Don Draper never asked a bartender what the house special was. He said Old Fashioned and got on with the evening. In an Indian bar today, he would need to specify. I went through the menus of 40 popular bars across the country and found that 75% don't print a straight classic.
"Do you want to stick to the classic, or are you feeling adventurous today?"
That is Karan Dhanelia's opening when a customer walks into his bar and asks for a Whisky Sour. He says that nine times out of 10, the customer takes the bait and opts for the house version. And the tenth gets what Diageo's Worldclass' Bartender of the Year 2026 promises will be the best classic Whisky Sour they have tasted in their life.
One has to admit that it's quite a sorted arrangement; the customer gets the choice of familiarity or discovery, the bartender gets a chance to show off a little, and the classic cocktail, which has lately been having a difficult time getting a place on the menu, can make its case all over again.
Spend some time with a menu at a contemporary cocktail bar, and you will see what the classic is up against. Ghee-washed spirits, and infusions involving regional spices, to signatures named after childhood memories or a regular's unusual request that turned out great.
However, classics remain, stubbornly, what India drinks. The 'What India Is Drinking 2026' report found the Picante at the top of the order charts, with the Negroni and the Espresso Martini close behind.
Two of the five best-selling drinks at Delhi's Barbet & Pals, the Espresso Martini and the Old Fashioned, appear nowhere on its menu. At Top Banana, also in the capital, bar head Angaihi Khawlhring puts classics and modern classics at about 20% of orders, every one of them off the page.
"I don't think a menu mention should be confused with unavailability," counters Rahul Mehra, co-founder of Third Eye Distillery, the house behind Stranger & Sons gin.
Three Much, Punchline Bar's take on the martini (Source: Instagram/Jeet Rana)
So, is it dead?
Put that question to the people who make the drinks for a living and you get two broad answers. The first, and the most disarming, is that the classic never lived here to begin with. "India is a land of whiskey drinkers," says Dhanelia. His theory is that a country raised on Scotch and soda skipped an entire century of drinking, and "jumped to craft cocktails straight!" When he started out, he says that guests knew two cocktails. One was a Whisky Sour, and the other was a Mojito, which a worrying number believed was made with vodka.
The second answer, the crowd favourite, is that the classic is alive, and simply unlisted. "Definitely not dead, definitely very much alive," says Azalia Pereira, head bartender at Bengaluru's Bar Doubble. Trisha Kanga, Creative Head at Unsobered, lands nearby too. She says that classics may be "not as advertised and prominent on menus these days", but "classic cocktails are classic for a reason.
Coming to the question of why the classics left the menu? The short answer is identity, as per Rana. A Negroni tastes the same in Delhi and in Dubai, and, "If everybody starts doing only classics, then the uniqueness of the individual bar will be lost," he says. Dhanelia will tell you that most good bars in India now keep a section for classics, but he says they shouldn't bother, since "naming just 10 classics will give the idea that your bar can only do these 10 classics". He'd rather print one line at the bottom of the menu: "Ask for any Classics."
The classic as an entrance exam
For many who enjoy a good drink, the classic is now how a bar earns the right to experiment in the first place. "I'm a two-drink kind of girl," says Anaheez Patel, a luxury and culture creator. "One classic to assess whether the bar knows its fundamentals, and one experimental cocktail to see how creative they can get. You've got to earn my trust before you start putting obscure ingredients in my glass." Patel, who works in marketing, also explained this in some marketing parlance: "Good marketing might get me to order a cocktail once. A genuinely good cocktail gets me to order it twice. That's the difference between acquisition and retention."
At Giacosa in Florence, a bar that is historically associated with the Negroni, she ordered the original alongside a Cosmo variant of the classic. Despite not being a vodka fan, she loved the reinterpretation, largely because it retained the spirit of the orginal.
A Negroni and a Cosmo Negroni at Giacosa in Florence. (Courtesy: Anaheez Patel)
Kanga reaches for a classic at an unfamiliar bar, "because cocktail menus can often feel intimidating". Pereira watches the same caution from her side of the counter. New guests start safe, she says, and "more often than not, it's one of the classics. And if that's good, then it's really easier to convince them to try something you want them to try."
Pereira has, however, had customers challenge the fundamentals that she spent years learning behind the bar. She recalls one guest who disliked sweet drinks, and ordered the Lalbagh, Bar Doubble's take on a Gin Sour without any sugar. A sour typically relies on a balance of sweetness and acidity, and Pereira remembers having to strip the sugar out and adjust the sourness to suit his palate, even though it went against everything she had learnt about making a balanced cocktail.
For all the rules, ratios and years spent learning the craft, the final say, after all, belongs to the person drinking the cocktail.
A classic in disguise
"Almost 100% of cocktails that everybody makes as a signature are always inspired by classics," says Rana.
Dhanelia doubles down, saying that every drink ever poured is a riff on one of five 'mother cocktails': the Old Fashioned, the Sour, the Daisy, the Martini and the Highball. His latest creation pays tribute to the ship captains who were Johnnie Walker's first brand ambassadors, and it brings together whisky, coffee, tomato and a Parmesan froth. Underneath all of it sits the sturdy old skeleton of a Bloody Mary.
"Classics are your foundation. They're your blueprint and your map," says Pereira, who starts every new bartender on them before anything else. Mehra's Stranger & Sons works the same seam with Indian ingredients, building its Gibson on the country's vast repertoire of pickles and its Gimlets on regional citrus. "We are just making sure that we can put a little bit of us in that glass."
The cocktail that actually dies
If anything on the Indian menu deserves an obituary, it's the signature. Last year, Barbet & Pals created 16 of them, and when the menu turned over on the bar's first anniversary earlier this month, only four made it through. "Now you see, the rest are dead now," says Rana, without any particular grief. They were, he adds, really nice cocktails too.
Kanga has gone back to bars for the sake of one beloved signature, including a smoky bourbon number at Mumbai's Olive, but doesn't "ever remember the names of the cocktails". But she describes it to the server, and they know exactly what she's talking about.
Can India make a classic of its own?
A cocktail becomes a classic when other bars start making it, which is to say that no single bar can mint one on its own. That is how the Espresso Martini travelled out of 1980s London and onto every menu on earth, and it is the test any Indian contender will have to pass.
India has no solid candidate yet, but it apparently loves a spicy, tangy Picante, as per most bartenders. Rana credits Soho House with spreading it. He says that the members' club brought the drink to Mumbai. Delhi then picked it up, and Lair's version was such a hit that by this Diwali, it had escaped into house parties. He calls it a modern classic in the making, and Pereira would go even further than that. "I feel like that's India's classic," she says. "There is no other country that does it as well as us." Bar Doubble keeps three versions on its menu.
However, Dhanelia refuses to count it. What India pours is "a pickled, tangy version" of the Picante, he says, "so let's not consider it a classic". The desi rewrite has apparently become the default so, "If, today, you make a classic Picante for a consumer, chances are you will be told, 'You don't know how to make a Picante.'"
So what would it take for an Indian creation to travel the other way? For Mehra, it starts with being "that one drink that you must have before you leave that city". His pick is the Midnight Brekkie, Pankaj Balachandran's breakfast toast in a glass (peanut butter fat-washed gin, watermelon, strawberry), first served at Goa's Bar Tesouro.
Pankaj Balachandran's Midnight Brekkie. (Source: 50 Best Bars)
Last call
Rana has invented so many signature cocktails across 15 years in the industry that he has forgotten some of his own; the recipes sit in a folder on his laptop, waiting to be looked up. But the classics are still in his head. "I know those recipes in and out. I can make them anytime," he says.
Here's the tell I kept noticing: most of the bartenders I interviewed for this piece, when asked what they drink on their night off, named a classic. The people with the most elaborate menus in the country go home and pour themselves a Highball. That's how classics are born, and if the experts I spoke to are right, the first great Indian one is already out there somewhere, waiting for the rest of us to order it twice.
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