and nuts, fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs, coffee, tea, soda and mineral water, and ferments—that cover each subject’s modern history, farming and cultivation practices, processing methods and distribution channels before suggesting sourcing and service insights from experts in each field. The primers grapple with the challenges producers, distributors and consumers face to produce and acquire each ingredient ethically and equitably to mix delicious drinks.

Each primer is followed by artfully illustrated mixer recipes that bring the reader into the prep kitchens of some of the world’s most revered bartenders, baristas, importers and chefs. These innovative and traditional recipes for historic- and underestimated – components of creative cocktails like horchata, matcha, Turkish coffee, sorrel, tepache, ginger beer and orgeat are followed by full-page photos of over 50 cocktails including modern classics like the Gin Basil Smash, Earl Grey MarTEAni and Penicillin. 

The Bartender's Pantry is an indispensable guide for hospitality professionals, curious enthusiasts, and anyone interested in how novel and traditional global beverages are connected to international foodways and our wellbeing itself.