In Underrated we evaluation the bizarre rituals we construct round meals. Subsequent up: ingesting a Shirley Temple.
You most likely final drank a Shirley Temple at your third-grade classmate’s laser tag birthday celebration with a slice of unhealthy pizza on a plastic Toy Story–branded tablecloth. Or perhaps you had it “soiled” with a shot of vodka again in 2022, when everybody from the New York Instances to Enterprise Insider named it the drink of the summer time. That’s after I started ingesting them once more myself—strictly the G-rated variety with grenadine, Sprite, and a maraschino cherry. The 12 months 2022 additionally occurred to be after I stop ingesting and abdicated all claims to future Drinks of the Summer season. I’m happy to report that the kid-friendly model nonetheless offers you all the identical emotions from the final time you had one: pleasure, pleasure, and the optimism of an individual who didn’t but know again ache.
After I stop ingesting I had no concept what to do with myself in eating places, the place my sobriety caught in my throat each time I used to be requested for my drink order. I used to be possessed, routinely, by the urge to apologize to my server for making them carry me some boring crap we each knew I didn’t need. To be honest, many menus did have a mocktails part with some tempting choices. However, dwelling in New York, I used to be insulted by the concept of paying craft cocktail costs for one thing that might by definition fail to get me drunk.
Then I discovered myself heading to a celebration hosted by the intimidatingly cool publication Dust, the place there can be an open bar. I dreaded the prospect of spending the night schlepping round my traditional pint glass stuffed with soda with bitters, a grim and unwieldy cocktail which may as properly be referred to as The Ugh. However as an alternative, after I arrived, I noticed her winking at me from the cocktail menu throughout the room—in oh-so-trendy “soiled” kind, true, nevertheless it was nonetheless like going to a celebration the place you suppose you received’t know anyone after which seeing an outdated buddy unexpectedly. I beelined for her, my coronary heart pounding.
“Hello there,” I stated to the bartender, my eyes nonetheless glued to the menu as if I believed she may disappear from it any second. “Might I’ve a Shirley Temple?”
“One Soiled Shirley coming proper up,” he stated.
“NO,” I stated casually. I’d be pressured to make this distinction frequently through the Summer season of the Soiled Shirley, and by no means managed to take action with any grace. “Uh. Sorry. Only a common Shirley, please.”
However the drink he served me didn’t appear to be “only a common” something. The Shirley Temple got here in a highball glass topped with a skewer of three velvety Luxardo cherries. What had I performed to deserve such opulence? A half-inch of neon pink grenadine climbed up the underside of the glass, the pale Sprite burbling away like witch’s brew. It did not appear to be one in all my sorry soda and bitters, that’s for positive. It didn’t even appear to be a cocktail. It simply seemed completely, unmistakably like a Shirley Temple. And it tasted third-grade-birthday-party scrumptious, its saccharine fruitiness tempting me with old school sugar rush.
