http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/dining/vodka-comes-in-from-the-cold.html 2014-12-08 20:10:37 Vodka Comes In From the Cold Vodka, once the whipping boy of all self-serious mixologists, has managed to get its foot back in the door at several bars in New York and beyond. === The Happiest Hour It also has a line on the cocktail menu that you wouldn’t expect from someone who has spent 10 years trying to broaden drinkers’ palates: “Happy to substitute vodka in any cocktail.” Was it for this that Pegu Club kept vodka off the back bar when it opened in 2005, in hope of weaning customers from their vodka-and-sodas? Was it for this that in all of its eight years, Death & Company has never listed a vodka cocktail? Vodka, once the whipping boy of all self-serious mixologists, has managed to get its foot back in the door at several bars in New York and beyond. “I felt that rather than continue to have the argument with people, that it made more sense to say, ‘Hey, if you’re a vodka drinker, why am I going to stand here and say the suggested spirits on the menu are the only ones that belong in the drink’? ” Mr. Kearns said. He has engineered the original house drinks at the Happiest Hour so they will work not only with the spirit he recommended, but also with vodka. “Things have really come full circle, haven’t they?” said Audrey Saunders, an owner of Pegu Club and a former employer of Mr. Kearns. Ms. Saunders’s bar was at the forefront of the vodka battles that raged in the last decade, when high-end bartenders disdained the drink as the white bread of the spirit world: devoid of character, unchallenging, safe and (to their minds) inexplicably popular. It brought nothing to a glass they desperately wanted to fill with flavor. Ms. Saunders, a gin evangelist, kept vodka in the house, but did anything not to use it. Her bartenders lined up behind her. “Toby Maloney used to jokingly say to people who wanted vodka or flavored vodka that he had a great juniper-infused vodka for them to try,” Mr. Kearns recalled, mentioning one of Pegu Club’s early bartenders. “And then he’d lay a gin drink on them.” That sort of my-way-or-the-highway hospitality often got patrons’ backs up. But Ms. Saunders doesn’t regret her adamantine standards. “If we were going to have a craft cocktail scene,” she said, “I had to take the vodka bottle away.” If attitudes toward vodka have begun to soften, it’s in part because the bartenders’ battle has been fought and won. “Now we’re at a point where so many people are comfortable with cocktails in general, you don’t have to use those same tactics any longer,” said Alex Day, a former bartender at Death & Company. Mr. Day is a partner in The real twist, though, may be this: Now that cocktail drinkers can get the spirit they were once denied, they don’t want it anymore. Most customers at the Happiest Hour are passing on the vodka option. “It doesn’t seem like people are expecting vodka with cocktails as much as they did,” Mr. Kearns said. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that times have changed is that even Ms. Saunders is adding a vodka cocktail to her menu at Pegu: the grapefruit cooler. Why bend now? “Because now,” she said, “I can.”