An Extraordinaire Experiment - with Cocktails

This article was originally published in International

Experimental—such a word attached to just about anything can make the imagination run wild. Avant-garde, brilliant, quirky or even just plain odd are frequently used to describe experimental art, music, or films. They all shake up the habitual and toy with people's emotions, is it good? Often times, yes, it’s very good.

Let’s mix things up, what about experimental cocktails? Intrigued? So were we. This is why we decided to have an experiment of our own at the now legendary Experimental Cocktail Club (ECC) in Paris. Not in Paris? No worries, you can run your own taste tests in one of their sister bars in New York, London, or Ibiza. If you have the funds, you might want to be thorough in your research and examine all four. Pro tip: be sure to tag your findings on Instagram with #DrinkPorn for proper documentation.

To start our experiment, with goggles and white coats ready—we’re that professional, we asked ourselves what should we expect at such a club? Would we encounter Frankenstein science projects, or just a trendy hangout at the forefront of new wave mixology? However unsure we were, with such global success this highly studied speakeasy leaves us with no other hypothesis than the ECC is extraordinaire.

Now, let’s go through our rigorous checklist for the Paris location:
- Low vintage trendy seating worthy of Etsy – check
- Candles and golden filtered lighting for the perfect #NoFilter – check
- Unique cocktail names worthy of a celebrity’s baby, like Popincourt and Cynarmonie – check
- Use of organic and unusual ingredients (eggs?) – check
- Fashionable bartenders to help you navigate the say whaaat? menu – check

So, is it good? As our well thought out study shows, the ECC does a fantastic job of fusing all the qualities of the word experimental. Its chill and quaint vintage charm somewhere between neo baroque and a ye olde tavern fuses perfectly with its avant-garde and sometimes quirky cocktails. As you may conclude, the hypothesis in this experiment is valid. The ECC is extraordinaire—though this may just be the Georgia cocktail talking.