The Bamboo is a bartender's drink. Dry sherry, dry vermouth, a couple dashes of bitters — it asks nothing of you and rewards everything. It has been, as Punch notes, "somewhat of a flex," with bartenders turning it into a showcase for blending and layering techniques. Which is fine. Bartenders are allowed to have fun.
But the version being served at Echo Lake — sherry and coconut and ice, thrown in a blender, married to the Colada template — is doing something more interesting than flexing. It's making an argument that the Bamboo's essential quality isn't its sophistication. It's its adaptability.
The Colada Template Is Underrated as a Vehicle
The Piña Colada gets treated like a guilty pleasure when it should be treated like a chassis. The fat from coconut cream, the acid from pineapple, the dilution from ice — that's a structure you can hang almost anything on. Siddalee Lewis, one of Punch's Best New Bartenders of 2026, built a drink she describes as "a Piña Colada that drinks like an Old-Fashioned" using toasted-coconut-infused bourbon and acid-adjusted pineapple cordial. The point wasn't novelty. The point was that the Colada's bones are good enough to support serious spirits work.
The Bamboo Colada is the same instinct applied to sherry. Fino sherry — the Bamboo's traditional base — is already saline and oxidative in ways that play well with coconut's richness. The combination shouldn't work on paper, and it probably does in the glass. That's the tell of a well-constructed drink: the logic only becomes visible after you've tasted it.
What the Bamboo Colada actually demonstrates is that the cocktail world's obsession with complexity as a signal of quality gets it backwards. The drinks worth paying attention to in 2026 — the Blueberry Bijou riff Jakob McCabe-Johnston is making in Atlanta with local fruit and wormwood extract, the Malta India tequila drink Laury Lopez Melon built from a Puerto Rican childhood memory — aren't complicated because complexity is the goal. They're specific. Specificity is harder than complexity, and it's what the Bamboo Colada, in its deliberately unfussy blender format, is actually practicing.
The flex was always optional. The drink was always the point.