Like Da Vinci or Mozart, every bartender wants to make something that lives on after they die," says Takahiro Watanabe of the Keio Plaza Hotel's Polestar bar. "A bartender's dream is to make a cocktail that appears on every bar's menu."

Of course, Da Vinci and Mozart never had to worry that all the good ideas had gone. Modern bartenders compete for menu space with martinis, Manhattans, gimlets and daiquiris — the brilliantly simple recipes that have been bar staples for decades. Though ingredients are getting evermore bizarre (Watanabe wonders aloud whether vodka would work with cream cheese), you won't gain bartending immortality by straying too far from the beaten track.

"It's good to experiment," says Watanabe. "There aren't any taboos this side of sarin gas. But when we enter cocktail competitions, we don't usually mix something completely unheard of. We take a classic recipe and twist it. It's standard cocktail plus alpha."