THEDRUNKENMUNKEY
Munkey House Paanch
Our communal punch — by the glass, or a bowl that serves twelve
Punch walks into English in 1632, in a letter written from India. The writer does not stop to explain the word, which tells you how ordinary the drink already was. Paanch is Hindi for five, and five is what goes in the bowl: spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice. A country that gave the world zero can be trusted to count to five.
The five are worth naming, because the formula still holds: something strong, something sweet, something sour, something weak and something spiced. Every punch poured since is a variation on that arithmetic, whether or not the person pouring it knows the sum. A rival theory hands the name to a cask instead. We have read it. The bowl still takes five, and the long version, with the evidence, is in the Munkey Times.
Back to the gymkhana
The drink went back to India and stayed. Gymkhana clubs and Army messes served it in bowls, because punch was never a drink for one person — it is a drink for a table, ladled out, refilled and argued over. That is the tradition our House Paanch belongs to, and the reason we still send it out in a bowl that pours twelve glasses.
The bowl is the whole point. A cocktail arrives finished; a punch bowl arrives unfinished, and the table completes it.
By the glass, or the bowl
By the glass it is a cocktail. By the bowl it is a social arrangement: somebody has to do the pouring, everybody has to reach across, and the conversation gets easier by the second round.
A bowl arrives with a ladle and no instructions, which is deliberate. Somebody at the table works out within a minute that they are in charge of it, and that person reliably has a better evening than everybody else.
The rest of the bar runs the same way — proper craft cocktails, poured on the Upper East Side back when that was not a normal thing to find up here, alongside rare Indian rums and whiskeys. Order the paanch for the table. Five ingredients, twelve glasses, and a word that has been travelling for four hundred years. It is one of the two drinks we are known for; the Indian Spiced Old Fashioned is the other.
“…great blend of flavors, fruity and complex, but not too sweet”
Dietary & spice
It is a cocktail, so it is not on the kitchen’s allergy menu. If you are not drinking, the bar pours zero-proof cocktails, lassis and fresh coconut water — just ask.