Small plates require small drinks. At Bourbon & Branch, the speakeasy-style bar in San Francisco, you get a pony glass of Kir Royale, a champagne cocktail, to sip while pondering the phonebook-thick list of spirited mixtures. It’s an alcoholic play on the amuse-bouche that often precedes a multi-course meal. And it’s great.

Champagne cocktails aside, brown whiskey is what Bourbon & Branch does best. That’s brown whiskey as in bourbon. Brown whiskey as in rye. What’s more, Bourbon & Branch is not alone. At bars and restaurants across the nation, the vodka-fueled Cosmopolitan is beyond passé. Instead, the Old Fashioned, the Manhattan, and other brown whiskey drinks are the small-plate sips of choice.

I’m especially keen on two new eastern seaboard restaurants that take pride in their brown whiskey and small-plate combos: Tailor in New York City and James in Philadelphia. (I’m also a fan of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta, where barman Greg Best pours a cardamom-kissed rye concoction known as a Nihilist Sour, but I don’t want to play up the Southern angle; by my reckoning, brown whiskey cocktails are en vogue above and beyond the Mason-Dixon divide.)

In the December issue of this magazine, I introduced you to James. So I won’t linger there. (To refresh your memory, go to usairwaysmag.com, click on Archives, December, and Food from the Edge. At that same location, you’ll find a recipe for the restaurant’s signature cocktail, the James-hattan, a Tennessee whiskey-fueled version of the Manhattan.)

But I will linger at Tailor, chef Sam Mason’s new SoHo restaurant, the one tricked out with all manner of touches that call to mind a late 19th-century haberdashery where the man with the thread has a way with the pig and the bottle.

Specifically, I’ll linger over a particular drink and small-plate combo that is among the most platonic of tastes ever to come my way. I’m talking about pork belly with miso butterscotch and artichokes, served alongside a drink known as the Waylon, a drink that the bartender reveals to be bourbon cut with house-smoked Coca-Cola.

Yes, that’s right, house-smoked Coca-Cola. In a couple or three paragraphs, I’ll explain how mixologist Eben Freeman and company smoke Coke, but for now, let’s focus on the pork.

It sounds too sweet, doesn’t it? It’s not. The miso (a paste of fermented soybeans and salt) tips the butterscotch toward savory. And that’s where it needs to go. Away from toffee and toward salty. Toward umami, the so-called fifth taste.

Things get really interesting when you drag a tile of pork belly through a puddle of butterscotch and follow the bite with a slug of Waylon. That’s because the smoky-sweetness of a Waylon (for Waylon Jennings, the late hard-living outlaw of country music) tips the seesaw of taste back the other way.

And so it goes — a bite of belly, a sip of Waylon, until, about six bites and six sips later, you want another. And another. Soon after, you’ll still be wondering how they smoke Coke. So was I. Here’s what I found out: Contrary to some reports, liquid smoke, a cheater’s elixir sold by the bottle to barbecue fabulists, is not the answer.

What Freeman does is stoke a smoker with hardwood, pop in a pan of Coca-Cola syrup, and let time and smoke take their toll. Carbonation follows. And so do drinkers, eager to claim a perch in a restaurant bent on matching small plates and smallish drinks.

As for how Sam Mason makes his miso butterscotch…well, I can’t really help you there. But I can offer this primer for readers wishing to study up on the history and practice of making cocktails conjured up specifically to complement certain food.

The most promising place to start is David Wondrich’s just-released book with the over-the-top title: Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. A quick scan of the index reveals no references to bourbon and Coke, but there are long passages on the Manhattan and the Whiskey Cobbler, two drinks that should be a part of your cocktail arsenal.

The Cobbler, of course, is the more arcane of the two. It’s a drink that was all the rage in the 19th century. Back then, sherry was the primary fuel. But a whiskey variation was also popular.

And the archival recipe is deceptively simple: four ounces of good bourbon or rye; one tablespoon of sugar; two or three slices of orange.

The modern-day instructions, provided by Wondrich, engender confidence: Dissolve “the sugar in an equal amount of water in a cocktail shaker, adding the [whiskey] and orange slices, filling it with cracked ice, and shaking vigorously (the shaking will muddle the fruit).”

Then, writes Wondrich, “pour it unstrained into a tall glass, lance it with a straw, and berry it up.” Yes, it seems clear after all that the mixing of food and drink comes with a long provenance. It seems that real men have long stirred real fruit into real drinks.