Why this Project?

"That first sip is confusing and not particularly pleasant. But man, it grows on you."

— Anthony Bourdain

The first Negroni that mattered was at Hotel Il Pellicano, on the Tuscan coast, where Matt Hranek was giving one of his book talks. Hranek, the man behind Wm Brown, has built a whole life around doing ordinary things with great care, and he has made a Negroni look less like a cocktail and more like a way of paying attention. Equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. Stirred. An orange peel. That's the entire recipe. I watched him talk about it like a small religion, and somewhere between the first sip and the last, his obsession became mine.

So I kept ordering them. Everywhere. It became the thing I did walking into a new bar in a new city: order the Negroni, see what came back. Bourdain was right that the first one is confusing and a little unpleasant. He was also right that it grows on you. Mine grew into a habit, then into something I couldn't stop noticing.

The project itself started with a bad one.

San Francisco International, Terminal 3, a seafood joint called Yankee Pier. I ordered a Negroni and got back something served in a glass built for a West Coast IPA. A woman sitting next to me watched it land and offered a pitying "bold choice."

She was right. An airport restaurant is no place for a bitter red classic, and I should have known better. But that botched, mystery-ingredient drink and that stranger's two-word verdict did something. It convinced me the obsession was worth a chronicle.

Here is the thing about the Negroni. It is the same drink in Buenos Aires, Detroit, and Edinburgh. Three ingredients, equal parts, a hundred-year-old formula nobody owns and everybody borrows. Which means the recipe isn't the story. The room is the story. The person making it is the story. What a place does with three fixed ingredients tells you almost everything about it: its taste, its ambition, whether it's showing off or telling the truth.

This book is not a ranking. I am not here to crown the best Negroni. I am here to document fifty of them, in fifty rooms, and the people and cities attached to each. Some were perfect. A few were disasters. All of them were worth the trip.

Bourdain's advice was to have a Negroni, have two, and stay open to the person next to you — even when you don't understand them or agree with them. Have a drink with them anyway. That is the whole idea. The drink is just the excuse to pay attention.

— Marc A. Ross