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The Blues at B Flat

B flat cocktail I’m fairly certain that blue cocktails are gauche. (I know because I spent a few years in the ‘90s drinking MD 20/20 Hawaiian Blue by choice. The more coconut-flavored Windex-y malt liquor that washed through your system, the more you could envision yourself lazily swimming to the shoreline pictured on the bottle’s label. “I’m half-way there…yep, reaching the sand…Zzzz.”) Unrespectable or not, this pale lagoon of a drink that blends prosecco, yuzu juice and Calpico with a few dashes of blue curacao that looks like a secret elixir when stored in a small, transparent metal-spouted bottle, keeps it classy. The bartender at Japanese, jazzy B Flat was shaking up a number of these seemingly nameless cocktails, one for a beefy man in khakis. No one can resist the aqua liquid once they’ve laid eyes on it.

Late to the game, I was given a standard champagne flute. It looked more special when served in the taller, narrow, straight-walled glass that the earlier patrons received. The basement lounge is busy with good reason; happy hour, featuring $6 cocktails, two signatures per the standard spirits, lasts until 8pm.

I tried a Sazarac and a Manhattan, both whiskey choices (hey, I was celebrating some good fortune—I don’t know if I’ll be able to take 2011 if it all turns out as well as the first two weeks of January) and couldn’t resist also trying the baby blue drink before rushing off to Sushi Azabu–it was a Japanese subterranean kind of night. The cocktail tastes like fizzy, sweetened grapefruit juice—if asked to describe its color based on taste alone, I would say orange—and was a nice send off after the two prior stiff brown beverages.

B Flat * 277 Church St., New York, NY

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