Why comfort-food cocktails are dominating bar menus in 2025

From butter-washed Bourbon to cheese-infused cream, nostalgic pantry staples are reshaping the cocktail landscape. As consumers seek comfort and craft in uncertain times, bartenders are blending culinary techniques with spirits to create rich, memory-evoking drinks. Kathleen Willcox reports.

When life feels uncertain, people turn to comfort. Children want hugs and blankies, adults want mac n’ cheese and buttery treats. The onslaught of negative news cycles, entrenched long-term conflict and violence and economic uncertainty is serving up a cocktail of stress and low-grade depression that no one wants, which has, predictably, led to a corresponding rise in saturated fat consumption.

And while the world’s problems can’t be solved with deep-fried dishes and buttery cocktails, ordering data and conversations with drinks managers across the country show that it hasn’t stopped folks from trying.

In 2025, Grubhub’s most-ordered items included chicken nuggets, hot dogs, protein-powered cinnamon rolls and cookies, and sausage, egg and cheese sandwiches. In cocktail bars across the country, the vibe was similar: everyone wanted nostalgic, comforting, escapist cocktails.

While showy throwbacks like the Margarita, Old Fashioned and Negroni dominated headlines, there was also a more subtle, but undeniable trend afoot: mixologists were finding ways to offer compelling comfort to thirsty drinkers, often with butter-tinged cocktails, and other homey culinary staples infused with bracing spirits.

The rise of fat-washed cocktails

If you feel like you’ve been seeing butter everywhere, that’s because you have. Butter has emerged at the top of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s widely pilloried new U.S. Food Pyramid; per capita consumption of butter is surpassing all records, and that fad is expected to continue; “butter yellow” has even become a trending colour in high fashion and interior decoration.

In cocktails, butter is showing up in several formats, often with a chaser of deep thought.

“When incorporating butter into cocktails, I tend to go back to two applications: fat washing or a butter syrup,” says Sam Wood, owner and bartender at the retro-chic Adventure Time Bar in Denver, CO.

Organic, grass-fed, preferably, because as Wood says, “it just tastes better.” Wood favours bourbon with a brown butter wash and rum with European ghee. Butter syrup, meanwhile, which essentially “re-creates a pastry with a boozy twist,” a variety of spirits will do “wonders for added body in a drink, while also adding a baked good quality.”

John Cooper, beverage director at D.C.’s Vagabond, says butter in the form of syrup is his favoured form of cocktail deployment—especially in milk punches or classics like Hot Buttered Rum. His “go-to” spirits companions for butter are bourbon, aged rum, reposado tequila and vodka, but Cooper says “almost anything works” because … butter.

“Butter gives a wonderful silky, velvety texture to cocktails,” Cooper says. “Texture is one of the biggest factors in making a great cocktail, but most people can’t articulate how or why that works, or even, in many instances, how to describe it.”

Dale DeGroff, aka King Cocktail for his work in inventing the Cosmo, perhaps unsurprisingly, often goes a different route, opting out of fat-washing and syrups for esoteric compound butters.

For hot buttered rum, he uses fresh-ground nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice, often ground together with grated orange peel.

“If you want a sweeter cocktail, there are many possibilities, including maple syrup, brown sugar, or agave nectar,” DeGroff, who now has his own eponymous line of spirits, says. “But to make a proper chilled cocktail, like my Midnight Daiquiri, you need a butter-washed rum.”

Preferably, he adds, a compound-butter-washed rum for extra complexity.

Why is butter resonating with mixologists and consumers alike?

“It is warming, cosy, comfort in a glass,” says Marshall Minaya, beverage director at LOLITA in New York. “Cocktails like Hot Buttered Rum are also reliable, adaptable and have their own place in the hot cocktail lexicon.”

Jonas Gonzalez, beverage manager at the El Dorado Maroma Resort in Cancún, agrees, saying butter cocktails are perched at the “intersection of comfort, nostalgia and craft. And as everyone leans into warmer, winter-friendly flavours, butter brings richness, softness and familiarity, while allowing bartenders to push boundaries.”

At resorts like Dorado Maroma, they also reflect a larger movement toward culinary mixology, where the bar borrows techniques from the kitchen to create complex, immersive experiences.
“Savoury-sweet combinations are especially popular—think corn, spice, smoke, and warmth,” Gonzalez says. “Butter acts as a bridge ingredient, softening bold flavours and making adventurous cocktails more approachable.”

Culinary staples come to the bar

Other comforting, familiar flavours from the pantry are being snagged by mixologists, especially as swaps or additions in nostalgic classics.

At Standard Fare in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which elevates everything tried-and-true drinking and dining classics from meatloaf to martinis with a modern paradigm, co-owner Zac Denham says they’ve found incredible traction among guests with the Black Tie Gibson.

“I’ve always loved a classic Gibson, and when we were building the martini men,u it felt natural to approach it the same way we approach the food,” Denham says. “Using a house-made shallot vinegar instead of a traditional brine gives it a clean, savoury edge without pushing it into anything overly sharp or salty. Finishing it with cracked black pepper and a touch of unfiltered olive oil brings everything together in a really intentional way.”

The name, Denham continues, embodies the spirit of Standard Fare, taking the familiar and “giving it a subtle twist, letting ingredients show up in ways that feel unexpected but still make sense.”
At ama by Brad Kilgore, a reimagined Italian social club with Japanese influences in San Francisco, head mixologist Jared Boller also aims to echo the restaurant’s paradigm at the bar.

The Tomato Hana and the Fungi and Oak cocktails epitomise ama’s mission to blend two wildly different culinary cultures and sprinkle in unexpected flavours that somehow work together along the way.

“It is the ultimate fusion of both cultures,” Boller says. “It is basically toasted rice shochu, tomato miso shrub, yuzu vinegar, clarified as a ‘Milk Punch’ is in truest form Japanese simplicity and elegance. A three-day process to make, but a simple pour over Ice cocktail with a burnt cherry tomato is clean and opulent. The fungi and oak is another that is the ultimate expression of Japanese umami with four types of Japanese mushrooms cooked and extracted into Bourbon.”

The culinary cocktail isn’t just a comforting, creative flex; it delivers the bang for the buck and joyful experience that more people are seeking, says Jill Higgins, owner of 1861 Distillery in Georgia, where they offer a robust cocktail program.

“People are drinking less, but they are drinking better. When you’re only having one cocktail, the ingredients matter,” Higgins says. “Guests are approaching cocktails the same way foodies approach food – with curiosity and an appreciation for the craft.”

One of their most popular cocktails is also one of their richest and most unexpected.

“The Tomme & Tipple uses Thomasville Tomme cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy that is infused into cream,” she says, insisting that it’s much more than an order it once for bragging rights wonder. “Although we love that it brings an element of intrigue, the cheese isn’t just used for the sake of novelty. It brings a lovely depth and texture to the cocktail.”

Kitchen ingredients, selected with care, can transform a cocktail and an entire experience, and upgrade the spirits within. Fat can help lock in subtle aromas; acids balance sweetness; savory flavors add umami and depth. And many of these favourite flavours are deeply tied to sense memory.

Proust’s madeleine may be another person’s hot buttered rum, triggering a flood of childhood experiences and deep joy. Or it just may be the perfect cup of comfort they were seeking, but didn’t know how to ask for.

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