Long before the new restaurant PEARL Provisions + Tipples opened this season, in the downtown Mystic space formerly occupied by Pizzetta, I had heard rumors of plans for a $20 cocktail.
Someone on PEARL’s team had clearly let slip the high-octane pricing strategy, because it had already raised a lot of eyebrows among Mystic proprietors, long before the first menus were printed.
It’s a small town, and the grapevine was buzzing early about an incoming wave of New York drink prices.
And sure enough — tada! — the signature cocktail in the posh new restaurant on Water Street is The PEARL, at $20, with Ketel One Vodka, Fords Gin, Lillet Blanc, orange bitters, basil oil and caviar onion.
Other drinks on the menu remain closer to the range of what I have learned, with a little research, to be more typical prices for complicated cocktails in downtown Mystic, $11 to $15.
Still, PEARL restaurant, with its $18 COSMO + WANDA and $16 APOLLO, with Tanqueray Gin, sage, lemon ginger and meringue, is clearly pushing some new price points in town.
Maybe there are some other places in Mystic with higher drinks prices, but I couldn’t find them.
The new restaurant looks great, a stylish renovation of the plain pizza and salad joint that hunkered there so long, and it appears to be capturing at least a share of the bustling Mystic restaurant trade.
I haven’t seen the kind of lines, though, that often now form outside Sift Bake Shop, the bakery/bar/restaurant that has that has mastered the croissant experience and become Mystic’s hot spot.
I salute all those who can take the passing of the $20 cocktail threshold in stride. I guess this is the in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound philosophy of eating out. Why quibble about the cost of your tipples?
And yet I’m enough of an old Connecticut Yankee that I find it hard to fathom that a round of drinks for four, with a modest tip, is going to break a $100 bill, many multiples of an hour of minimum wage labor.
It also feels a little like inflation exploitation.
We’ve all come to expect higher prices, and some businesses seem to think consumers have become so accustomed to it that they are no longer shocked by price adventuring.
I haven’t noticed big spikes, for instance, in retail liquor prices, when it’s sold in bottles and not cocktail glasses.
It’s true of everything.
I decided not to buy a jug of windshield washer cleaner, at $8.99, not long ago at the gas station at the Mystic Interstate 95 exit, because that seemed even more shocking than a $20 cocktail. I bought the same stuff for $3.50 at the hardware store less than a quarter mile away.
To be fair to the proprietors of PEARL and their aggressive drink pricing, I will say I did find one menu from a resort not far away that makes them look like drinks discounters.
De Cognac Avec Amour, XO, at the Ocean House in Watch Hill, starting with Hennessey XO Cognac and topped with a foie gras cookie, will set you back $150.
Otherwise, $20 and $30 cocktails at the Ocean House are fairly routine. Maybe they are in Newport, too.
I’ll be curious to see how successful PEARL’s pushing of the drinks prices envelope in Mystic will be and how many others follow along.
The new Mystic continues to surprise.
This is the opinion of David Collins.
d.collins@theday.com
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