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CLUB ME . . . WITH A MARTINI! |
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 Mighty Macanudo sets another kind of record
Los Angeles, August 10 – The Food Network is well known for its quirky shows and the eccentric but endearing “Top 5" is one of them. Host Bobby Rivers counts down the show’s picks in a lot of strange categories like “Donut Dreams” and “Lunchbox Faves.” Then there was last week’s “Big Bites.”
While wading through the features on $19 hot dogs, a seven-layer chocolate cake big enough to kill diabetics in a single serving and a $58 Sunday brunch large enough to feed some African nations, there, to my astonishment, was Macanudo.
Club Macanudo, that is.
Seems that the New York cigar bar at 26 East 63rd Street, now enjoying its eighth anniversary, is not only home to a congenial atmosphere, quality food and your choice from 15 of the top brands of cigars available in America, but it is also the only spot to enjoy the “63rd Street Martini.”
Which costs 63 dollars!
Sure, it’s got rare ingredients including Chateau Font Pinot Cognac made from champagne grapes, Belle de Brille (a pear-flavored Cognac liqueur), Real Companhia (a 20-year-old Port) and Fiji Pear Nectar. But it’s the price which is the draw.
General Cigar’s Victoria McKee couldn’t stop smiling for the cameras when talking about the unique cocktail. Maybe she was thinking about the profit margins. But she was honest enough to note that “a lot of these are bought with corporate plastic.” Uh huh. Expense-account auditors, you have been warned.
And I thought Macanudo was about cigars.
Time for some football:
General Cigar also introduced the ultimate gift for the cigar/football glutton, perfect for whiling away an entire weekend (season?) of college and professional football with all of your friends, right through to the Monday Night game.
It’s the Hoyo de Monterrey “Factory Fresh Crate,” packaging 350 cigars in three different sizes: 150 Rothschilds (4 1/2 x 50), 100 Double Coronas (6 3/4 x 48) and 100 Governors (6 1/8 x 50). All come in cellophaned bundles inside a giant, Hoyo-logoed wooden box, lined in burlap and shavings of Spanish Cedar.
The Crate is a pretty good deal, too, with 25 percent off the regular price of these excellent, medium-to-full-bodied cigars. Even at an average of just over $2.70 a stick, the Crate will still set you back about $950. But you won’t have to buy any more cigars this season!
Carrie Nation Follow-up:
Yesterday’s comments included a note warning about the effects of Prohibition (and near-Prohibition) tactics on tobacco from zealots reminding us of Carrie Nation, the turn-of-the-20th Century temperance fanatic. A weekend news item from Toronto is a peephole into the future.
The Toronto police have noted that thanks to the ever-increasing tax requirements, bulk theft and black-market resale of cigarettes is now at an all-time high and climbing in Ontario. At C$66 per carton, cigarettes are easily sold, impossible to trace and in almost unlimited supply.
When one considers the wide trade in Cuban cigars already underway in this country, where one stick from Havana can cost twice as much as a carton of branded cigarettes, imagine the depth and breadth of a tobacco black market in cigarettes, pipe tobacco, cigars and smokeless if the anti-tobacco zealots have their way. Then again, we’re only 16 years away from another “Roaring ‘20s.”
See you sometime at Club Macanudo. Do I need a password to get in yet?
~ Rich Perelman
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