At Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, the 80-plus-year-old institution on South Ninth Street, patrons are not handed a menu to peruse.
“We have a list of questions we ask people. We have a conversation and decide together what they would like,” says owner John Dye, who reports a 98 percent success rate. The hardest people to decode are the “sweets people” who think they like sweet undertones with their booze but later find out they don’t.
For the staff’s reference, hundreds of drink recipes are stored in an old Rolodex organized by decade and extending back to the 1930s. These include the Pink Squirrel, which Bryant’s claim to have invented.
“Sometimes we want to develop a drink that fits a modern taste,” says Dye. But not just any drink makes the cut. Since Dye took over 10 years ago, just 100 new concoctions have been added.
Recent newbies are Cherry Benjamin, which joined the list about eight years ago, with a cherry-ginger flavor profile; Flamingo, a grapefruit hurricane-style drink; and Graveyard Whiskey, unsurprisingly popular around Halloween, says Dye.
The Ultimate Milwaukee Drinking Guide
