Marc A. Ross

Marc drinks Negronis. Not exclusively, and not professionally — but with enough consistency, in enough places, that it eventually turned into a book.

The recipe never changes: equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, but it always does. Numerous exceptions, numerous improvements, numerous bartenders' clever riffs on a drink that didn't ask to be improved.

Order the same thing in fifty rooms across four continents and something strange happens. The drink disappears as a variable. What's left is everything else — the light, the stools, the guy three seats down, the way a place in Stockholm holds a late afternoon differently than a place in Detroit. The way local ingredients and tweaks come through when you are in Buenos Aires or Edinburgh.

That's the book. The Negroni is just a reason for adventure, exploration, and observation.

Marc came to this the way most people come to their better ideas: by accident, and slightly underdressed. The first one that mattered was at Il Pellicano, on a coast that photographs better than it has any right to. Think Slim Aarons and the beautiful people. He's been chasing the next one ever since — through twenty-nine cities and nine countries, into hotel bars and airport lounges and one Syrian kitchen that has no business being as good as it is.

When he isn't doing this, he runs a geopolitical advisory + communications firm and a private network of people who'd rather talk than present slides. He writes and thinks about the intersection of commerce and government for people who have to make decisions before the headlines catch up. It's a serious living, built on watching how rooms work and what moves between the people in them, which, it turns out, is the same skill this book runs on. He gets to use it sitting down, with a drink, in more relaxed settings.

He splits his time between Washington, Detroit, and London, which is a polite way of saying he is rarely where he is supposed to be. This has been good for the research.

He'd like it on the record that this is not a ranking. People want it to be a ranking. They want a winner, a worst, a definitive verdict they can argue with at dinner. There isn't one. When pushed to say which one is best, he replies: "The next one."

The book captures the vibe of the cocktail joint and, when possible, the ingredients. When he was denied or unable to ask the bartender for the makeup of the cocktail because the mood wasn't right or secrecy was demanded, he moved on with a Jay-Z mindset, on to the next one.

This is the first volume. There will be more because the world is vast and full of bars, and he has not yet found a reason to stop.