Christine Sismondo

Coming Up

Christine Sismondo writes from the overlap of spirits, bars, and history, treating drinking culture as a field of craft rather than ornament. Her reporting moves cleanly between the archive and the bar, with attention to old recipes, obscure labels, and customs that have dropped out of circulation. As she has said, “I collect over proof spirits and hard-to-find aperitifs, so that I can recreate old cocktails from old recipe books and, occasionally, even invent new ones.” That line is the work in miniature: collecting, testing, and returning to the source material with enough fluency to rebuild it.

Signature

Christine's signature dishes include America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History, Cocktails, and A Still Life. Read together, the books show a writer working through three angles on drink culture: taverns as public space, cocktails as a defined form with their own chronology, and the glass as an object of attention. The throughline is historical method applied to hospitality, with atmosphere, memory, and use treated as part of the record.

In Their Words “I collect over proof spirits and hard-to-find aperitifs, so that I can recreate old cocktails from old recipe books and, occasionally, even invent new ones.” The sentence lays out the method plainly: source the bottles, work from the books, and use the old formulas as working material. It is preservation without museum language, and experimentation without separating itself from the archive. The line keeps scholarship and practice in the same frame. Research and drink work are not opposed here; they sit side by side, with the same ease and the same dry edge.