The $20 cocktail has arrived in Mystic

August 29: Long before new restaurant PEARL Provisions + Tipples opened this season, in the downtown Mystic space formerly occupied by Pizzetta, I’d heard rumors of plans for a $20 cocktail.

Someone on the PEARL team had clearly missed the high-octane pricing strategy, because it had already raised a lot of eyebrows among Mystic owners long before the first menus were printed.

It’s a small town, and word got out early about New York’s impending wave of soaring drink prices.

And sure enough, the signature cocktail at the chic new Water Street restaurant is The PEARL, $20, with Ketel One vodka, Fords gin, Lillet Blanc, orange bitters, basil oil and onions with caviar.

The other drinks on the menu stay closer to the range of what I’ve learned, with a little research, are the more typical prices for complicated cocktails in downtown Mystic, between $11 and $15.

Still, PEARL Restaurant, with its $18 COSMO + WANDA and $16 APOLLO, featuring Tanqueray gin, sage, lemon, ginger and meringue, is clearly pushing some new price levels in the city.

There may be other places in Mystic with higher drink prices, but I couldn’t find them.

The new restaurant looks fantastic, a stylish renovation of the humble pizza and salad place that was there for so long, and appears to be capturing at least a portion of Mystic’s bustling restaurant business.

However, I haven’t seen the kind of lines that often form outside Sift Bake Shop, the bakery/bar/restaurant that has mastered the croissant experience and become Mystic’s hot spot.

I salute all those who can calmly accept the fact that they have to go over the $20 threshold for a cocktail. I guess this is the philosophy of eating out: “in for a penny, in for a pound.” Why argue about the price of drinks?

And yet, I’m an old Yankee from Connecticut, and I find it hard to imagine that a round of drinks for four, with a modest tip, is going to cost a $100 bill, many multiples of an hour of minimum-wage work.

It also seems a bit like exploiting inflation.

We’ve all come to expect higher prices, and some companies seem to think that consumers have become so accustomed to it that they are no longer surprised by price gouging.

I have not noticed any major increases, for example, in retail prices for liquor when it is sold in bottles rather than cocktail glasses.

This is true for everything.

I recently decided not to buy an $8.99 can of windshield cleaner at the gas station off the Mystic exit of Interstate 95 because it seemed even more shocking than a $20 cocktail. I bought the same product for $3.50 at the hardware store less than a quarter mile away.

To be fair to the owners of PEARL and their aggressive drink prices, I will say that I found a menu from a resort not too far away that makes them look like a discount liquor store.

The Cognac Avec Amour, XO, at the Ocean House in Watch Hill, starting with Hennessey XO cognac and topped with a foie gras cracker, will set you back $150.

Otherwise, $20 and $30 cocktails at Ocean House are pretty standard fare. Maybe they’re standard fare at Newport, too.

I’ll be curious to see how successful PEARL will be in driving up drink prices in Mystic and how many others will follow suit.

The new Mystic continues to surprise.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

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