William L. Hamilton - Shaken and Stirred: Through the Martini Glass, and other Four-Ounce Adventures

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DUSHAN ZARIC HAS, TO MY MIND, a unique and concise view of life.

You like it sweet? You like sour? he asked me last week. You like bitter? You like dirty? Straight?

I thought about all that, maybe a little too deeply.

Mr. Zaric is a bartender, and we were talking about cocktails. He is also, with Jason Kosmas, a fellow bartender, a partner in Cocktail Conceptions, a consulting service in Astoria, Queens, in the apartment the two men share and where they develop cocktails for restaurants, bars and liquor companies. They have been friends for four years and have a combined bartending experience of thirteen years.

You have to be behind the bar, Mr. Zaric said. If youre not behind the bar, youre going to lose touch with your basics.

Cocktail Conceptions, which is actually Mr. Zaric and Mr. Kosmass dining room table, set up with liquors, barware and glass-ware, jars of sugars and vanilla beans, homemade infusions and bowls of fruits currently in the markets in Astoria, has worked for Courvoisier, Beefeater, Mumm and Perrier Jout Champagne, and the new Stoli Premier.

One of Cocktail Conceptions latest assignments was the cocktail menu at Schillers Liquor Bar. It is Keith McNallys newest venture, at the corner of Rivington and Norfolk Streets. The white neon sign makes it look, cleverly, like an all-night pharmacy in a bad neighborhood.

There was a point in time when it might have been brilliant to put Mr. McNally on the City Planning Commission. He invaded and occupied frontier territories like TriBeCa with the restaurant Odeon in 1980 and eastern SoHo with Pravda in 1996 and Balthazar in 1997. Mr. McNallys recent posts are more like cleanup missions in well-publicized locales: Pastis in the meatpacking district in 1999 and Schillers, opened last month, on the Lower East Side.

Mr. McNally asked Mr. Zaric, who also works at the bar, for frozen margaritas and then cut him loose to invent the house drinks.

I didnt want us to appear too fancy, but to bring it down a littlenot just cocktails, Mr. McNally said. And I like them. But, Ive got quite bad taste.

In Astoria, the request sent a freezing chill down the spines of Mr. Zaric and Mr. Kosmas, like the time Mr. Kosmas saw a maraschino cherry in a cosmopolitan.

I threw away a lot of it, Mr. Zaric said of their research, conducted at the dining table beneath a portrait of Tito, the president of the former Yugoslavia. (Mr. Zaric is from Belgrade.)

Its a sentimental, not an ideological thing, Mr. Zaric said, referring to Tito. The guy was a great scamster. We have respect for that.

How do they start, in inventing a cocktail?

Shopping, Mr. Zaric said.

Shopping, Mr. Kosmas agreed. On 30th Avenue here, theres a whole bunch of produce marketseverything you can imagine. On the dining table were white peaches, green apples, crabapples and pomegranates.

I juiced ten cases of those once, Mr. Kosmas said, gesturing toward the pomegranates. I had a white apron on. I looked like a butcher.

At Schillers on Wednesday, it was business as usualMr. McNallys standard bistro background and, in the crowd, Europeans in track suits, artists with children and couples who probably werent of age when Mr. McNally opened his last restaurant. There were also older men in short-sleeved polyester shirtsthe aging aristocracy of the East Village and the Lower East Side.

If Schillers frozen margaritas are an honorable escape, the Sparkling Mango is a triumph. There are nights when you think youll never drink again, and then you come upon a drink like it, a piece of exoticism whose simplicity is its surprise.

You get this sweet-and-sour kind of thing, but then, you get the bubbles, Mr. Zaric said proudly.

Consider it the newest of lifes choices.