Who Put the Whiskey in My Milkshake?

THERE is bourbon in the Bourbon Street milkshake, served at Brooklyn Bowl, the loud, slick palace of fun that opened last year in Williamsburg. There’s also a sizable gobbet of Nutella, its nutty richness meant to evoke pralines — and by extension New Orleans, and by further extension the wild time you might have in New Orleans but are now presumably having in Brooklyn. And, of course, there is ice cream — the good stuff, with egg yolks and real vanilla, certainly better than anything you’ve ever eaten in a bowling alley.

The shake, like the rest of Brooklyn Bowl’s food offerings, was conceived by the Bromberg brothers — Bruce and Eric — of Blue Ribbon restaurant fame. From the very beginning of the project, Bruce Bromberg said, they knew they wanted a spiked shake.

How could there not be a boozy shake on the Brooklyn Bowl menu, a grab-bag of high-toned versions of every fried and melty thing your parents once frowned at? The menu was designed, he said, with “childhood memories of birthday parties” in mind.

In a culinary landscape teeming with art-directed burger joints and endless fancied-up takes on mac and cheese, maybe it’s time to welcome a new kind of “fusion” cuisine: childhood fusion. Where the original fusion boom of the 1980s had chefs ransacking Asia, now the place to find inspiration is over on the kids’ menu. Ice cream. Plus liquor. Together. In a big glass. Could there be a better emblem of the sort of juvenilia-with-a-wink that defines the current food aesthetic?

As anyone who has survived a frozen mudslide could tell you, the spiked shake is anything but a new idea. But it seems to be experiencing a sudden uptick in ubiquity, respectability and, here and there, craftsmanship.

Some have taken the concept further than others. At Ted’s Bulletin, a four-month-old Art Deco-themed place in Washington, customers walk in to discover a “shaketender” mixing away at a dedicated station.

Much of the credit (or blame) for this phenomenon probably goes to BLT Burger, which pioneered the idea of a “milkshake program” when it opened in New York four years ago. The shakes have remained a signature of the restaurant, though the founding chef, Laurent Tourondel, has not; he left the BLT group last March.

Mr. Tourondel apparently remains attached to liquor-laced shakes, however: last week, his former colleagues served him with a lawsuit for offering, in the restaurant he now runs in Sag Harbor, N.Y., a menu that they thought was overly similar to that of BLT Burger. It may be the first legal action in which spiked milkshakes play a role: the paperwork filed in federal District Court in Manhattan says that one of the items Mr. Tourondel has replicated is BLT’s bourbon-laced Grandma’s Treat.

That shake is a favorite of Fred Dexheimer, a certified master sommelier who helped Mr. Tourondel hatch the original shake menu. (“I got teased a little bit by my colleagues,” he said. “ ‘MS means Master Shake-maker,’ things like that.”)

The fact is, Mr. Dexheimer noted, alcohol and ice cream play very well together. All those syrupy liqueurs, anathema to the classic cocktail crowd, come into their own when used judiciously in shakes. And the harder stuff reveals depths of sweetness.

“The inherent flavors of bourbon are vanilla and caramelization from the barrel,” he said.

The pastry mastermind Christina Tosi has just added proudly lowbrow “fancy milkshakes,” liquored up and served in delightfully tacky plastic hurricane glasses, to Momofuku Milk Bar’s menu of sugary eccentricities. A cereal milk white Russian takes off from her signature invention, a brown-sugary, grain-infused dairy mixture, which she’s used in a variety of desserts. Here, cereal milk soft-serve gets boosted with Kahlúa and vodka.

The shake will remain on the daily Milk Bar menu, along with a salty pistachio flavor, spiked with butterscotch schnapps. (“Butterscotch schnapps,”" Ms. Tosi marveled. “That’s so gross. I would never drink that. But in the shake it does amazing things.”) Two other flavors will rotate in, depending on the soft-serve options. (Opening week saw a rather alarming combination of barbecue-sauce ice cream, pineapple juice, honey syrup and cayenne-spiced tequila.)

Where Ms. Tosi ramps up the kitsch factor, Mariah Swan seems to be trying to strip it away. For the last two years, Ms. Swan has been presenting monthly milkshake events at the Los Angeles restaurant BLD, where she is pastry chef. Served in flights of three, her shakes pair top-shelf spirits with homemade ice cream: her repertory includes bourbon with chicory cardamom, añejo tequila with dulce de leche, and Cherry Heering with lavender vanilla.

They’re adult shakes in the best sense of the term. But still, unavoidably, they come from childhood. Discussing her milkshake inspirations, Ms. Swan singled out one at the Bob’s Big Boy franchise that she would eat while growing up in Glendale, Calif. (though only when she was “very good”).

“You had to eat it with a long spoon,” she said. “It was on a little plate with a napkin, and you got the whipped cream and the cherry. It was in no way the best milkshake ever, but it was such a treat. And that’s what I want to keep going, that kind of splurging and everything that goes with it. Keeping it special.”