Category Archives: Barware

Alchemy, Barmoire, Bars, Barware, Cocktail craft, Events, Exotic tales of adventure, Fancydranks, Fashion and style, Molecular gastronomy, Seasonal, The maturing scene, West Dallas

Jettison’s omakase cocktail event will put some Spring in your sip

Jettison’s George Kaito positions a spoonful of bitter liqueur “caviar” atop a cocktail at the bar’s spring omakase experience.

The bartender comes bearing flowers, a certain sign of spring – and depending on your choice of bloom, a harbinger of the drink you are about to receive. Presented in a tall glass with tiny spoonful of what looks like caviar resting atop an ice cube, the mix of mezcal, tequila and house-made grenadine is a feast for the senses – and a playfully constructed nod to the season.

It’s one of six cocktails that, along with a closing shot, form Jettison’s Spring Omakase Cocktail Experience, a multicourse cocktail event happening at the West Dallas bar on April 28. The drink above, called Pick Your Antidote, is a variation on the Tequila Sunrise – and with a sunrise a symbol of renewal, yet another nod to the springtime theme. The “caviar” atop the spoon is actually one of three bitter liqueurs chemically gelled into tiny spheres, to be consumed separately or dropped into the drink.

This Tequila Sunrise variation is among the cocktails featured at Jettison’s omakase event.

Behold, the cocktail renaissance is complete: Having pulled alongside wine as a featured complement to prix fixe dinners, drinks are now earning star billing, with bars like San Francisco’s Wilson & Wilson, The Aviary in New York and NOBU in Newport Beach offering experiences of three to five cocktails, and maybe some nibbles, for a set price.

Jettison’s omakase event creatively taps into that trend while embracing the bar’s Japanese influence and barman George Kaiho’s heritage. (Omakase translates to “I will leave it up to you,” most often applied to chef-driven sushi experiences.) It’s the third seasonal offering from Jettison, which adjoins coffee joint Houndstooth in the neighborhood’s Sylvan Thirty complex.

Influenced by the season itself and science-driven concepts like molecular gastronomy, the event features artistically conceived cocktails that would be impractical to put on the bar menu. “It’s stuff that at 10 p.m. on a Friday night we’re not going to have time to do,” bartender Andrew Kelly said at a recent media preview of the event. “There’s rapid infusions, dry ice, spherification. The degree of difficulty is a little more intense.”

Breaking the Ice, a cocktail encased inside an ice egg, is also on the slate.

For instance: The slate’s first cocktail, Breaking the Ice, is a tart and funky play on the classic Champs-Elysees. Featuring shochu, Japan’s national spirit, along with Green Chartreuse, lime, simple syrup and edible flowers, the name refers not just to the drink’s place in the order but also to spring’s emergence from winter – and the fact that the drink is presented in an egg of ice that, with the thwack of a mallet, hatches into the glass along with its botanical components.

“I love the way the ice ball traps the aromatics and then releases them once you break it,” says Jettison’s owner, Sean Henry. “It’s so fragrant.”

Spring also means that herbs and plants feature heavily into the experience. The rose-petal-enhanced Eternal and Fleeting gives the bar a chance to showcase its recently acquired magnetic stirring machine, a lab instrument that swirls liquids by way of a rapidly spinning metal pellet dropped into the vessel and powered by a rotating magnetic field in the platform underneath. (“It’s amazing what you can find on Amazon for 30 bucks,” Kelly says.)

Guests snack on popcorn and watch as red petals whirl like sprites in dry Manzanilla sherry, gradually infusing the fortified wine with their essence. “The agitation helps with the infusion,” Kaiho says. “Sherry is delicate and low-alcohol, so it more easily adopts the flavor.”

The strained sherry is then mixed with peach brandy, Benedictine and bitters flavored with black tea, yerba mate, hazelnut and vanilla, sweetness lifting the dryness. 

Kelly and Kaito team up for a riff on the classic Brown Derby cocktail. They hope to make these events a seasonal occurrence.

The event encompasses about two hours, and Kaiho and Kelly hope to offer a fresh omakase experience each season. Two seatings are available on the 28th, and in keeping with the bar’s intimate setting, Jettison will limit each to 10 participants apiece. Cost is $90 and reservations can be made here.

Spring represents the beginning of the cycle of life, Kaiho says, and with this experience, “it’s about taking the cycle of life into the cocktails.”

Jettison, 1878 Sylvan Ave., Dallas. 214-238-2643.

Barware, Cocktail history, Cocktail Legends, Downtown, Most excellent ideas, Prohibition

DMA exhibit to showcase cocktail culture history — through its barware

Dallas Museum of Art
Did someone say cocktails? Among the collection of vintage barware at the DMA exhibit. (Photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art)

So….. that cocktail you’re holding in your hand? Your great-great-grandfather might have drunk the very same thing.

That historical connection is one of the great charms of the modern craft-cocktail renaissance, and now, thanks to the Dallas Museum of Art, you might even get to see the very shaker the old guy’s drink got made in. (OK, the chances are wee, but you get the point.)

Dallas Museum of Art
“Shaken, Stirred, Styled: The Art of the Cocktail” features nearly 60 vintage and modern cocktail items. (Photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art)

Later this month, the DMA will open “Shaken, Stirred, Styled: The Art of the Cocktail,” a yearlong exhibit tracing the development of cocktails from the late 19th century to their modern-day renaissance, as well as the wares used to prepare and serve them.

The collection goes on display Nov. 18 and features nearly 60 items ranging from 19th century punch bowls and early 20th-century decanters to Prohibition-era shakers and modern designer barware.

The exhibit also spans craft-cocktail culture’s long and glorious history, starting with the punchbowl potions of colonial times and, long before fedoras were a thing, the 1862 publishing of storied bartender Jerry Thomas’ How To Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon Vivant’s Companion – the first printed compilation of cocktail recipes.

Opening night will bring an appearance by Dale DeGroff, another storied bartender whose attention to fresh ingredients and classic techniques at New York’s Rainbow Room throughout the 1990s are pretty much why you can find a properly made Sazerac even in select dive bars today. The godfather of the modern cocktail revival, DeGroff (a.k.a. “King Cocktail”) will addfress the current scene and its centuries-old roots.

As cocktails rose in popularity, so too did the tools needed to make them, and they got fancier and cleverer as time went on.

Dallas Museum of Art
Cocktail culture’s modern reboot has inspired a new wave of designer barware. (Photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art)

In an article about the exhibit, Samantha Robinson, the DMA’s interim assistant curator of decorative arts, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that silver was among the primary materials for luxury barware, especially in the prosperous 1920s, when speakeasies flourished in defiance of Prohibition.

Given drinking’s underground nature at the time, shakers took on seemingly whimsical shapes – like penguins, or lighthouses – to mask their actual utility.

(The coolest thing about the story, by the way, is learning that Robinson is a fan of the Aviation, though I prefer mine with crème de violette – as it should be.)

Starting around the 1960s, cocktails fell out of favor and plummeted to truly awful depths of neglect. The current reboot, rooted in the late 1990s, has inspired a new wave of cocktail artistry, including designer shakers and martini glasses, some of which will also be on display.

The exhibit runs through Nov. 12, 2017.

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