This book is dedicated to the youth of North Belfast, with all the best hope for their future. Copyright © 2015 by The Best Bar in the World, LLC Interior photography © 2015 by Brent Herrig Photography Additional photographs (page 1, 2, 3, 4) © 2015 by Drinksology Additional photograph © 2015 Sean Muldoon Additional photograph © 2015 durstonphoto.com Additional photograph © 2015 [email protected] Additional photograph © 2015 Filip Wolak Photography A L L R I G H T S R E S E RV E D . Lighting technician: Bryan Tarnowski Prop stylist: Rachel Hornaday For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhco.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGarry, Jack The Dead Rabbit drinks manual: secret recipes and barroom tales from two Belfast boys who conquered the cocktail world / Jack McGarry, Sean Muldoon, Ben Schaffer; photography by Brent Herrig. pages cm ISBN 978-0-544-37320-4 (hardcover); 978-0-544-37339-6 (ebook) 1. Cocktails. 2. Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog (New York, N.Y.) I. Muldoon, Sean. II. Schaffer, Ben. III. Title. TX951.M154 2015 641.87‘4—dc23 2014043215 Book design by Steve Attardo/NINETYNORTH Design v1.1015 Introduction How to Open the Best Bar in the World, Twice Notes on Glassware A Note on Spirits and Ingredients Drinks Communal Punch Punches for the Bar Use Sours and Fizzes Fixes and Daisies Cups and Cobblers Juleps and Smashes Slings and Toddies Flips, Possets, and Nogs Bishops Cocktails Absinthe Diverse and Invalid Drinks Index Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry launched and ran one of the best bars in the world. And then they did it again. hat follows is a celebration of two bars. We will learn about the Cocktail Bar at the Merchant Hotel—elegant, first-class, an international destination, W historically-focused, with an exacting standard of service—and the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog—a neighborhood haunt, ragtime piano venue, pretensionless spot for a pie and a pint, which nonetheless manages to embody all the aforementioned virtues of the Merchant, too. The creative forces behind them were the same two men. Sean Muldoon is a bar mentor, one of the first of his generation to see the opportunities in the cocktail revival. He takes his place as a taste bud traveler in time, an adventurer of absinthe and sailor on the high seas of sours and slings, an excavator of elixir erudition, a man who made his mark on moonshine. Jack McGarry is the consummate barman in the flesh. It is he who tamed the tincture tiger and deciphered the lost language of the Ancient Cocktailians. Discovered after years of slumber in a block of hand-shaped ice in the basement of Jerry Thomas’s Exchange Saloon, he is said by some to be the only nineteenth-century barman alive today. In both their establishments, the boys from Belfast have focused on historical drinks. At the Merchant, the emphasis was on the twentieth century heyday of British and European hotel bars, where travelers would encounter classics, perfectly made with meticulous detail. Once that was accomplished, they ratcheted up the challenge. At the Dead Rabbit, the drinks still come from history, but they are not the classics, they are the forgotten ones: Drinks that have long since fallen out of fashion but can still teach us much about flavor and texture, not just as it was understood in bygone eras, but in ways relevant to our own tongues and nostrils. However, even as we begin to create myths, let’s dispel one. While Jack and Sean are both meticulous barmen and bar historians, and their respect for their antecedents is at the core of everything they do, the drinks in their bars and in this book are not just instructions out of old books. They haven’t simply been selected and reprinted here. Everything in this book is an original recipe, though it was inspired by historical sources. As you will see, every drink listed in this volume includes the historical source material from which it was derived. But these recipes are all-new renditions, not only updated for modern ingredients and the modern palate, but enhanced, deepened, awoken through the inspiration of our authors. The reverse is also true: unlike the many encyclopedic cocktail manuals on the market, we are only including original recipes that you won’t find elsewhere. We will tell our own stories here. So pull up a stool, unclip the nutmeg grater from your belt, and let’s start our tale. HOW TO OPEN THE BEST BAR IN THE WORLD, TWICE TALES OF THE COCKTAIL, 2010 The sky darkened, the planets paused in their headlong course, and mankind held its breath as Sean James Muldoon entered the ballroom of New Orleans’ Roosevelt Hotel. This Irish barman, representing his Belfast establishment, the Merchant Hotel, had been nominated for the most prestigious award in his industry—World’s Best Cocktail Bar—at Tales of the Cocktail’s 2010 Spirited Awards, the Oscars of the beverage world. Meanwhile, back in Belfast, his right-hand man and head bartender, Jack McGarry, was handling Saturday night service. Well, someone had to mind the shop. In each of the three previous years that Tales’ highest award had been given, a New York City bar had been its recipient. New York was then capital of the cocktail world, and everyone knew it. In 2009, a new category had been introduced to the Spirited Awards— Best American Cocktail Bar—so the New Yorkers could win something and still give the rest of the world a chance for World’s Best. Instead, New York bars swept both categories. Several other categories had been added in 2009 to the fast-growing Spirited Awards, including World’s Best Hotel Bar. That award, plus those for World’s Best Drinks Selection and World’s Best Cocktail Menu, went to a little-known outfit from a small town not usually found on hospitality’s international stage: Belfast’s Merchant Hotel. Who were these characters? BELFAST, 2006 When pub magnate Bill Wolsey opened the Merchant Hotel in 2006, it was only the second five-star establishment in Belfast’s history. The elaborate mocha-colored Italianate pile on Waring Street in the redeveloping Cathedral Quarter, formerly the Victorian-era headquarters of Ulster Bank, was a symbol of the new Belfast, eager to benefit from the Good Friday Agreement and get on with the day-to-day of a city: its arts, commerce, and street life. Belfast had never seen anything quite like The Bar at the Merchant Hotel. Wolsey wanted his hotel’s main bar to be just as grand as the Corinthian columns lining the building’s entrance. Remarking on his experience there a couple of years later, cocktail historian and author David Wondrich characterized the hotel as “elegant, but not swank.” It had all the touches that displayed culture and none that displayed crass consumption. Pictures hung everywhere, of every size and style, just as one might accumulate over time in one’s own house. Red velvet chairs, shining wallpaper, dark wood, glowing chandeliers, and gilded portraits of recumbent ladies were just the beginning; Wolsey wanted the service and the selections to be top-flight as well. Accordingly, he contacted Sean Muldoon. ARDOYNE—MARSEILLE— ABERDEEN—LONDON—BELFAST Sean had already built a reputation as Northern Ireland’s preeminent bartender and cocktail creator. He had grown up around pubs and bars, but hadn’t initially seen this as a career. Raised during the stunning daily violence of the Troubles, what he most wanted to do with Belfast in his youth was escape it. The Catholic working-class neighborhood where Sean grew up, Ardoyne, in north Belfast, was surrounded by Protestant areas, making it a flashpoint for killings by all sides of the conflict. When Sean was a boy, bomb threats and street closures by the British Army were so common that sometimes he would invent one as an excuse for coming home late. This atmosphere of aggression made a big impression on young Sean, and after he left school at sixteen he felt his ambitions would be best served by the army. But as Northern Ireland was part of Britain, that would have meant the British Army, and no Catholic boy from Belfast could join up with the forces of the oppressor. Of course, there was the Irish Army of the Republic to the south, but they similarly took a suspicious view of Northerners in their ranks. Belfast was not a city of opportunity; growing up, Sean knew many people chronically out of work, and as a young man he struggled to find work himself. Usually work meant a few months on a building site in London if his uncle could hire him, otherwise it meant the dole. Sean earned a reputation among his friends since, as the only non-drinker among them, he made his unemployment allowance of thirty pounds a week last the longest. So, at the age of twenty, Sean did what many young men without opportunity had done for centuries, and shipped out to Marseille to join the French Foreign Legion. After several training exercises in the rain, he acquired a chest infection, consequently failed the fitness exam, and shipped right back. He realized that fighting and potentially dying for a foreign country was not among his goals. But there seemed to be so little for him at home. While sitting on a beach in Marbella in southern Spain, on his way home by the scenic route, Sean couldn’t help but notice its tranquil beauty compared with the confusion and clashes of Belfast streets.