Editors Response: Aperol vs Hugo.

In response to last week's post … Aperol is out, Hugo is in, and dare I say it, Campari may be the next emerging player. We reject the subtle bittersweetness of Aperol and lean all the way in, whether that's to a syrupy sweet Hugo ("thank god, I never liked Aperol anyways") or to a bitter, almost savory Campari ("I really wanted a negroni but it's 2pm and we are in public"). In this essay I will explore the manifestation of our increasingly polarizing sociopolitical trajectory in NYC patio drinking culture.

The Center Cannot Hold (a Spritz)

Aperol was the centrist drink. It was the drink of mild agreement. It was the drink you ordered when you wanted to be part of something without committing to anything. Its color is the color of a compromise — not quite sunset, not quite traffic cone. It tasted like nothing in particular, which was the point. You could drink it with your boss. You could drink it with your mother-in-law. You could drink it with a man you were no longer sure you wanted to be dating.

The center, as has been widely reported, no longer holds. This is true of the country and it is true of the patio.

The Hugo Wing

The Hugo drinker is sweet now and forever. They have made peace with sugar. They are wearing linen. They are reading a novel. They have, perhaps, recently gotten into matcha. The Hugo says: I am opting out. I am choosing softness as a political act. The world is hard, my spritz will not be. Elderflower is not a flavor, it is a posture.

I respect this. I will not always understand it but I respect it.

The Campari Wing

The Campari drinker has chosen the other direction. They want it to taste like something, and ideally that something is medicine. They have stopped pretending. They are ordering a drink the color of a warning label and they are sipping it on a sidewalk at 2pm. The Campari says: I am not opting out, I am opting in, and what I am opting into is the ongoing project of being too much.

There is no "Campari spritz" yet, not really. There is the Americano. There is the Campari soda. There is, of course, the Negroni — but the Negroni is a 6pm drink and we are talking about the afternoon. The point is the bitterness, not the format. The point is that you wanted to be at a martini bar but you are at a sandwich place with a bench out front, and you would like the drink to acknowledge that.

Actually

Somewhere along the way, we lost our appetite for nuance — the ability to straddle the line, to say both and instead of either or. I have been writing this whole essay as if you have to pick. As if the menu is a ballot. As if Aperol's sin was being in the middle.

But the point was never to compare. Maybe the point was never Aperol vs. Hugo. Maybe the point was that we used to be able to sit on a patio and order a drink and have it just be a drink, and now we cannot order anything without it being a statement about who we are and what we believe and whether we are sweet people or bitter people or the kind of people who still, against all evidence, want it to taste like an orange.

The Aperol spritz was the centrist drink and we killed it for being centrist. We may come to miss the center. We may come to miss the both-and. We may, on some hot afternoon in the back half of a hard year, look down at a menu and realize that what we actually wanted, the whole time, was a drink that didn't ask us to be anything in particular.

Order both. Order neither. Stay lusty.