Do cocktail glasses have a gender? For some men, clearly

NEW YORK – At a recent work party in New York City, Mr Brady Dunayer bolted to the bar to order a drink.

The 28-year-old real estate banking analyst was startled by what he received: His whiskey-based cocktail was served in a stemmed glass and garnished with a flower.

The presentation, he thought, was “a little out of the blue” for a whiskey drink. So for his next round, he ordered the same cocktail but told the bartender: “Hold the flower, give me a rocks glass.”

That same night, Mr Daniel Kaye, a 26-year-old working in finance, was not thrilled with the fruity cocktail he had ordered at Commerce Inn while out with his buddies.

He said the highball glass, complete with a striped straw, made him feel a little feminine. “I didn’t love it,” he said, adding, “It was a masculine venue, a lot of whiskey being served.”

There are many reasons a bartender will serve a cocktail in a particular kind of glass, dilution and aeration among them.

“The 30-something finance bro doesn’t care about that,” said Mr Kyle Kuhl, head bartender at Rocco’s Sports & Recreation in NoHo.

While efforts to challenge the gender binary are evident in how people talk, dress for work and wear make-up, a visit to the cocktail bar might transport you back to the 1950s.

Bartenders say that many men appear as committed as ever to drinking out of “manly” glasses and avoiding glassware they deem too feminine.

“It’s an industry joke that we tend to stereotype people based on their glassware preferences,” said Ms Kaslyn Bos, 30, a bartender at Donna in the West Village.

At Donna, the drinks are colourful, sometimes heavily garnished with fruit and cocktail umbrellas and often served in “shapely glasses”, she said.

She has fielded requests – only from men – to transfer a cocktail from one glass to another. She noted that a manly glass, to those asking, is always a rocks glass.

At Rocco’s, Mr Kuhl’s solution is a colour-coded glassware guide on the cocktail menu. A blue dot means the cocktail will come in a rocks glass; a green dot signifies a coupe glass; and a brown dot denotes a novelty glass (one is shaped like a football).

He has noticed more glassware imagery popping up on menus since the pandemic. “More and more cocktail bars are leaning into it a little to mitigate the surprise” for the customer, he said.

Glassware choices are important. For instance, Mr Kuhl serves the Serena Chilliams, a take on the French 75, in a coupe glass so the drink is neither diluted with ice nor warmed up by the customer’s hand.

His menu provides fair warning.

The system requires some degree of glassware knowledge, but it does the trick.

“A younger guy said to me, ‘I was going to get the Cherry Bonds, but then I looked up what a Nick and Nora glass is’,” Mr Kuhl said. (The Nick and Nora looks like a shorter version of a stemmed wineglass – potentially non-manly.)

Advertising executive Rory Sutherland wrote in his 2019 book, Alchemy: The Surprising Power Of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense: “A few years ago, we discovered that men were reluctant to order a cocktail in a bar – in part because they had no foreknowledge of the glass in which it would be served.”

The fix, Sutherland found, “was to put illustrations or pictures of the drinks on the menu”.

In a video with more than 2.4 million views on TikTok, Max Klymenko, who also works in advertising, presented that revelation in Alchemy to a new audience.

The conversation in the comments mostly confirmed the book’s findings: One response, from a bartender, read, “I’ve seen men freak out about a straw”.

“It’s just a matter of what you see in TV and movies,” said Klymenko, who added, “I vividly remember Harvey Specter on (legal drama) Suits always drinking from a short glass. To me, that seemed like something I should emulate.”

At Shinji’s in the Flatiron district, the menu includes illustrations for all house cocktails, which are served in speciality glassware.

At Up & Up in Greenwich Village, the cocktail menu has both illustrations and a key showing rocks, highball and stemmed glasses.

Cocktail director Ali Martin said the intention was only to communicate the drink’s strength or dilution, but for people who want to drink exclusively from rocks glasses, it does save a step.

“As a society, we’re working towards dismantling gender roles and gender dynamics,” said Ms Haley Traub, general manager at Attaboy on the Lower East Side. “Why is this the one little thing that we’re still holding on to?”

She is disheartened by the lingering trope of the man’s glass, but does not see it changing anytime soon.

“As much as you want to shake the person by the shoulders and say, ‘Stop gendering glassware’,” she said, “it does help to take the opportunity to explain and educate, and hopefully change his viewpoint.”

Mr Jake Webster, a 24-year-old working in finance, used to succumb to the desire for a stemless glass.

When he started going to bars, he would order a beer or a whiskey on the rocks. Eventually, he grew tired of ordering drinks he did not like.

Despite stares from some men in bars, he said, his go-to drink is now a Cosmopolitan, served straight up in a V-shaped glass.

“It’s 2023,” he said. “Who cares anymore?” NYTIMES