About this magazine
Asterisca is a small, occasional magazine about good taste — drinks, places, people, and the myths we build around them. Its subject is really just one thing: the received story, the claim everyone repeats and nobody checks. Each piece takes one — a cocktail’s origin, a bar’s famous ghost, a general’s legend, a fear you can taste — researches it as far as the record allows, and then audits it out loud, claim by claim, in a ledger. Where the record gives out, we say so. Legends are printed, clearly labeled, because the legends are usually the point.
The house rule is to audit the counting, not the counted. Verdicts cut both ways — plenty of the myths turn out to be half true — and nobody in the story is a villain; a village, a barman, a fan rounding a good tale up are all doing the most human thing there is. A new edition arrives each season, four a year.
Recipes, where they appear, come in bar measures with metric equivalents and lean on the modern craft consensus. None of it is gospel; taste as you go.
Set in Fraunces and Space Grotesk, every illustration drawn in-house as vector line work. Built as a fast, static site — no trackers, no pop-ups asking about your feelings — and served from the edge.
Drink less, drink better, drink water in between. And take everything here exactly as seriously as the asterisk suggests.
All stories