Tough-to-book Tatiana, recently awarded five stars in these pages, is fun fine dining at Lincoln Center. It's updated its food and drink menus a few times since opening last November, and this season's Miami Vice, a piña colada, strawberry daiquiri swirl, is, like everything else here, peak form.
Trends come and go whether they illustrate a seemingly organic zeitgeist like 2022's influx of speakeasy-style bars, or they’re the product of a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign like the Aperol spritz blitz of 2018. Summer is particularly conducive to the form: A season that somehow feels more ephemeral than the others, making abstract promises of love and holidays, all hazy with the patina of heat.
Last year’s so-called drink of the summer was the frozen, as it was before, and is once more and will always be. It's the ideal icy canvas to spin anything into with unending possibilities limited only by the imagination (and occasional supply chain issues). They reached a saturation point even earlier, in 2021, when a proliferation of places newly making room for slushie machines or plugging blenders in behind the bar were suddenly serving more frozens than ever before.
“I think that frozen drinks are outstanding,” PDT owner Jeff Bell told us in an interview at the time. “I don’t think frozen drinks were received well ten years ago. I think everybody was still in this moral high ground, high horse of like, ‘Oh, that’s a trashy cocktail because it’s frozen.”
But as more and more restaurants and bars were able to create or expand their outdoor seating areas, attitudes changed, and soon new frozens were joining our old favorites all over town. And, while the occasional zag to something shiny and new can be cute, frozens are the drink of forever summer in NYC.
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