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Garden & Gun Presents: Good Libations John T. Edge scours the South for 15 top-shelf cocktails worth pulling up a stool for Plus: ☛ The ONE DRINK YOU MUST KNOW HOW to M A K E The LIQUID ASSETS RETURN Making a splash at of the Julep in Houston. HOTEL BAR Opposite: Space- themed records, A P R O ’ S circuit boards, and GUIDE to TA S T I N G snapshots from a refurbished photo BOURBON booth adorn the bar at Satellite in Birmingham. ☛ 15 WAYS TO TOAST THE SOUTH Drinks of Choice Frothy Raising the bar on Southern cocktails ver t h e past decade and a dynamics a n d v e s s e l g e o m e t r y. half, I have been a lucky While many of us merely drank during those witness to a drinking formative years, others worked. In search of revolution. I was an ear- origins, historians plundered archives. After ly patron of Milk & Hon- years of fakelore validation, when dupes like ey, the Manhattan bar me believed the word cocktail derived from Owhere Sasha Petraske defned the modern the French word for eggcup, the author David speakeasy aesthetic of Jazz Age cocktails and Wondrich discovered the likely origin of the Ramos Gin Fizz hirsute bartenders. Before he was a household term. (The story involves a horse, a ginger sup- Kimball House, Decatur, GA name and his whiskey was the fetish of the elite, pository, and a cocked tail.) ✤ I sipped old-fashioneds with Julian Van Winkle This resuscitation work proved inspiring. Gin, egg white, cream, lemon and listened to him marvel at the kismet re- Digging in to apothecary manuals and saloon juice, lime juice, simple syrup, discovery of his family’s wheated bourbon. manifests, educated tenders paid homage to orange fower water, and Back when Chris McMillian, a founder of the their forebears, restocked moribund bars with orange seltzer Museum of the American Cocktail, was mallet- fabled bottles, exhumed lost recipes, and con- crushing ice blocks in a canvas bag in a New jured new tastes that respect old ways. On the Huey Long, the 1930s Louisiana Orleans hotel lobby, I learned to embrace the whiskey-tossed seas of the modern South, all political demagogue, drank gin slow and pleasant dilution of a proper julep. Not ships rose. fzzes. Dressed in a white suit, long after Hurricane Katrina foodwaters re- Barriers that once separated restaurants and his hair combed into a mop of ceded, I hunkered in that city with Ted Breaux, bars fell. Bars built menus that met the starch curls, he held forth on the egg- who charted wormwood-bewitched absinthe’s and salt needs of drinkers but didn’t verge white-and-cream body that path to legalization, to drink deep into his stock into Applebee’s territory. (I’m looking at you, a profcient barman should and dream green pixie dreams. Kimball House Pommes Macaire potato logs.) achieve. Long would have loved My seat at the bar has been privileged. But Restaurants expended as much effort on cock- Kimball House, a former train I have not been alone. Across the South and tail lists as wine lists. depot where the Ramos Gin beyond, drinkers have gained fuency in sin- Fifteen years or so into the revolution, the Fizz—conceived in 1888 by gle-barrel bourbons, barrel-rested gins, and idealized cocktail has reemerged as a fulcrum Henrico C. Ramos at the Impe- solera-aged rums. Southerners now demand of Southern life, brimming with stiff rye and rial Cabinet Saloon in New Or- pedigreed booze and principled mixers. Soda sweet vermouth, perfumed with a fairy share leans—reaches its platonic ideal. guns, coursing with anemic tonic water and of absinthe. Served over a silicone-mold-frozen To understand the labor that cola treacle, are passé. House tonics and small- rectangle of ice, presented with a fourish by goes into a proper cocktail, or- COUPED UP batch craft vermouths are the choice. A platoon a bartender who, after years of bourbon and der a pony of lager as an aperi- A potent pair at of bitters, marshaled like soldiers for war, fronts Cokes and servility, now claims her place in the tif and watch bartender David the ready. the correct modern bar. hospitality frmament, the modern cocktail is a Chapman or Jason Harris work Obscure amaros from obscure Italian totem of craft and creativity, a passkey to every- Boston shakers like castanets. provinces (and unobscure Southern cities) day bliss, achievable nightly across the region. Thirty minutes, a quick rest line the back mirror. (High Wire Distilling of Join me on a victory lap, run over the last in the freezer, and a few more Charleston, South Carolina, crafts a Lowcoun- eighteen months, in which I surveyed the fourishes later, the drink ar- try amaro, sourced from locally grown and state of drinking and came home with ffteen rives, a white velvet froth plum- foraged ingredients including black tea, yau- emblematic cocktails to celebrate and repli- ing over the highball lip into a pon holly, and tangerine.) Elegant glassware, cate, from a whiskey sour in my hometown of high fade and the aroma wafting from Marie Antoinette coupes to fat-bottomed Oxford, Mississippi, to a mint julep goosed with like a camellia in spring bloom. Illustration by Name Here Name by Illustration lowballs, await bartenders, now expert in fuid pinecone liqueur in faraway Rome. kimball-house.com This page and opening pages, right: photographs by DYLAN + JENI Opening pages, left: photograph by STEPHEN DeVRIES; illustrations by VALERIYA DANILOVA Feb. | Mar. 2017 GARDENANDGUN.COM 85 Sours Rum al Pastor Edmund’s Oast, Charleston, SC ✻ Aged rum, demerara syrup, lime juice, cilantro, bitters, and charred pineapple As bartenders moved away from bottled mixes and canned juices, the term bar chef briefy Trinidad Fizz gained traction among food and Small Victory, beverage writers. But that fey Austin, TX phrase, which implied that bar- ✤ tenders were merely aspiration- Angostura bitters, egg al chefs without the poofy hats, white, cream, lime juice, never suited. grenadine, and soda Today, bartenders take pride in their profession and Not all cocktails need to pack their title. At Edmund’s Oast, alcohol wallops. Suppressors, Jayce McConnell does more a term that gained purchase in than pair drinks with food. Atlanta in the early years of this He crafts drinks that conjure decade, describes an emergent foods, including those pineap- category of low-proof drinks, ple-marinated and cilantro- built on fortifed wines and confettied pork tacos, born bitters instead of whiskeys of Lebanese immigration to and gins. Mexico, now translated by The jolt here arrives on the seemingly every taqueria in the shoulders of Angostura, that South. edmundsoast.com omnipresent bottle of bitters sheathed in an oversize white wrapper. One and a half ounces doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider that most recipes call for dashes. Shaken with cream and egg white, served in this ele- gant shotgun bar perched at the rear of a garage, this pale mauve Lurleen conceit is a replenishing quaff Snackbar, Oxford, MS that buoys instead of bombs. ✻ smallvictory.bar Bourbon, ginger liqueur, bitters-soaked lemon, grape- fruit juice, sweet vermouth, and nutmeg HEADY TIMES From top: Jayce McConnell gets to This is my family drink. To be work behind the bar at Edmund’s Oast; his Rum al Pastor. Opposite: Kimball exact, this is a drink named after House’s towering Ramos Gin Fizz. my family dog, who was named 86 GARDENANDGUN.COM Feb. | Mar. 2017 photographs by MARGARET HOUSTON photograph by NAMEGOESANDREW THOMAS HERE LEE Tkdate. | Tkdate. 2010 GARDENANDGUN.COM 00 for Lurleen Wallace, the wife of on a classic. Reworking the machine shop, showcases the Alabama politician George Manhattan, Julep proprietor postmodern exuberance. Wallace and the frst woman Alba Huerta has built a luxurious Glasses get a chilling swirl of to govern that state. Bitter like drink with a boozy undertow. liquid nitrogen, followed by an Wallace politics, sweet like Every detail is engineered to atomizer spritz of Herbsaint. the love of a mutt, the Lurleen provide pleasure, including the Bottled Sazerac The strong stuff arrives batched straddles the sour-sweet divide ice, from a local supplier who Filament, Dallas, TX in a stumpy bottle. It’s a fool- and offers a lesson in becoming freezes water gradually to yield ✴ proof execution, elevated by a regular. blocks that are denser and slow- Rye, cognac, Herbsaint, theatrical swagger, ready for ad- In conversation with the ten- er to melt. The overall process Peychaud’s bitters, and aptation in any latitude where ders at Snackbar, where Chef sounds like a comedy skit, show- demerara sugar thirsty people gather. flament Vishwesh Bhatt serves drink- casing the pretentious lengths dallas.com ing food like peanut-tossed to which twenty-frst-century Proper Sazeracs, those anise- fried okra chaat, I told them Southerners go to rationalize scented rye bombs, were once that I liked my whiskey cock- their buzzes. Until you take hard to fnd outside of New Whiskey tails sour. Blair, my wife, showed a sip, follow with a bourbon- Orleans. Just as po’boys still phone pictures of our pup. A marinated cherry, and realize taste best in the city of their Forward drink appeared. Soon it earned what happens when true craft birth, Sazeracs depended on a place on the bar’s roster. Such is applied to a craft cocktail. the latitude of their makers. are the fruits of claiming a stool julephouston.com That changed after Hurricane at your local. citygroceryonline Katrina, as New Orleans bar- .com/snackbar tenders dispersed through the nation, and the craft cock- tail movement inspired new- COLD COMFORT generation tenders.