If you like dinner with your tequila, then boy, does Henry’s Majestic have a treat for you: On Wednesday, Jan. 24, the Knox-Henderson mainstay will present “A Majestic Agave Dinner” – a four-course dinner featuring dishes paired with varying expressions of Avion tequila.
Expect cocktails such as a prickly pear Paloma or a tequila Old Fashioned spiced up with a pistachio orgeat to accompany delicious sounding dishes like a curried lamb empanada or a cocoa-crusted venison.
Tickets are $85 per person. Call 469-893-9400 or email info@henrysmajestic.com for more information.
The Ultimate Cocktail Experience, coming soon to a Klyde Warren Park near you. (Photo by Don Mamone)
Oh, Cocktails for a Cause. My, how you’ve grown.
Four years ago, the annual, bar-industry-driven fundraiser for Triggers’s Toys was a modest Christmas-season party at The Standard Pour, with 50 bartenders in Santa hats raining cocktails upon their mirthful elf minions. These days… well, look at it: Repositioned in the expansive savanna of Klyde Warren Park, this benefit behemoth, now dubbed the Ultimate Cocktail Experience, last year raised more than $200,000 and aims to exceed that this time around. Naturally.
The 2017 version of the Ultimate Cocktail Experience is set to go down on Saturday, Sept. 30, from 6:30 to 10 p.m. There will be food trucks and a charity casino area. Tickets, which range from $65 to $125 for VIP status, are available here. Or you can get your tickets for $80 at the door.
This big boy pop-up is the brainchild of Bryan Townsend, vice president and sales director for spirits producer The 86 Co., who a decade ago was a corporate wonk who didn’t like his job very much. In 2008, he left his job and began to focus on other things – including his dog, Trigger.
One day he was a Grapevine hospital with his newly trained dog when he met a nurse distressed about a young girl who’d been in therapy for a year, unable to socialize with others. Townsend suggested that maybe the girl would like to give Trigger a treat.
The girl did, and Townsend wondered if she might follow the dog through one of the hospital’s children’s ward play tunnels. Then that happened too. The nurse retrieved the girl’s mother. “It was the first time she’d ever crawled,” Townsend remembered.
Inspired by the experience, Townsend launched Trigger’s Toys, a nonprofit that provides toys, therapy aids and financial assistance to hospitalized kids and their families. That’s the organization at the heart of the revelry that now includes bartenders, brand reps and spirits distributors from Texas and beyond who come to lend their shaking, stirring hands.
A scene from 2016’s Ultimate Cocktail Experience at Klyde Warren Park. (Photo by Don Mamone)
Recast as a global throwdown, the Ultimate Cocktail Experience puts forward six unique bar “concepts,” each representing a different part of the world with drinks to match. This year’s showcased locales are Mexico City, London, New Orleans, Hong Kong, Havana and Casablanca, and each station’s drink lineup will include a classic drink and a non-alcoholic selection.
In the mix this year are bartenders Ash Hauserman of New York’s Havana-themed Blacktail, named Best New American Bar at this summer’s Tales of the Cocktail festival, and Iain Griffiths of London’s Dandelyan, which won the honor of the world’s best cocktail bar.
This year’s teams, classic drinks and team captains are as follows:
Casablanca (Mule): captain Andrew Stofko (Hot Joy, Uptown)
A man and his brews: At Niwa, George Kaiho’s sake game is strong.
Let’s say you are the type of diner who confidently fords a robata grill menu, stoutly navigating the fare only to break into a paralytic stupor at the sight of an extensive sake list. Faced with a noodle bowl of unfamiliar terms, you might very well leap into the abyss of a random choice or opt for a safer fallback (“Sapporo, please!”) — but wouldn’t life be one less mystery burdened if you knew what all those enigmatic terms meant?
Partially unfiltered Daku sake, paired with a Wagyu short rib deviled egg.
Fortunately for you, George Kaiho is here to help. The resident bar manager at mezcal/sherry bar Jettison in Oak Cliff, Kaiho has been moderating a series of sake tastings every other Sunday at Deep Ellum’s Niwa Japanese BBQ, sharing his love and considerable knowledge of Japan’s brewed, rice-based alcohol with anyone who will listen. (Niwa’s next sake tasting will be Sunday, Aug. 6.)
This is the way to explore sake: In dribs and drabs, with an experienced tour guide leading the way. Niwa’s tastings begin with a thin spiral-ring booklet called “A Guide To Tasting Sake.” Inside is a detailed description of sake production along with a map of the 47 prefectures of Japan. And because one is never too old for sticker books, attendees also receive a baggie of stickers with photos of the five premium sakes to be sampled and background on each; these can be applied to pages in the booklet with space for notes about each sake’s first impressions, tasting notes, pairing ideas and more.
Kaiho explains the meaning behind the name of Dassai’s “Otterfest” sake at a tasting in July. “This one’s special,” he said.
Each sake – all of them registering about 15 percent alcohol – is paired with a small bite. At Niwa’s inaugural sake tasting in late June, first up was the Daku Nigori, nigori meaning a sake left partially unfiltered; with a milky, porridge-like texture, it’s best served chilled. Offering notes of grape, berry, banana and pear, the Daku was paired with a Wagyu short rib deviled egg, a rich contrast to its viscous, syrupy sweetness.
Kaiho, who was born in Dallas but grew up in Japan, explained that while sake’s quality and diversity are similar to wine, it ‘s better compared to beer, being less affected by climate than by the production process itself. “Wine is about what happens in the vineyard,” he said. “This is more like a beer. It’s about what happens along the way.”
Restaurant owner Jimmy Niwa displays the evening’s menu at a sake tasting last month.
Cheap sakes abound, but it’s premium sakes that are on the rise, one of the main characteristics being the degree to which the rice is polished, or washed, since the grains’ exterior layers offer less desirable flavors to the final product. To be called premium, a sake’s grains must have been polished down by at least 30 percent. “Ginjo” sake has been 40 percent polished, “Daiginjo” 50 percent.
Our second sake was Otokoyama’s Tokubetsu (special) Junmai from Hokkaido prefecture, one of Japan’s northernmost breweries, founded in 1661. While some producers add alcohol to sakes to bypass the lengthy fermentation process, a junmai sake is free of such chicanery; made with snowmelt well water, ours was dry with apple notes and it paired well with the starch of spicy fries and wasabi aioli.
Shiokawa brewery’s “Cowboy” Yamahai sake, paired with Niwa’s pork belly bun at a tasting in July.
Next up, the Kirinzan Classic, immediately distinguished by a funky, yeasty aroma. Its watery, nearly flavorless taste blossomed into an apple/pear finish; Kaiho speculated that yeasts were likely added during production with a neutral spirit added to halt fermentation. (Trickery! See above paragraph.) It coupled nicely with a salty kara-age chicken.
Fourth up was Masumi’s highly drinkable Karakuchi Kiippon, a junmai ginjo (no added alcohol, 40 percent polished) made with soft mountainous water from Japan’s alpine Nagano region. (The Coors of Japan!) Kaiho said this particular sake, served with sashimi, was a favorite when he worked at Tei-An, where tables of buoyant imbibers would order bottle after bottle. Pleasantly refreshing with a clean, cucumber-y taste, our glass at Niwa was appropriately flanked by a crab cucumber roll.
Kaiho demonstrating the art of the proper pour at a sake tasting in July.
Our final pour was Kirinzan’s Junmai Ginjo. The brewery, founded in 1843, gets both its water and rice from Niigata prefecture, and Kirinzan is a so-called zizake (local) sake consumed largely by local inhabitants. Sweet and clean with a lovely floral character, it was paired with sushi.
At the moment, Niwa offers the tastings for a generous $20-$25, a bargain compared to the pricey sake dinners Kaiho oversaw when he worked at Tei-An. The booklets have enough pages to accommodate multiple visits. “If you come to four or five, you’ll end up with a good book of sakes you can keep to yourself,” Kaiho said. (Actually, two tastings was enough to fill up my booklet, but I’ll not quibble with a pleasant buzz and a good time, provided the math isn’t torpedoing my wallet.)
And anyway, “the goal here is not to make money,” said restaurant owner Jimmy Niwa. “It’s to show people what sake is all about.”
And that right there should be reason enough to give sake’s goodness a try, for goodness’ sake.
It is said that the tradition dates back to the early 14th century, and its participants are known for something resembling cojones. The famed Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain, held during the nine-day festival of Sanfermines, is the best known of such rituals, in which young, white-clad daredevils in red bandanas dash through the streets just ahead of six rampaging toros.
Of course you’ve thought about doing it. But maybe you’ve been unnerved by the airfares, or possibly it the fact that the event prohibits participation by anyone under the influence of alcohol.
My friends, Dallas has got you covered.
Imagine this on the streets of Dallas, except with roller derby girls and beer. (Image from TravelGenius.com)
Prepare to showcase your derring-do on Sunday, July 16, when the inaugural Cedars Running of the Bulls goes down with a three-venue trot just south of downtown. The event, dreamed up by Industry Alley proprietor Charlie Papaceno, kicks off with a pep rally from 4 to 6 p.m. at Lee Harvey’s.
There, intrepid imbibers will receive their customary red bandanas before the less-than-half-mile run gets underway, with Dallas’ own flat-track roller derby girls, the Derby Devils, playing the part of the minatory beasts. Mac’s Southside and Industry Alley, both on Lamar, are the final destinations. Expect the Easy Slider food truck and drink specials sponsored by Tullamore Dew, along with plenty of Topo Chico.
Charlie Papaceno of Industry Alley.
As its Facebook page puts it, the event is a way to “celebrate the spirit of our unique neighborhood,” carving out a niche in the same way that Oak Cliff has earned a claim to Bastille Day. Though reception to the idea was lukewarm at a Cedars merchant meeting, Papaceno said, he and managers of the other two bars decided to push forward with the idea on their own.
Sometimes, you just gotta take the bull by the horns.
At Sissy’s Southern Kitchen, former bar manager Michael Reith rotated his barrel for a week with sweet sherry before setting his Negroni variation to age.
Negroni Week is underway, and as summer creeps ever closer it’s time to make this legendary ruby-red cocktail your wingman for the next few months. Bittersweet and refreshing, it’s one of my personal favorites, and while any decent bar with a bottle of Campari can generally cobble one together, this week is extra special: It’s all for a good cause.
As drinks go, this is Kirk, Spock and McCoy (or hey, if you like, Harry, Ron and Hermione). The complementary trio of equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and lush, bitter Campari dates back to early 20th-century Italy and has inspired a host of variations; you can enjoy the original and its spawn through Sunday at bars across Dallas-Fort Worth and feel extra good about the fact that your hard-earned dollars are going to charity.
At High and Tight, Austin Gurley’s Negroni variation: Bols genever, Cocchi di Torino, Campari, orange, lime, vanilla.
Now in its fifth year, Negroni Week, presented by Imbibe magazine and Campari, has a hashtag and a flashy web site with a super-cool feature: You can specify your global location, set your acceptable travel range (yes! Drive 150 miles for a Negroni if you wish!) and be given a list of participating bars. There are 95 such venues within a 15-mile radius of Dallas, for instance, so there’s really no excuse not to drink and donate.
Between 2013 and 2016, the effort has grown from 100 participating venues to about 6,000 worldwide, raising nearly $900,000 in the process for charities such as Mercy Corps, Water for People, United Cerebral Palsy and the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. In Texas, the recipient is Trigger’s Toys, which serves long-term hospitalized kids and their families.
Among the participating venues – you can find a full list here – in Dallas are the Time Out Tavern, Americano, Lounge Here, The Mirador, Sprezza, Oddfellows and The Cedars Social. In Fort Worth, you’ve got Rodeo Goat, Proper and Cork and Pig Tavern. Among others. Even Ruth’s Chris Steak House is getting into the action.
Pouring Mellow Mushroom’s honey-ginger habanero margarita at Margarita Meltdown 2017.
It’s been just over a week since the 7th annual Margarita Meltdown, a sold-out, five-hour party featuring more than two dozen Margarita variations from all around the Dallas-Fort Worth area – which could be why I’m barely getting around to recapping the whole thing.
A sample scorecard: Each sample-size margarita meant crossing another box off the chart.
Armed with score sheets like big coffee-club cards, we and our fellow festival goers sloshed through the West End grounds on the drizzly last Sunday of May and lined up for sample-size margaritas from places like The Theodore, Mellow Mushroom, Renfield’s Corner and Y.O. Steakhouse (which marked its territory with a longhorn skull and fake Saguaro cactus). There were mango-papaya margaritas, cucumber margaritas, pickled beet margaritas and honey-ginger habanero margaritas. Aside from Lekka’s snow-cone-style version, they came in little cups – the kind salad dressing comes in with a to-go salad – festooned with rose petals, rimmed with chili salt, or in The Standard Pour’s case, garnished with watermelon radish and vegetable ash.
The Standard Pour crew knocks out pickled beet margaritas.
Attendees had a sought-after tool at their disposal: one wooden coin, to deposit into the “tip jar” of their favorite overall margarita, with prizes of $1,000, $500 and $250 awarded to the first-, second- and third-place drink makers.
My favorite of the day was the blood-orange margarita from Cassidy’s, in Fort Worth, a Texas two-step primped with Solerno blood orange liqueur and a chewy piece of candied blood orange sunbathing in the cup. The drink, followed by the sugary punch of the candied fruit, was a winner – and not just with me: It turned out to be the people’s choice as top margarita, joining previous champs Pie 314 of Lewisville, Whiskey Cake of Plano, and Dallas’ Asador, Iron Cactus, Savor Gastropub and Soleo.
The Renfield’s Corner’s team handing out berry-powered “Purple Jesus” margaritas.
Coming in second was the pineapple-jalapeno margarita from Frankie’s Downtown, while third place went to Rj Mexican Cuisine’s blueberry-basil translation. The people had spoken. The people were feeling pretty good. So even though we may never know who created the original margarita, it’s safe to say its legacy is alive and well.
The classic Margarita. Image courtesy of LetsGetTwisted.com
In Texas, no drink says summer is almost here better than a Margarita. And in Dallas, nothing puts an exclamation point on the thought like the 7th annual Dallas Margarita Competition, happening this Sunday in the city’s West End District.
Ah, the Margarita. The classic mix of tequila, orange liqueur and lime, rimmed with kosher salt, is among the most legendary and debated of cocktails, with more than a few origin stories to its credit. Rather than try to figure out which one to believe, the Dallas Margarita Competition offers you the opportunity to decide which of the 30-plus versions of the drink you’re going to try. Which will be the best? That’s for you to decide.
At the 2013 event, Armando Guillen and Brian McCullough of The Standard Pour battled the crush in Bishop Arts.
That’s right: At the Dallas Margarita Competition, which runs from 4 to 9 p.m., you are the judge. Your $40 ticket ($50 at the door) gets you samples of Margarita variations created by more than 30 DFW bartenders, along with a scoring card and a wooden chip with which to cast your ballot. (Don’t wait too late, though, or your vote won’t count at all!) The top three bartenders will win prizes of $1,000, $500 and $250, respectively.
Previous first-place winners of the previously named Margarita Meltdown have included Lewisville’s Pie 314, Plano’s Whiskey Cake, and Dallas’ Asador, Iron Cactus, Savor Gastropub and Soleo.
The event will include food and retail vendors, and a DJ. Tickets are available here, but first one to email me at typewriterninja@gmail.com with the year of the very first Margarita Meltdown wins a free pair!
The Standard Pour bar crew, doing its thing at San Francisco’s PCH — for charity.
For any serious Dallas cocktail fan, the crew behind the bar Sunday would have looked familiar – Austin Millspaugh, Jorge Herrera and Christian Rodriguez, the popular Thursday night crew from The Standard Pour in Uptown – jostling shakers, swirling liquids, torching lemon peels and working the room in their dapper TSP uniforms. It was a practiced environment for the TSP crew, but a typical Uptown crowd this was not. A glimpse outside made it clear: They weren’t in Dallas anymore.
Chinatown was a half-mile away; the Transamerica Pyramid a few blocks beyond that. Five miles to the west, the Golden Gate Bridge. On Sunday, the Standard Pour team – which in recent months has made a habit of doing guest pop-ups at other bars – took things to a whole new level, bringing their traveling “TSP Takeover” to Pacific Cocktail Haven, or PCH, one of San Francisco’s newer cocktail joints.
TSP’s Herrera talks cocktails with a thirsty patron who teaches at Stanford University.
“We’re going into a West Coast stronghold,” Millspaugh had said before the trip, aware that the city, along with New York, had forged the beginnings of today’s craft-cocktail revival. “We have to bring our A-game.”
And that they did, with a six-drink lineup sponsored by Pernod Ricard USA. As with their previous pop-ups at Dallas’ Industry Alley and High & Tight, it was all for charity – with Planned Parenthood the recipient of this night’s proceeds.
Though PCH has hosted guest bartenders before, “we’ve never had a team take over the bar,” said Kevin Diedrich, PCH’s operating partner. The bar, typically closed on Sundays, had opened for this special event. “It’s a cool way to share what we do, but also for them to share with they do. We went through the drink list this afternoon. There’s some cool flavors. They’re pushing the boundaries.”
Millspaugh, garnishing his quirky Light Camera Action — reminiscent of caramel-truffle popcorn.
There was Rodriguez’ tropical Bad and Boujee, a mix of tequila, horchata, lime, cinnamon-vanilla syrup, Topo Chico and tiki bitters.
Herrera’s Tourist Trap was a crowd favorite featuring Irish whiskey, Yellow Chartreuse, bittersweet liqueur, sweet vermouth and a tobacco tincture.
Millspaugh, meanwhile, in typical Millspaughian fashion, had concocted the cocktail equivalent of caramel-truffle popcorn with his disorientingly delicious Light, Camera, Action – an ensemble of Irish whiskey, nutty Oloroso sherry, popcorn liquid, dehyrdrated foie gras and black truffle salt.
“It’s weird,” said one woman, a Stanford University instructor. “I feel like I’m drinking a movie.”
Rodriguez’ tiki-style Bad to Boujee.
The TSP team showcased Texas hospitality and flair, with Millspaugh at one point grating dehydrated foie gras directly into a woman’s mouth. He, Herrera and Rodriguez have drawn a loyal following on Thursdays at The Standard Pour, which has made a habit of trying not to be a standard bar.
Last year, the McKinney Avenue venue featured a weekly series of guest crews from other Dallas bars; a weekly event felt like too much, so as 2017 rolled around they brainstormed. What if the TSP team spent one night a month working at other bars, they thought? “We’re just trying to get our names out there,” Rodriguez says.
Pacific Cocktail Haven is one of the San Francisco’s newer and most well-regarded cocktail spots.
Their first “takeover” took place at Knox-Henderson’s Atwater Alley, after which Herrera proposed the idea of doing it all for a good cause. April’s event at Industry Alley, sponsored by Remy Cointreau, benefited Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, while proceeds from their March pop-up at Deep Ellum’s High & Tight, sponsored by Avion tequila and St. Germain, went to the Dallas office of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Each event raised $1,300 or more for charity.
They recently met Jessamine McClellan, the San Francisco-based national brand ambassador for Redbreast Irish whiskey, and told her about the project, pitching the idea of taking their show on the road. She suggested the idea to Diedrich, who agreed to host the TSP crew. The Standard Pour offered to partially subsidize their trip, and the deal was done.
“The idea is, one, to showcase the place we work at, and two, to give back,” Millspaugh said. “It’s, like, paying it forward.”
The Standard Pour crew: Rodriguez, Herrera and Millspaugh.
The poster for Sunday’s benefit event, the second of what the bartenders hope to make a monthly occurrence.
When it comes to benefit events involving cocktails, there’s always room for one more. This weekend, Dallas’ Industry Alley is pulling off what perhaps no other local cocktail bar has done by throwing two benefit events on consecutive nights.
On Sunday, a team of bartenders from Uptown’s Standard Pour will be slinging drinks at the Cedars District bar, all for a good cause: All of the night’s tips will benefit Scottish Rite Hospital for Children.
“The Standard Pour Takeover” runs from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday at Industry Alley, just one night after the bar hosts a pair of pop-up dinners from two teams of Dallas chefs, also to benefit Scottish Rite.
Standard Pour bartenders Austin Millspaugh, Christian Rodriguez and Jorge Herrera started the takeover events as a way of both promoting their bar and giving back, and they hope to make it a monthly thing. Last month’s inaugural benefit takeover, at Deep Ellum’s High and Tight and sponsored by Avion tequila and St. Germain elderflower liqueur, benefited the Dallas office of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
“It’s, like, paying it forward,” Millspaugh said. “And people get to experience different venues.”
Sunday’s event will be sponsored by Remy Cointreau, so look for cocktails featuring Mount Gay Rum, Botanist Gin and, of course, Cointreau.
Victor Tangos, where Monday’s Halloween bash benefits a good cause. Photo by Mei-Chun Jau.
Here’s some Halloween weekend activity that won’t have you saying Boo.
Monday’s event at Victor Tangos is the highlight, and the costume party/cocktail fest doubles as a charity effort, with proceeds benefiting Dallas CASA, an agency that helps abused and neglected children find safe and permanent homes.
Josh Hendrix and Omar YeeFoon, behind the bar at since-closed Bar Smyth. Now spirits ambassadors, both will be pouring at the Victor Tangos event.
The longtime Knox-Henderson craft-cocktail den is teaming up with Brian Floyd of The Barman’s Fund, a national organization of bartenders who hold monthly events to benefit worthwhile causes and donate their night’s tips to the proceeds.
The Victor Tangos party features an all-star cast of Dallas bar industry pioneers, including five members of the original teams at milestone craft-cocktail joints Bar Smyth and/or The Cedars Social, both of which earned national acclaim: Michael Martensen, Mate Hartai, Josh Hendrix, Julian Pagan and Omar YeeFoon.
Joining them will be Victor Tangos vet Emily Arseneau, Brian McCullough of The Standard Pour, Midnight Rambler’s Zach Smigiel and spirits distributor Kristen Holloway.
The fun gets underway at 7 p.m. with drink specials, with tracks spun by DJ Bryan C and prizes to be awarded for the best, most outlandish and most inappropriate costumes.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, the classic Windmill Lounge on Maple Avenue will hold its annual Halloween bash with drink specials, a midnight costume parade and contest ($100 for first place!) and DJs Chris Rose and Genova providing the beats.
The Windmill’s Halloween party gets underway at 9 p.m. (Image courtesy of Windmill Lounge)
Booze news and adventures in cocktailing, based In Dallas, Texas, USA. By Marc Ramirez, your humble scribe and boulevardier. All content and photos mine unless otherwise indicated. http://typewriterninja.com
