Drink
My Day Off: A Cocktail Tour of Manhattan
By Christine Sismondo
The Bar at Death and Co..
At about the mid-way point of my most recent "liver tour" of Manhattan, a group of us decided there was a distinct difference between the "sprinters" of the group and the marathoners. I have been given a gift ? endurance ? and it would be a sin not to use it.
So, we’ve put the disclaimer at the beginning. This is not for the faint of heart. This tour is not suitable for oenophiles. Don't try this at home, kids. But, if you're in New York and have stamina, follow my route and you'll be treated to some of the best cocktails in the Western hemisphere.
Noon: The Grand Central Station Saloon
This is the most touristy and well-known place on my tour. Despite that, it's a mandatory stop for bar aficionados and a swell place to get a start on the day. Even if you've been to the famous Oyster Bar, you may have missed the saloon hidden behind swinging doors at the back. They open to reveal a gorgeous, nautical-themed wood-laden traditional bar, named one of America's best bars by Esquire magazine.
We blow the bank on a couple of platters of assorted oysters, a bowl of chowder and a couple of Bloody Marys. I don't usually tolerate vodka in a drink but I make an exception, since it's really the appropriate drink to accompany oysters for breakfast. Plus, it's important priming for the arduous workout ahead.
3PM: The Rusty Knot, 425 West Street (near 11th)
Good cocktail bars open in the daytime are a rare commodity, so we give the Rusty Knot, a newbie on the scene, a shot. It's a faux-dive (again with a nautical theme) in a section of town so far west and so far out of the way to anything else that it's impossibly hip. Here, on a black sign board with white plastic letters, they offer up a menu of unpretentious bar snacks, like chicken liver and bacon sandwiches and retro libations like daiquiris and mai tais.
Here's where the cocktail controversy begins. Purists all over town reject the notion of blender drinks. I have a daiquiri and, déclassé as it might be, it truly hits the spot after a 30-something block walk in 80-degree heat. I spend the entire time listening to the staff in a good natured quandary about who is actually supposed to be working. The laid-back atmosphere and chaos make it an excellent afternoon stop. Rumour has it the place gets pretty packed later in the day.
5PM, Tailor, 525 Broome Street
This is where things start to get interesting. The breathtakingly lovely bar at Tailor is located in a fairly slick room in the basement of their restaurant. It's hard to conceive of the design expertise which must have gone into the construction of this deceptively simple looking bar, since it holds one of the city's best caches of impeccably chosen liquors, high end bar equipment, artisanal bitters and house-made syrups and infusions.
Our vest-clad, uber professional bartender, Marshall, rims the glass with more care than I have ever seen in the name of a Margarita. Of course, it's not just your average Marg. It's a Mushroom Margarita, made with Huitlacoche mezcal, lime, triple sec and artfully dabbed on lava salt. Incidentally, Huitlacoche is a corn fungus, known as the Mexican truffle, which has an unmistakably gritty taste. So does the drink - but in a good way.
Also on the menu is a Collins made with Kaffir leaf, a Kumquat Caipirinha, a sour with a yerba mate base, a Beet Sangria and a Mai Tai made with a house-infused Garam Masala Rum.
The innovator of this cutting edge cocktail program is a fellow named Eben Freeman, one of New York's many self-proclaimed cocktail geeks. He has clearly designed Tailor's menu with a unique mix of the pre-prohibition aesthetic (more about that later) and global influences.
If this sounds novel already, wait 'til you try the solids. Freeman is a world leader in the field of molecular mixology - bar chefs who are working on Ferran Adria's principles to create visually appealing and sensory-surprising drinks like his solid versions of the classic Ramos Gin Fizz, Cuba Libre and White Russian. Served on a plate, these drinks come in cubes. Imagine a jello-shot, only several degrees of sophistication higher, we hope.
Freeman's bartenders are trained in the Japanese hard-shake method, which was taught to Freeman by Stanislav Vadrna, a Czech bar owner, who learned it from the original inventor, Kazuo Ueda. It agitates the drink in a number of different directions, making it a few degrees colder and ensuring that the cocktail is full of air bubbles and ice shards.
7pm, Death and Company, 433 E. Sixth Street
Okay, to get here in time, we chug the Mushroom Margarita and hail a cab to the Lower East Side. It's a bit of effort but, trust me, worth it. If you push this stop off any later, you're liable to miss it altogether, since the place is only open until midnight and villagers are clamouring to get in while they can.
Here, Philip Ward and Alex Day, dressed impeccably in vests and looking the very picture of classic barmen, make what are, clearly, some of the best cocktails in all of America. Ward is the lead in the cocktail program here at Death and Company. He and Day embody the notion of the professional bar man. Ward worked previously at Pegu Club, an iconic cocktail bar on Houston owned by Audrey Saunders, one of New York's pioneers in the classic cocktail scene.
I ask Ward to make us something of his own choosing. He asks if there's anything I don't really like. I tell him I don't like vodka much and I lean towards dry drinks.
"You've come to the right place," says Ward.
He makes me a tall "Dolgren," made of tequila, bitters, lime, ginger and homemade tonic water. It's tangy, dry and, well, just divine. While sipping, I watch Day in action. He has his own unique shaking style, carefully pours his concoctions through a fine strainer to remove ice shards and tops a gin fizz-type drink with a soda shop-worthy spoonful of foam.
Making home made tonic water may sound extreme, but a key component of the pre-prohibition bartending movement is home made ginger beer, syrup, tonic and bitters. Commercial brands, often packed with sugar, simply don't fit into Ward's exquisitely crafted cocktails. Many of Ward's drinks are made with brown liquor. This season, there's a heavy emphasis on Applejack and he uses of a number of boutique bitters. He let me try a drop of Bittermen's Xocolatl mole bitters - a life-altering experience.
Pre-prohibition drinking traditions have been of interest to practitioners and historians for a few years now. Looking through archival records and old cocktail books, it became clear that a highly refined culinary tradition of cocktail making, passed down from tradesperson to tradesperson, existed before prohibition. As they say at Death and Company, the 1919 Volstead Act put a "swift end to that."
After repeal, the traditions and ethic were lost. What ensued were 75 years of hideously sweet grenadine concoctions, tropical blender drinks (hence the blender controversy) and more recently, the notorious pink drinks. The new bar stars of New York are devoted to reviving the old foodways (or, in this case, drinkways). At Death and Company, they advertise as such: "Welcome to a new golden age."
And while I'd like to bask in the golden glow as long as humanly possible, PDT (just a block away) is waiting for me. And there, I have reservations - something not to be trifled with.
9PM: PDT, 113 St. Marks' Place
To get to Please Don’t Tell (PDT), you take an unlikely looking walk through Crif’s hot dog stand, head to the phone booth and ring a buzzer. It's hard not to feel a little chuffed with yourself as the back of the phone booth opens into a lovely, low bar with the requisite cool taxidermied animals on the walls. They won't let more people in than there are seats - making it a refuge from over-crowded, raucous bars which populate the area.
Jim Meehan, also an editor at Food and Wine, sits with us and talks about their program. He's responsible for the new summer menu, which is, in itself, a literary text. Customers take nearly as long to read Meehan's eloquent descriptions of the provenance of the drinks as they do sipping.
Meehan, who also worked at Pegu along with Ward, is another leading man in the pre-prohibition school. His drinks are made with absinthe, Dubonnet, yellow chartreuse, Punt e Mes, Volace and a host of other exquisite liqueurs and liquors - most of which are completely unavailable to us in Ontario. The stark and uninteresting shelves at the LCBO are a key factor in Toronto's failure to successfully foster a cocktail culture. Of course, I guess I can boast my better chances at getting an OHIP-covered liver transplant to my New York pals and, after tonight, I'm getting on the wait-list - just in case.
As at Death and Company, you’re not going to find a lot of molecular mixology or Japanese hard-shaking going on. While Meehan has tremendous respect and admiration for those going in new directions, neither really fit in with his philosophy.
Don Lee, another manager, sits down with us and we spend a while discussing the finer points of rhubarb juice. Lee makes a rhubarb puree sweetened with agave nectar for PDT’s Rhubarbarita (rhubarb puree, reposado tequila, lemon juice, Grand Marnier and Veloce), a drink which one of my liver tour victims proclaimed the best drink she’d had in her life.
The French Maid (Cognac, lime, velvet falernum, a Bajan syrup, cucumber, mint and house-made ginger beer) is a hit with the rest of us, although my first cocktail - the Bee’s Sip (a pisco, sake, honey liqueur combo) was no slouch, either.
The drinks here are all elegant and built along classic lines. That’s a hallmark of the pre-prohibition influence. But along with a commitment to serving first-rate drinks, the new ethic of bartending also extends to customer service. Although I count myself in the lucky few who have had a chance to taste the creations these outstanding artists have concocted, I am never made to feel that way. It is a cliché of bad service all over Toronto and large parts of New York that the customer must grovel and earn the bartender’s respect before she receives decent service. Here, the opposite is true. Service is courteous and respectful and, ask anybody a serious question indicating that you’re interested in their trade and you receive a thoughtful and considered answer.
Meehan tells us about how he wishes there were more excellent cocktail bars in New York. Although it seems a boon to me and my pals from Toronto, London and Tokyo are the real cocktail capitals of the world. Many surmise that the custom of tipping is a handicap in the establishment of a thriving cocktail culture in North America. In those other places, bartending is a skilled trade - not a route to a quick couple hundred bucks a night.
Meehan explains that, in Japan, the first few years of bartending apprenticeship are spent learning to carve ice.
One of my party speaks up: "And in the end, what do they do it all for?"
"They do it for honour," replies Meehan.
11PM: Little Branch, 20 7th Ave S.
Little Branch is the third in a series of bars owned by Sasha Petraske, a legendary New York bartender and one of the founders of the cocktail renaissance. At his first place, Milk and Honey, Petraske famously refused to stock cranberry juice in the midst of the Cosmo craze in order to get people to try something new.
This bar is noteworthy for its excellent ginger and lime drinks and its rules of conduct - no fighting or talking about fighting, no approaching women who aren’t part of your party, be quiet and respectful of neighbours when leaving the bar, a nod, again to the pre-prohibition ethic. I’m sorry to say, though, that the service was, initially at least, ever so slightly reminiscent of being in a hot new club here at home. While waiting for a table we tried in vain to get acknowledgement of our existence from the bartender who studiously avoided us. Another employee came over and told us that the side of the bar we were on (the only side of the bar open to customers) was closed, even as the bartender served the people next to us.
The hostess got us a table fairly quickly but then it took some time for a server to get to us. The hostess herself apologetically served us. We like to think we caught them at a bad moment - I’ve been twice before and enjoyed myself ? but it was literally about 30 minutes before we finally got a drink. I know good things take time, but?
But then, redemption. The Rum Buck - made with rum, ginger, lime and bitters - is an excellent tall drink, garnished with a delicious candied ginger, cooled by a single long block of ice (so it doesn’t dilute the drink so much as it melts) and served with Petraske’s signature metal spoon straws which conduct the cold was up to snuff. That, and an America Trilogy (rye, applejack, simple syrup and bitters) put me in a forgiving mood about the sobering delay.
Midnight: Daddy-O’s, 44 Bedford Ave.
The group is now clamouring for a "normal" bar, so we head across Seventh Avenue to a nice looking joint called Daddy-O’s. Our efforts at just having a Pabst Blue Ribbon are thwarted, however, when presented with a drink menu including Pisco Sours, Papa Dobles and a series of other classic cocktails. The obliging bartender tells us that most of the drinks are made from century-old drink recipes.
This strikes me as testament to the strength of this pre-prohibition drinks movement - that a bar which isn’t even on my extensive list of venues has a really nice program of fresh, classic drinks.
At this, the sprinters in the group split off, leaving only three marathoners to head to "Authentic Bar" B-Flat in Tribeca.
1AM: B-Flat, 277 Church St.
I should say up front that I absolutely love this place and am no impartial observer. Jim Meehan sent me here a year ago and I’ve been enamoured ever since. Not everybody seems to feel as strongly as I do about the classy, minimalist room, the impeccable service, non-stop John Coltrane, brilliant drinks and Berkshire pork belly with enoki and Tokyo scallion miso garlic sauce. BFlat hasn’t enjoyed quite as much media attention as the other places and, since it’s a little out of the way and they aren’t quite as busy as some of their competitors. All of this makes it a bit of a hidden gem.
If you want to watch a Japanese hard shake, "Authentic Bar" B-Flat is the place to do it. The Japanese bartender-owners here have been through a long apprenticeship and also all used to work at Angel’s Share, which, along with Petraske’s bar, is one of the places credited with sparking the New York culinary cocktail movement.
Kenny makes me a Misty, made of rum, calpico (a milky, uncarbonated Japanese soft drink), lemon juice and a float of champagne. It is gorgeously garnished with five blueberries, a slice of lemon and a mint leaf and, if anybody still has doubts that she is drinking the work of artists, this drink would resolve those doubts - quickly.
We also try a Biju (gin, sweet vermouth, green chartreuse and orange bitters) and a tequila drink called the Matador. B-Flat has a more ambitious menu than it did the last time I was here. The place is known for its shiso-infused vodkas and exquisite, light sake drinks. Well and good but I’m always craving something from the dark side. Lucky for me, there’s a lot more rum, tequila and whiskey (liquors after my own heart) on the newer, more diverse menu.
Taka, one of the other bartenders, comes over and speaks with us about ice. He shows us how he hand carves the ice used in our drinks. Late night talk about ice may sound a little tiresome, I realize, but Taka’s passion for ice is incredibly compelling. I could practically listen to him all night.
But not tonight, since even the marathon-runners are fading and need to hit the hotel. I have a big day tomorrow, after all. At noon sharp, I start the micro-brew bar tour...
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