THEDRUNKENMUNKEY
Munkey House Paanch
Our communal punch — by the glass, or a bowl that serves twelve
Punch is a Hindi word. Paanch means five, and five is the number of ingredients in the original: spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice. Sailors of the East India Company drank it in the seventeenth century and carried the word home, where English flattened paanch into punch. Every rum punch poured anywhere since is, etymologically, a Hindi loanword with a hangover.
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.
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 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.
“…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.