Our man in the liquor-soaked trenches.

Sam Sifton

"Terrific"

The Washington Post

The cocktail book you've always wished you had.

Food 52

A brilliant new book anyone, anywhere calling themselves a bartender should feel duty-bound to read.

DRINK Magazine

An excellent history of the Old-Fashioned.

The Wall Street Journal

About Robert Simonson

ROBERT SIMONSON has written about cocktails, spirits, bars, and bartenders for the New York Times since 2000. He also regularly writes for the Travel section at the Times. Since 2017, he has been a contributing editor at Punch, where he writes the column "Bar Review," making him the country's only bar critic with a national purview. He is the author of The Martini Cocktail (2019), 3-Ingredient Cocktails (2017), which was nominated for a 2018 James Beard Award, A Proper Drink (2016), the first chronicling of the current cocktail renaissance, and The Old-Fashioned (2014), a history of said drink. He is also a contributor to The Essential New York Times Book of Cocktails (2015) and Savoring Gotham. His writings have appeared in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Saveur, GQ, Lucky Peach, Whisky Advocate, Imbibe, and many others. With Martin Doudoroff, he created the apps "Modern Classics of the Cocktail Renaissance" and "The Martini Cocktail." With the barware purveyor Cocktail Kingdom, he created a set of period-specific, 19th-century Old-Fashioned glasses. Nominated for two IACP Awards and 11 Spirited Awards, he won the latter in 2019. A native of Wisconsin, he has lived in Brooklyn since 1988.