This story begins as such stories often do. A man walks into a bar.
The early evening is dark and bone cold. The bar is inviting. The man is thirsty.
“What are you thinking?” asks the bartender. Behind him stand dozens of bottles of spirits and mixers. In front, juices and tinctures. Above, a pressed tin ceiling. To the side, a red brick wall, radiating warmth.
Between the bartender and the man lies a beat-up old wooden counter — dented, salvaged, varnished anew. This slab of wood could tell some tales. The man trusts the bartender.
“Bourbon, or maybe rye,” the man says. “But in a cocktail, served up. Not too….”
“Shaken or stirred?” the bartender asks.
“Does it matter?” the man responds.
The bartender smiles. “Do you want something with just bitters or also some citrus?”
The man picks citrus, and the bartender gets to work. He grabs bottles from the back shelf. He measures. He shakes the cocktail vigorously. He strains it into a slope-shouldered coupe. The drink is cloudy orange, the color of a sunset seen through cataracts.
Its flavor is alive, a rotary engine of sensations — tart juice pushing into twisty bitters opening up to sweet brown liquor. It tastes like an old pop song played on a scratchy .45.
This was the drink the man wanted even though he didn’t know it existed. That first bright nip on a cold winter evening when he wasn’t planning to drink too much. It wasn’t a serious cocktail, but not totally frivolous either.
The bartender tells the man the story of this cocktail. It wasn't his invention — not even a specialty of the bar, the Clover Club in Brooklyn.
The Paper Plane was invented by a bartender named Sam Ross during the latter years of the previous decade. Ross was one of the founders of Milk & Honey, a speakeasy-style bar that helped launch the new cocktail culture. He was listening to the 2008 M.I.A. hit "Paper Planes" when he was working on the recipe.
If you know the song (“bang, bang, bang, bang”) then you’re thinking that you once loved it, then couldn’t get it out of your head, then heard it in an elevator, and then it was over.
Is that what the Paper Plane drink is? The played-out Top 40’s hit of craft cocktails? Maybe. If you Google the drink, you’ll see that everyone has already written about it. So why now?
Maybe because a bartender thinks of it, and a man delights to it, and it proves itself a new classic. The only drink for a certain mood.
The recipe has the canny simplicity of a great math theorem. For one cocktail you blend equal 3/4-ounce measures of these four ingredients: 1) Fresh lemon juice. 2) Bourbon. 3) Aperol, an orange-flavored Italian aperitivo that has the exact color of an Orange Red Crayola. 4) Nonino Quintessentia amaro, an Italian potable bitters that is based on grape brandy and oak aged with dozens of ingredients, including licorice root, saffron and tamarind.
A casual poll of four Atlanta bartenders revealed that two didn't know the recipe (but were quick studies) and two did. As you might expect, Paul Calvert at Paper Plane in Decatur knew it well.
In fact, it was a variation on the drink that Calvert used to make that gave his bar its name. He and his partners were drinking these cocktails when they were casting about for inspiration.
That’s how the story ends. The man in the bar always finds what he’s looking for in the bottom of a glass.
