Don’t ever design a cocktail menu for high schoolers.  Empire Hotel, I am looking at you.

EE and I headed to the Empire Hotel this week for a drink in the Lobby Bar.  It’s in our neighborhood, and EE loves their logo (duh), which is not only monogrammed on everything monogrammable, but also forms the pattern of the carpets, and serves as door handles on all the double-doors:

Anyway, the most recent drink menu has a title like, “Try a Gossip Girl Cocktail”  WTF?  Really?

Let’s consider the problems.  The:

a) show is absurd (not that you personally are absurd if you like it, but the show IS – you know it).

b) characters are teenagers and have not been drinking long enough to possibly have knowledge worth emulating.

c) characters are teenagers who really shouldn’t be drinking at that level (without getting into a bigger debate over what the drinking laws should be).

d) drinks ACTUALLY REFLECTED IMMATTURE TASTES.

I took one look and said, “I’ll have a negroni.”  EE, bless her soul, ordered one.  She claims she felt rushed to make a decision.  It involved an Atomic Fireball.  She asked me what an Atomic Fireball is just after ordering.  Candy.  It is a piece of candy.  The rim was encrusted with sugar - the most sugar I’ve ever seen on a rim.  The thing tasted like a strange, flat Cherry Coke served in a martini glass with a sugared rim.  Nasty.  The kind of thing you might like if your standard breakfast consists of Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids on the school bus.

EE re-orderded a classic margarita.  Meant in the best possible way, this type of admission-of-ordering-error and assertiveness-in-correcting-it is not very characteristic of EE, which should really underscore how horrific the drink was.  To the hotel’s credit, they just switched out the drinks and never charged us for the freaky one.

The lobby bar of the Empire Hotel.  Cool place, good bar, nasty cocktail menu.

The sad thing is that the Empire Hotel bar is really cool.  The ambiance is great, but more importantly, they are skilled drink-makers!  My negroni and EE’s margarita were perfectly executed.  The bartender was fast; the waitress was attentive.  But the drink menu was disgusting!

We went to the hotel restaurant, Ed’s Chowder House, after cocktails.  Confounding us further in regards to the drink menu is the fact that Ed’s drink menu is AWESOME.  I had a spectacular West Side Gimlet.  EE had a great jalapeno-infused margarita (feeling scarred by her Atomic Fireball attempt at branching out, my sweet EE may be back to margaritas for a while now).  The oysters were great, the service was again great.  I highly recommend it.

Bar of Ed’s Chowder House at the Empire Hotel.  Awesome.

Lesson: Skip the lounge bar and walk upstairs to Ed’s.

Moral: never design drinks for high schoolers.