Best Of 2014: The Most Poetic Drunks of the Year

In vino veritas, said some drunk Roman dude.

Indeed, he was on to something. Our good friend alcohol can often lead us into tricky situations—waking up with someone else's hair in your mouth, Dorito dust on your nose, missing your underwear and a single shoe—but it can also make us feel like we can speak better than Winston Churchill after his routine breakfast of whiskey.

In Chef's Night Out, we followed some such drunkards who sing the song of booze like none other.

Erik Anderson of Catbird Seat says of his predilection for Fernet: "There's weeks where we'll go through four or five bottles. It can get a little out of hand sometimes." On our night out with him, and it certainly did.

Dong Phuong of Berlin's District Mot follows the motto ko say ko về, roughly translated as "As long as we're not drunk, we're not going home." Too drunk, that is—because Phuong and his crew definitely didn't shy away from the high-proof cocktails.

Even Inaki Aizpitarte, the lauded chef of Paris's Le Chateaubriand, can drink with the best of them. Sure, France is famous for wine—and there was plenty of that, followed by beer and a not-so-deftly rolled joint. But it's the mezcal shots that render Inaki unable to speak at the end of the night.

Not sloshed enough? Just wait for Daniel "Papi" Ramon (from Calgary's Market) and his rendition of Phil Collins's "Easy Lover." Not everyone can sing falsetto like that.

Jamie Bisonette and Ken Oringer of Toro managed to outdrink all the rest of them. After wine, "boomerang cocktails," sabered Champagne, beer, and stuntman shots, they end back up at Toro for yet more porrónes of wine taken straight to the face. And that was just a regular night at the restaurant.

See if you can top that on New Year's.