CLUB DRINKS

Throughout the Garden State, fashionable folks will gather at swanky bars to ring in the New Year. In a sea of designer logos, the bold and the beautiful will schmooze and snicker over drinks like a scene out of Sex and the City. But introduce the wrong beverage to the equation and the scene would stop dead in its tracks. Only the trendiest of drinks wet the lips of the most style-conscious.

"The trend has definitely been cocktails—strained drinks in a cocktail glass—and that trend probably will continue," says Paul Lothrop, general manager of Dish in Passaic. "It's definitely a fashion statement. And no doubt about it, the cocktail glass has a classy appeal, plus the shape of the glass really shows off the color of the drink, so it just looks good."

But while the martini has seen a revival in recent years, it's the variations on this drink that are hot for 2002. "The traditional gin martini has given way to softer cocktails," says Lothrop. "The new vodkas are being cut with different non-alcoholic beverages to smooth them." The result: apple, even chocolate- and mint-chocolate-flavored martinis, and the cosmopolitan, the most common flavored martini, in raspberry, watermelon, and orange—each, of course, in a fashion color. Which makes us wonder: How long before the fashion police insist you color-coordinate these pretty cocktails with your outfit? Cocktails: the new accessory?

—Kristin McKeon Nieto