I met Jeff Lyon when he was bartending at Range, Phil West’s restaurant in San Francisco. When Jeff and Phil later teamed up to open Third Rail, I offered to help …
by designing bar coasters.
I treated them like a limited-edition print project. The set featured six cocktail recipes. Each began reasonably enough, then wandered into increasingly questionable instructions and bad puns.
The Manhattan Project combined Dubnium whiskey, Flerovium vermouth, and uranium bitters. It was strained onto a Ouija board, garnished with a radioactive cherry, and served with the instruction to ask Robert Oppenheimer if he was thirsty.
It’s not a real drink. I made it up.
The Irish Coiffure was topped with shaving cream and an optional edible toupee. My Tie called for Cravat Rum, Windsor Rum, Ascot Syrup, and a lemon paisley with matching cufflinks.
I made that up too.
Each recipe came with its own monster, drawn in black over a pale pink field. The set was letterpress printed in Ohio using black and PMS 488 U, then individually numbered in an edition of 500.
The printer and I discussed minimum line weights, reversed dots, overprinting, registration, and whether the fine background patterns would survive platemaking. These were serious production questions concerning drawings of monsters holding radioactive cherries.
When the pieces were finished, someone put a drink on them.
Eventually.