Choosing a bar, choosing a cocktail from the menu—these things can be fraught. But the physical act of lifting a cocktail to your lips and taking a sip is supposed to be the easy part, the simple reward at the end of a lot of decisions. Well, depending on the glass. A new “wave” (you’ll get the pun in a second) of glassware is popping up, featuring tilts and angles that might have you thinking you’re tipsier than you are.
You may have seen them at bars like Brooklyn’s Sunken Harbor Club or Biddeford, Maine’s Magnus on Water. They aren’t quite novelty glasses, but they look like an accident out of the glassblowing studio. They’re tilted in one direction, or swooped to the side. They look like a regular highball glass might look if you’ve had one too many. They are, at the very least, a conversation starter. As one reviewer commented on a retailer’s website, “I tell [people], if the glass looks slanted to you, then drink more until it looks straight!”
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Magnus on Water has been using the “wave” glasses, as staff call them, since the bar opened in 2020, to serve its Couch Surfer drink. “I wanted to recreate the experience of diving headfirst into a breaking wave, but also let people experience that from the comfort of our restaurant,” says bar director Brian Catapang. The shape of the glass means the foam from the drink, a Margarita riff made with dry Curaçao and a poblano and pineapple sea salt foam, sits at an angle, more like an actual wave.
Making drinkers think about how to approach the cocktail seems to be the point of the glasses. CloudBar, atop Chicago’s Hancock Tower, serves its Feeling TILT-sy cocktail in an angled glass, evoking the Tilt experience available at the building’s observation deck. “You put down the glass, and for a split second, you’re like, Oh my gosh, the glass is gonna fall,” says Jen Hesser, assistant general manager of CloudBar. “It’s just an unexpected way to look at a drink.”
There are challenges to using these kinds of angled glasses. Catapang says bartenders must use a soft-shake technique to blunt the edges of the ice cubes, so they can fit into the glass. “It’s kind of like playing Tetris,” he says. And certain garnishes may not sit the same way. But the glass is eye-catching, the kind of thing that makes a guest ask what’s being served to someone else, then order it themselves. But the tipsy glass is not for everyone. “Customers have mixed feelings about them, they either love them or hate them,” wrote another reviewer of Libbey’s so-called “Pisa” glass.
The response at Magnus on Water, however, has been positive. “I think the best part about this glass is that it forces people to lean into the experience of the drink (quite literally),” says Catapang. It’s interactive but approachable, something that makes you think twice about how to drink, but not so confusing that you’re put off. And the results, like the glass itself, are just fun. “There is nothing more satisfying than looking around and seeing sea-foam mustaches on everybody.”
