"In a landscape where bars are serving weird cocktails with wild-sounding sub-ingredients, these drinks, while definitely weird (in a good way!), felt intentional and far from pretentious. Today's bartending tools enable cocktails to channel whatever you want them to: butter chicken , ancient traditions , literally the center of the galaxy . When drinks can realistically resemble anything, that can be exciting, but is it also limiting? Is there still room for a happy accident?"
"When I was at Forbidden Planet in the Union Square area, I saw that they had these three dice that were in the primary colors, similar to our color palette for Oddball. I got the dice because I thought it would be a cool tchotchke we could use on the backbar. But then I thought we could use them for drinks. We roll the dice, and that becomes our ingredients."
"Enter: Oddball's Blind Box Punch. To make it, the bar literally rolls the dice. I spoke with beverage director Logan Rodriguez about how it works, how it helps make use of some leftover booze and R&D scraps, and how it helps staff think on their feet. Read on for his thoughts, plus a hot take about rats in restaurants, an essay on unpaid restaurant work, and more."
Oddball pairs adventurous, out-there flavor ideas with deliberate, approachable execution. The Blind Box Punch assigns ingredient categories to dice faces and uses rolls to determine syrups, liqueurs, and base spirits. The dice idea grew from a backbar tchotchke and became a practical method to repurpose leftover booze and R&D experiments. The randomization encourages improvisation, forces on-the-fly decision-making from staff, and reduces waste by spotlighting underused stock. The format preserves room for serendipity while keeping drinks rooted in intentional flavor choices and operational usefulness.
Read at PUNCH
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