Cocktails at Dinner ─ Daring Pairings of Delicious Dishes and Enticing Mixed Drinks

Cocktails at Dinner is equal parts cookbook and bar book. It explores a fascinating edge of the culinary frontier—food and cocktail pairings—with an imaginative collection of companionable recipes.

As mixologists strive to catch up in culinary creativity with their counterparts in restaurant kitchens, collaboration has become a natural progression. Seriously interesting, ingredient-driven cocktails, concocted with top-shelf liquors, fresh seasonal fruits, flavored bitters, and other artisanal components, have begun to reflect a restaurant’s artful cuisine. First-rate food and mixed drinks—judiciously and harmoniously paired—become something more than the sum of the parts. The kitchen flows seamlessly into the bar, as cocktails take on a fresh, farm-to-glass aesthetic, and when paired with inspired dishes, the unions beget never-before-imagined taste sensations.

Cocktails at Dinner serves as a vital introduction to these “new wave” combinations, bridging the gap between the upscale restaurant and the home kitchen and bar, for creative dinner parties and special occasions and for curious cooks and bartenders at all levels. It is meant to showcase a range of innovative and original yet accessible recipes from a diversity of cuisines that open the door to new possibilities in dining and entertaining. Michael Turback and Julia Hastings-Black have recruited working chefs and bartenders from forty-four progressive restaurants with innovative cocktail programs—each contributing the recipe for a cocktail paired with the recipe for a compatible small plate, main plate, or dessert. The process or methodology by which chef and bartender work in consort and their joint efforts to stretch palate perspectives are explored in lively headnotes, guiding the reader along the sensorial journey. Immensely readable, Cocktails at Dinner is an essential guide for everyone who loves food and drink.

For nearly three decades, Michael Turback combined inventiveness, passionate cooking with local ingredients, and an award-winning list of regional wines at his legendary restaurant in Ithaca, New York. As an author, he has previously taken on, with distinction, such single topics as the ice cream sundae, the banana split, hot chocolate, mocha, coffee drinks, progressive gin cocktails, Finger Lakes wine country, and the bounty of both the Ithaca Farmers Market and the historic North Market of Columbus, Ohio. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Julia Hastings-Black has been working her way around the food world for more than a decade. As a cook, gardener, recipe tester, cooking instructor, and researcher in the history of food writing, she is fascinated by the intersection of food and language. She lives in Washington, DC.