Every new business represents an attempt by its founder, or founders, to reorder the world in some way – Bo Burlingham, Small Giants

For Christmas, my brother gave me a great book, The PDT Cocktail Book. I’ll admit: when I first opened it, I wasn’t completely taken. It wasn’t exactly my style, and its cartoonish and stylized artwork turned me off at first. But as I browsed through it the following days, I really started to appreciate it and realized that while I probably wouldn’t have bought it myself it was in fact exactly what I liked. And this made it a perfect gift.

What I love about the book is that it lays out the author’s, Jim Meehan’s, professional and artistic vision. Both in form and content, it’s a faithful exposition and symbol of his idiosyncratic cocktail craft. The recipes aren’t simply a survey of different drinks: they’re a curated collection that includes many original house cocktails. The illustrations are unusual and were specifically commissioned from an artist whose work the author had noticed and felt was aligned with the spirit of his cocktails. The book is effectively a manifesto of his bar, the eponymous PDT in New York City, which is itself another incarnation of the author’s personality.

Reading the book reminded me of the Netflix documentary mini-series Chef’s Table, which sketches portraits of six chefs. Each episode takes you into the philosophy of a chef and shows you, in a visually beautiful way, how the chef communicates this philosophy through his or her restaurant. For example, the third episode features Francis Mallmann, who organizes meals in specifically chosen natural settings and prepares food using the raw power of fire. Listening to him and seeing the images of the Patagonian landscape, you immediately appreciate that eating a meal by him is a holistic experience that immerses you in his sensual reality.

What unites these people, from Jim Meehan to Francis Mallmann, is that all of them have a definite vision of food, drink, and dining, and painstakingly realize this vision through their work. In preparing the food and drink, designing the restaurant or bar, and meticulously controlling their patrons’ experience, they bring into being an authentic embodiment of this vision. This, to me, is one of the greatest contributions you can make to society: to boldly live out your inner values and dreams and offer others the opportunity to participate in your reality, if only in a miniature world. Even if this style is necessarily unique, people of different tastes still relish the chance to see your perspective, to go on a guided tour as it were.

I think this is part of what people mean when they speak of “authenticity.” Insofar as traditional, putatively objective measures of moral and aesthetic value have largely been discredited, what grounds value is the status of a worldly product as authentic, that is to say as an unabashedly genuine instance of self-expression. This is, I think, what we also find most inspiring and exciting, and the ones who have the courage and determination to do it are invariably the magical ones you want to be around.