Sweet and sour mix, gone. Maraschino cherries, banished. Orange juice concentrate, no more. It’s 2015, and you should expect the drink in your glass to be as fresh as the food on your plate.
Just like the restaurant movement to return to food grown on a nearby farm, cocktails are going back to an earlier time. From olive juice to simple syrup, the ingredients in your drink are more likely to be made in-house than in recent decades.
So bar managers and drink makers are arriving earlier in the day to prep for Durango’s thirsty hordes, juicing oranges and grapefruits, cutting lemons and limes, making their own bitters for Old Fashioneds and even going so far as creating an in-house tonic for the ever-popular G&T.
“It’s more labor, but you can definitely taste a difference,” said Lucas Hess, manager of El Moro Spirits and Tavern, as he expertly prepared a Hollywood – Tito’s vodka, crème de violette, St. Germain and house-made lemon bitters – for a Monday lunch customer.
Caring about what goes into your body is an abiding trend among consumers of high-end anything, from grass-fed beef and Greek yogurt to small-batch beer and locally produced wine. That liquor is following makes great sense, especially in a foodie-centric town like ours.
“Who wants orange juice concentrate when they can have fresh-squeezed?” Hess asked. “People want to get back to natural ingredients.”
Six colorful cruets line the prep station offering house-made bitters for almost every drink – grapefruit, lemon, orange, apple, absinthe and a deviously dark aromatic potion of 12 ingredients, the most prominent of which is cinnamon. Hess also makes his own tonic water from a tincture that comes from chinchona bark, infuses sweet vermouth with vanilla bean and cloves and barrel-ages cocktails to give them a distinctive flavor.
If aging works for wine, why not for cocktails? So don’t be surprised to see a mini barrel sitting on the end of the bar when you walk into any restaurant.
At Chimayo Stone Fired Kitchen, the A.P. Elixir is named after bar manager Aaron Peterson, who ages the concoction of potato vodka (so the beverage would be gluten-free, of course), cardamom, allspice, rosemary, thyme, vermouth and Campari for weeks. The barrel’s wood adds flavor to the mix, just as it does for wine.
At Seasons Rotisserie & Grill, they age their Manhattans to blend and mellow the cocktail, a combination of bourbon and sweet vermouth. They also soak Bing cherries in bourbon, hand-stuff blue cheese olives and make their sweet-and-sour mix from scratch.
“If you purchase it, it’s not fresh,” says owner Karen Barger.
While bartenders are looking to a more wholesome past for their ingredients, they’re looking to a more louche time for their recipes – Prohibition. Many of America’s most beloved cocktails stem from that era, and to no one’s surprise, many of them are based on bourbons and whiskey. So bring on the Manhattans, the Old Fashioneds, the Boulevardiers – they’ll warm our way through the end of winter.
They’ll also recall some early memories of our own.
“You won’t drink your dad’s drink, but you will drink your grandfather’s,” said Scott Wells, general manager of the Palace Restaurant and Quiet Lady Tavern. “They made good drinks then, and they fell out of fashion.”
In their search for something different, customers have come full circle. They’re abjuring the hyper-sweet drinks of their college years – remember the Long Island Iced Tea, Sloe Gin Fizz and every beach town’s buzz of the day, Piña Colada? – in favor of more sophisticated tastes.
Wells caters to them with adult beverages created with in-house infusions like a martini made with lemongrass-and-ginger-infused vodka. If you’re looking for a Durango take on the margarita, try his Valcano, a silver tequila infused with four different kinds of hot peppers, mixed with agave nectar and fresh lime juice. Besides its name alone, the Kinky Lemonade lures one with a vodka liqueur infused with mango, blood orange and passion fruit, to say nothing of the vodka and lemonade itself.
“Maybe people’s tastes are growing up a bit,” he said.
Maybe that explains the current craze for all things mule. The World War II-era drink is a little bit sweet, a little bit sour and a little bit spicy, and all the rage during your grandfather’s day. The copper cups were a huge hit at Urban Market over Christmas, and the drink was a fast seller at new distillery Durango Craft Spirits recently.
You can find a version at almost every bar in town, a simple mix of vodka, lime and ginger beer. Seasons offers six, including one with raspberries, another with honey and, breaking with tradition, one made from dark rum. The drink is the best seller at El Moro, where it has Goat vodka and Zuberfizz ginger ale.
As warmer weather sets in, you can anticipate your local bartenders will take a cue from the kitchen and include locally grown and seasonal ingredients in their creative libations, from Palisade peaches to fresh herbs and vegetables. Some already are.
Peterson charges up his martini with jalapeños charred each day in Chimayo’s super-hot wood-fired ovens then muddles them with soothing cucumber, fresh lime, agave nectar and tequila. (Trust me, my grandfather never drank a martini with anything but stiff gin, a whiff of vermouth and two olives.) He also offers a margarita made with blood oranges – in season and in grocery stores right now – and a blood-orange liqueur called Salerno, after the Amalfi Coast town where they grow in abundance.
Chef and co-owner Michael Lutfy adds new dishes to his menu at least once a month, and Peterson says he tries to do the same with cocktails. It’s more work, sure, but it’s more fun, too.
“It keeps the creative juice flowing,” he said.
It also keeps us coming back. Like foodies of every stripe, we want to know what’s new and what’s next, not just on our plate, but in our glass, too.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
