In the cocktail world, there's a lot of focus on Prohibition this and Prohibition that, but Union Lodge No.1 delves even deeper into America's past, resurrecting recipes and techniques from the glorious barroom days of the late nineteenth century. The cocktail is an American invention, and owners Mike Huggins and Lenka Juchelkova open a window onto history with a menu that's chock-full of cobblers, flips, fizzes, sours, smashes and juleps. They essentially created a museum of bygone cocktails, keeping alive recipes like the Ramos gin fizz, the Saratoga, the Knickerbocker and the Blue Blazer. The back bar is limited to products that were available around 1880 (no vodka here, and no Coke or Pepsi, either). Bar manager Alex Daniluk trains his bartenders to carefully craft each drink in the traditional way of the period.
Readers' choice: Bar Fausto