The Restaurant Takeaway column is devoted to restaurant dishes you can make in your own kitchen, tested and tweaked for home cooks.

I had always considered simple syrup to be nothing more than the liquid sugar often responsible for making my cocktail too darn sweet. Yes, a restrained drizzle was often necessary to offset the lemon or lime in the shaker. But beyond that, I thought its usefulness was moot.

What I never realized was that in the hands of a great mixologist, simple syrup can add a lot more than just sweetness to the mix.

For example, when the syrup is concentrated and thick, it also adds body and viscosity, making your daiquiri feel like velvet on the tongue. Most simple-syrup recipes call for equal parts sugar to water. But to make a more concentrated syrup, some bartenders prefer two parts sugar to one part water.