Food + Drink: Cocktail World Cup Regionals Come To Lustre Pearl Sunday

This Sunday evening at Lustre Pearl, eleven of Austin's best drink slingers will shake, stir, mix and muddle their way toward world domination. The two bartenders with the most inventive concoctions in Sunday's competition will move on to the 42BELOW Cocktail World Cup regional finals in New York, with a chance to compete for the top prize in New Zealand.

We're confident that Austin will go far in this year's competition -- after all, if we didn't have such an abundance of delicious cocktails, we probably wouldn't have earned the title of 5th Drunkest City in the U.S. (Yay, us?) Plus, we've had a sip of victory before -- in 2008, Bill Norris (now at Haddingtons) won the local qualifying round and advanced to the World Cup, where his team took second place.

Among a field of talented competitors from such renowned drink establishments as Peché, East Side Show Room, and Perla's, standouts include David Alan the "Tipsy Texan," Brian Dressel of the new Bar Congress, and Nate Wales of La Condesa -- respectively the host and second and third place winners of the 2010 Drink Local Cocktail Competition.