From Dorm Room Shots to At-Home Aperitifs: Millennials Re-Embrace Pregaming

After Annie Sinsabaugh Pick’s son was born in early 2023, she and her husband commenced a monthly date night ritual based on one rule only: “It has to be something our child can absolutely not attend,” she says.

This might entail a fancy dinner out or dancing at one of New York City’s earlier-bird nightclubs. Whatever decidedly adult theme the evening takes up, Sinsabaugh Pick and her husband start early with an activity some might associate more with their underage, budget-conscious college years: pregaming at home.

“We’ll usually ask the babysitter to come an hour before we leave so we can get ready peacefully,” says Sinsabaugh Pick, who’s an executive producer at Milk Street Radio. “While I’m in the shower, I’ll have a spicy Mezcal Margarita or an Aperol Spritz with me, then we’ll come together for a second drink in the kitchen — just playing music and getting hyped.”

Any cost savings of having a drink or two at home is quickly negated by the extra hour of babysitting (“$25 to $30 alone!”), the cabs the couple will take, the pricey dinner out, or $25-apiece drinks at some downtown or Bushwick bar. But pregaming in this household is more about celebration.

“We committed to doing something crazy for date night, so we like to make a big event out of it,” Sinsabaugh Pick says.

She’s not alone, as more millennials choose to drink that first round at home rather than pop by a buzzy cocktail bar or show up early for a dinner reservation. Did age and the pandemic conspire to turn us into homebodies with bartending chops and well-stocked bars? Perhaps we just want to prolong the soft-pants good times — though our tastes may have evolved beyond cheap jet fuel to shower spritzes and kitchen Negronis. Whatever the reason, pregaming is back in force among middle-aged drinkers. Or maybe it never left.

From Desperation to Glamor

When I polled my social media for answers, I assumed that the decision to drink the first round or two at home was largely economical. After all, inflation’s still up, and baseline adult beverage prices have been climbing since well before 2020 — up 1 percent at restaurants in the year ended December 2023, according to Technomic. Why not stay in for happy hour instead? Sinsabaugh Pick says drinks haven’t been affordable at cocktail bars in New York or Boston (her former home) since probably 2015. Respondents in Fort Worth, Texas, where the cocktails are “expensive and tiny,” and Los Angeles alike told me that finances play a role in why they pregame at home, too.

“Who can afford to have drinks with dinner anymore?” lamented L.A. cocktail writer (and VinePair contributor) Dylan Ettinger.

In college, pregaming necessarily smacked of desperation — that the $23 left in the bank account had to last us till the next meager payday, that our questionable fake IDs wouldn’t get us into the bar, that the overcrowded house party’s single keg would probably run out early. But it was also, inarguably and illicitly, fun.

“Pregaming in college was the best part,” says Sinsabaugh Pick. “Just hanging out in the dorm room — because you couldn’t drink outside it — playing your music, dancing and having drinks with your closest friends while you got ready.”

“Drink menus have gotten too fancy, even the ones that are at, like, your neighborhood bar. I like interesting cocktails, but they’re often too bitters-based now. I usually only see one drink I like.”

With the financial security, improved taste (and abandonment of heedless binging) of adulthood, pregaming was subsumed by its more glamorous adult cousin: the aperitif.

I grew up with parents who relished this pre-dinner cocktail or glass of wine as a relaxed yet celebratory transition out of the work week. If Mom was cooking, Dad would pop a nice bottle of white at 5 p.m. If we were going out to a restaurant, Dad always insisted we show up 30 or 45 minutes early for our reservation to have a drink at the bar.

I adopted and evolved this ritual in my late 20s. Owing to the proliferation of craft cocktail bars that boomers like my parents didn’t have easy access to (or perhaps considered utterly pointless like Larry David), my husband and I grew accustomed to popping by a cocktail bar en route to dinner — until Covid-19 changed everything.

Home Bar > Cocktail Bar?

It’s hard to conjure a single upside, aside from the compulsory financial one, to the 18-month closure of restaurant and bar interiors due to Covid-19. But I’m unconvinced money is the reason my husband and I never fully embraced our old ritual of the pre-dinner drink at a cocktail bar or restaurant once the pandemic abated. For one thing, he perfected the simple, spirit-forward Negroni or Manhattan I typically request, a task made far simpler since the good stuff has gotten so easy to get.

Indeed, direct-to-consumer access to quality bottled and canned cocktails, small-batch wines, and liquors soared in 2020 as producers, retail, bar and restaurant owners groped for new revenue streams. Meanwhile, drinkers took bartending into our own hands to claw back some semblance of luxury and escape.

“The aperitif hour is sacrosanct, when you sit down and take a little stock. When you meet up with people and the drinks are all weird and very bespoke, there’s very little to ground yourself.”

But something else seems to be keeping us home for the first round these days.

“Drink menus have gotten too fancy, even the ones that are at, like, your neighborhood bar,” says Sinsabaugh Pick. “I like interesting cocktails, but they’re often too bitters-based now. I usually only see one drink I like.”

Chicago-based restaurant critic John Kessler agrees that there’s a trend toward “bad” bespoke cocktail menus at restaurants and bars looking to differentiate themselves. Kessler wonders whether there’s self-imposed pressure among restaurants to match the inventiveness of their food.

“So much of the emphasis in dining today is, ‘This is our twist on X,’” Kessler says. “I think that the restaurants that have the most interesting menus really think they’ve gotta come out with this bar program that tries to compete with the best cocktail bars in town. They want to match a sense of invention and playfulness and modernity in the food, but it often feels like they’re not drawing from an equally deep well of knowledge.”

What’s more, staring down a drink menu full of koji, tana leaf, umami vermouth, and six kinds of bitters has the opposite effect of what’s intended with aperitif hour: to ease into the evening, or “take the edge off,” as Kessler aptly put it. It might even sow doubt that the place is capable of making a perfectly serviceable Manhattan, which it almost definitely is. (But will it be tiny and cost $25? Will it come in a weird glass? Will it taste like the one I’ve perfected at home?)

“The aperitif hour is sacrosanct, when you sit down and take a little stock,” he says. “When you meet up with people and the drinks are all weird and very bespoke, there’s very little to ground yourself.”

Even Sinsabaugh Pick, for whom pregaming represents special-occasion hype machine more than relaxing weekend on-ramp, always starts with the same one or two low-ABV cocktails while getting ready.

Chalk it up to the fastidiousness of aging, perhaps, or that we all got a little too comfortable staying home, where we control the playlist and the pregame cocktails are always mixed to our exacting specs. Or maybe, just maybe, our broke, tasteless, fun-loving college selves were onto something all along.

“It’s a really fun and festive thing to do,” Sinsabaugh Pick says. “After nine months, I just need this so much.”

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