NEW YORK >> Bar Kabawa, the East Village cocktail den connected to chef Paul Carmichael’s new Caribbean restaurant, Kabawa, will provoke a range of reactions, like any new establishment. But for people who like classic daiquiris, the main one will be: Where have you been all our lives?

Outside Cuba, where it originated, the daiquiri has rarely been treated to such elaborate shows of devotion.

A neon sign in the window advertises “wine & daiquiris” in glowing lavender letters. Daiquiris take up the top half of the first page of the drinks list. Right inside the door, taking up precious real estate on the bartop, is a squat, black, hand-cranked machine that rasps away at blocks of ice. The fluffy heap of snow that drifts down into a glass below is the soft bed over which bartenders pour a freshly shaken daiquiri mixed, as they still are in Havana, from nothing more than lime juice, sugar and rum.

Treatment of this sort — playful, informed, reverent, fetishistic — is now routine for other famous cocktails. Any halfway serious new Italian restaurant is expected to offer half a dozen spins on the Negroni. Manhattans are aged in barrels and zapped in the microwave. In a quest for tooth-rattling coldness, martinis are stashed in freezers overnight, bombarded with ultrasonic waves by equipment meant to clean diamonds and chilled below their natural freezing point with Japanese technology called Supercooling Magic, originally conceived to preserve human organs.

While these drinks were taking their place at the altar, the daiquiri collected a closet full of bridesmaid dresses. It is a relative rarity on drinks menus. It turns up in some tiki bars but tends to be upstaged by showier, tiki-er drinks like the Missionary’s Downfall. Even those cocktail parlors that serve variations like the Hemingway daiquiri can go for weeks without being called on to shake up the original formula.

This neglect is odd, given that many people who’ve spent years behind the bar revere the daiquiri. It’s a secret handshake when one bartender sits at another’s bar, a signal that passes between the person sipping it and the person shaking it that means they both know the score.

Early in her career, Karin Stanley, now the beverage director at Lincoln Center, worked at one bar where the bartenders started each shift with a round of daiquiris, and another where they shared a shaker of them when the clock reached midnight.

When she checks out a new bar, “it’s still my litmus test,” Stanley said. “It’s how I can tell if the bartender has that understanding of the quiet nuance of how it needs to be made.”

Stanley, who put a $10 daiquiri on the happy-hour menu at David Geffen Hall, gets the credit for naming the Snaquiri, a brief and refreshing pause in the middle of a night of drinking, although the term “pause” is relative, given that the Snaquiri is simply a full-strength daiquiri decanted into smaller-than-usual glasses. In some precincts, the Snaquiri goes by the name DTO, for Daiquiri Time Out.

Frozen daiquiris are the lingua franca at Margaritaville, Chi-Chi’s, the Flora-Bama Lounge and generally any bar where, if you are wearing flip-flops, they are happy to see you.

New Orleans, though, is the world capital of the frozen daiquiri. The city is home to the Voodoo Daiquiri, familiarly known as “purple drank”; the Hand Grenade, which comes in a bewitching antifreeze hue and is garnished with a plastic replica of an explosive device; and the Shark Attack, a specialty of the Tropical Isle that arrives to a symphony of sirens, bells, whistles and screams of “Get out of the water!”

“Anything that’s frozen is a daiquiri,” said Abigail Gullo, the creative director of the bar in the International House hotel in New Orleans. “It doesn’t matter if it uses rum or brandy or bourbon.”

The split in nomenclature can be precisely dated to 1980, the year an enterprising Louisiana Tech student named David Ervin opened a drive-thru outlet in Lafayette, La., called the Daiquiri Factory, selling a rainbow of frozen drinks, none of which had much relation to the daiquiri.

“‘Daiquiri’ conveyed a sense of prestige and status, and I concluded that most people had never had one or had no idea of what it actually was,” Ervin recently told drinks writer Wayne Curtis. “My branding every frozen cocktail as a daiquiri was a first.”

“A lot of places can have fruity candy bombs, but that’s not what we’re doing,” said Kathryn Stashek, whose title at Bar Kabawa and Kabawa is “creative bartender.” A few customers, she said, have admitted to anti-daiquiri bias, but most are wiling to go along for the ride. “The response has been amazing.”

This won’t surprise those bartenders who, like St. John Frizell, an owner of Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn, regard the daiquiri as “the perfect drink.”

When they’re well made, he said, “no one doesn’t like them.”

Daiquiri

The daiquiri is a classic sour — that is, a family of cocktails made with spirit, sugar and citrus juice — whose simple, straightforward appeal has been obscured for years by frozen, fruity variations. One doesn’t need a blender to make one — just fresh limes, good rum and sugar. The proportions of syrup and juice can be adjusted, depending on whether you prefer a sweeter or more tart style. — Robert Simonson

Yield: 1 serving. Total time: 5 minutes.

Ingredients

2 ounces light rum

1 ounce simple syrup

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

Lime wheel, for garnish

directions

1. Shake all ingredients with ice until chilled, about 15 seconds. Strain into chilled coupe glass. Garnish with lime wheel.