Category Archives: Fashion and style

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.

Alchemy, Fashion and style, Technique, Whiskey

Good times rolling: Cigars and booze are a smoking-hot pair

Oak Cliff
Brandon Fields of DeSoto enjoys his smokes with bourbon at Cigar Art in Oak Cliff.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud said, but then again he probably never paired one with Scotch. The two were practically made to go together, and increasingly they actually are: The smokes in C&C’s four-edition Dram line, for example, are each designed to pair with specified whiskey profiles.

As the spread of craft cocktails has given rise to more and better spirits, cigar enthusiasts find themselves awash in options when it comes to enhancing their puffery. It’s not as simple, though, as blindly picking something off the shelf or menu – too strong a spirit or cocktail and it might stomp all over your stogie goodness; too mild and it won’t stand up at all.

“A lot of people think they need to pair cigars with a really robust Scotch, and then they just pick any cigar,” says John Pullo, managing editor of online magazine Cigar Advisor, which has published guides on the subject. “And then the flavors of the drink completely wash out whatever they got out of the cigar.”

Delicia Silva, the so-called “Cigar Vixen” who presented on the topic at the 2015 Tales of the Cocktail festival in New Orleans, says it’s all about flavors. “You want to match the body of the cigar with the body of the spirit,” she says. “You want it to be like a marriage. You want them to complement each other.”

Tobacco is enhanced by flavors in the wrapping paper, just as spirits are enhanced by flavors in the barrel or a cocktail itself. As the Tales seminar description put it: ”There are parallels in the production of cigars that align with the creations of spirits and cocktails… The potent flavors of smoke and spirit, in combination, can create a truly unique experience.”

Pairing cigars with booze has been around since your great-grandfather’s grandfather, but Cigar Advisor copywriter Jonathan Detore says the tradition really thrived in the Roaring Twenties, when high rollers smoked cigars wrapped in $100 bills. With time, that nonsense subsided and cigars fell out of popularity, not to rise again until the 1990s.

Their profile has been rising ever since, helped along by the spirits explosion and the continued rise of craft beers. In addition to C&C’s whiskey-ready line, major cigar maker Perdomo earlier this year debuted smokes meant to pair with craft brew.

“What we’re seeing in the industry now is a deep dive into the pairing world,” Detore says. “In the last five years, makers have even started aging cigars in used whiskey barrels to make sure they go well with that particular liquor.”

Glenfiddich
At Dallas Chop House’s “Scotch and Cigars Under The Stars” event in July, attendees sipped several Glenfiddich single-malts with their smokes.

C&C’s Dram Cask #1, according to Cigars International, is designed to go with a milder, lighter whiskey “with notes of citrus and wood.” But absent paint-by-numbers instruction, how’s a cigar smoker supposed to know what to do? While it’s really a matter of personal taste, there are some basic principles one can follow. Generally speaking, the darker the cigar, the darker the spirit or beer best suited for the occasion.

Say, for example, you were smoking a Connecticut cigar, says Cigar Advisor’s Detore from the magazine’s offices in Pennsylvania, where he and Pullo are, of course, smoking cigars. You’d likely want a lighter beer, something like a nice, crisp Harpoon Saison.

“Right now,” Pullo says, “Jonathan is smoking a Partagas 1845 Extra Oscuro, from Honduras. The wrapper is extra fermented to get that dark color. There’s a mix of Nicaraguan, Honduran and Dominican tobacco in there. If I was a beer guy, I would put that with a stout or a porter; I wouldn’t think twice about putting a Guinness with it. That’s the nice thing about a cigar – it shows you the color.”

As far as spirits, Detore says, the cigar’s spicy, woody, leather notes, would probably go best with an aged rum or maybe the spicy bite of Bulleit Bourbon.

In Dallas, Brandon Fields of DeSoto likes complementing his smokes with Knob Creek. “The spirits that have the most age pair well,” he says as he and friends share a bottle at Cigar Art, in Oak Cliff’s Bishop Arts District. “They have different characters, like oak, dark plum, or chocolate or coffee. It’s almost parallel to what the cigar rollers are trying to show you.”

Cigar Art managing partner Russell Hargraves says it’s similar to how you might pair wines – for instance, not expecting a Riesling or Pinot Grigio to hold up against a big, bold Maduro or Jericho Hill cigar. “With some cigars, whiskey cocktails aren’t a terrible choice,” Hargraves says. “Like a Sazerac, or an Old Fashioned.”

While cigar smokers have long complemented their smoky puffs with solid pours, typically from bottles of Scotch and cognac, aged tequilas and rums are coming into their own, too. The goal is to bring out the flavors and character of each, by complement or contrast. Detore suggests aiming to complement your cigar first, and then, as you learn how each works with the other, to go for more complex, contrasting pairings.

Cigar Art

Silva, the “Cigar Vixen,” says you have to decide what you want from the experience. Do you want the cigar, or the spirit, to stand out? Once she decides, her approach is to start smoking the cigar, and then to introduce the spirit, typically aged rum, about a third of the way in. “Zacapa 23 goes with just about any cigar on the market,” she says. “It especially goes well with a Maduro.

“You’re creating a memory, an experience,” she says. “It’s becoming more popular, especially for people who aren’t necessarily that into cigars.”

With a low barrier to entry, it’s also a trend that doesn’t appear ready to go up in smoke anytime soon. “You can pick up a cigar for five or six bucks,” Pullo says. “It’s cheaper than a movie ticket. And, it lasts longer than the flick.”

Barmoire, Bars, Cocktails and cinema, Downtown, Fashion and style

Talkin’ ’bout the Midnight Rambler, Dallas’ ambitious new cocktail arrival

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Dallas cocktails
Everything is illuminated: The new gem in Dallas’ cocktail scene.

With a month gone by since the jewel that is Midnight Rambler beamed into downtown, it’s hard to believe it was barely a year ago that the Dallas cocktail scene seemed lost in free-fall… To recap: Everything was going just fine – better than fine, actually, with two notable spots, Bar Smyth and The Cedars Social, getting national acclaim, and then – Bam! Both places were suddenly gut-punched with the overnight departure of Michael Martensen and his top-notch bartending posse. Meanwhile, Eddie “Lucky” Campbell, an equally well-known luminary behind the stick, was still bouncing around after leaving the failed Chesterfield downtown. Sure, both said they had projects in the works, but DELAYS. The imbiberati were verklempt.

Dallas cocktails
More of these? Okay then.

Then, on one night in August, everything was illuminated: Parliament, Campbell’s carefully polished Uptown gem, and Proof + Pantry, Martensen’s much anticipated Arts District venture, opened on the same night with his crafty little bartenders all in a row. This fall, The Bourbon Review named The Standard Pour among its top 60 bourbon bars in America.

Dallas’ cocktail mojo is flowing again, and Midnight Rambler immediately joins the dean’s list – a gorgeous space in the Joule Hotel that reveals itself in holy-moly fashion the moment you plunge into its subterranean home. From the pincushion lighting to the art-deco styling to the arcing, inverted hull of a ceiling with its sleek wooden beams, it’s if you’ve walked into…. New York. Which is no surprise, given the Big Apple origins of owners Chad Solomon and Christy Pope, whose New York-based beverage consulting firm, Cuffs & Buttons, has put its stamp on bars and hotels around the world.

Midnight Rambler has an art deco, midcentury-modern aesthetic that Solomon ascribes to David Lynch’s Silencio space in Paris and the hotel bar in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, minus Lloyd the bartender. Strategically placed curtains hide or reveal adjoining space based on volume, intending a sense of intimacy no matter what the crowd. The punch bowl display is a bling-y touch.

Dallas cocktails
Part of Midnight Rambler’s solid cocktail lineup.

This is what he and Pope have had in mind since – well, since those dark days of last autumn, but as already noted, these things take time. The wait has been worth it. “It’s pretty much exactly how we envisioned it,” Solomon said a few days before a glorious preopening-night party whose guest list included Manhattan mixology legends Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club and Cuffs & Buttons partner Sasha Petraske of Milk & Honey (where Pope and Solomon once tended bar).

The lineup of thoughtfully conceived libations is ladled out by a relatively fresh crew of bartenders whom Solomon and Pope have molded to their well-honed specifications. Labeled vials of premixed cocktail portions sit on the backbar, awaiting call to duty: It’s all about efficiency and consistency, and save for the ample canon of classics with which humankind is blessed, few variations occur off-menu, which is okay-fine because it’s muy excelente. (Being at the Joule, it’s also pricy, with drinks ranging from $12-$15.) Creative, daring and amply sized, it features the orange-y, bourbon-based Soul Clap, the tart, poblano-kissed Wang Dang Dula and the clever Savory Hunter, whose lemongrass- and kaffir-lime infused gin, mixed with coconut and lime evoke the flavors of a delicious Thai tom kha gai soup. There’s a selection of group-friendly punches and a playful trio of shots, including a pho-themed one that incorporates beef stock.

Dallas cocktails
The bar’s midcentury modern aesthetic is “pretty much exactly how we envisioned it,” co-owner Chad Solomon says.

Midnight Rambler is also notable for what you don’t see: A backroom “lab” with nifty toys like refractometers, an evaporative still and a centrifuge, all employed in the making of cocktail ingredients. “We call it a lab, but we’re not back there experimenting all the time,” Solomon says. “It’s more like a flavor house. It’s our own dedicated flavor house.” Many drinks also include a touch of mineral saline – a bit of salt that as in food enhances and brings out other flavors; two drops is all it takes.

Nibbles come from CBD Provisions, up on the main level of The Joule – including charcuterie, a tilefish dip (the fish is smoked on the hotel rooftop), black-eyed pea hummus and a knockout burger. Fries are served in a Moscow Mule mug.

Despite the intense structure and pre-planning, the occasional drink can falter: The Sound System, for instance, which I initially loved for its bold and effective use of super-funky Hamilton pot-still rum, turns out to be fickle; inadequately stirred on a later visit, it was too heavy on the rum’s overripe banana flavor. The pre-prepared vials behind the bar can also visually take some of the appeal out of having your drink prepared to order; they’re more appreciated on a busy weekend night. About the only real minus for Midnight Rambler might be its location in the Joule, whose owner, Tim Headington, has enraged preservation architects with a record of destroying historic buildings, including the recent razing of two century-old structures across the street from the hotel, as noted in a scathing column by Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster in September. Likewise, those who support historic preservation efforts may want to consider whether they want to patronize the businesses within.

Midnight Rambler
The Savory Hunter: Refreshingly recalling your favorite Thai restaurant.

Otherwise, Midnight Rambler is a welcome and needed addition to the DFW cocktail scene. Solomon and Pope had initially considered Austin until the Joule opportunity fell into their laps; they’re now settled in Bishop Arts and have hatched something ambitious, adventurous and more glamorous than any serious cocktail bar Dallas has seen.

“It’s just another layer on top of what’s already here,” Solomon says. “This is next level. We are standing shoulder to shoulder with the best in Chicago and New York. But we’re here.”

Events, Fashion and style, Horses, Theme parties

Fancy clothes, fancy dranks: Sissy’s’ annual Derby party rides again

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Sissy's Southern Kitchen
If you can’t make it to Churchill Downs, there’s always Sissy’s.

For those of you who like to drink in costume, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Barely a few days have gone by since we told you about History With A Twist, the Prohibition-Era vintage-cocktail-station benefit hitting Dallas Heritage Village later this month.

Now, on Saturday, May 3, comes Sissy’s Southern Kitchen’s third annual Jockeys and Juleps party, where you and your sophisticated self can sip $8 Mint Juleps while watching the horses run the track onscreen at the venerable Kentucky Derby.

Churchill Downs fashion is encouraged, and a $200 prize awaits the house’s best outfit. If this all sounds to you like a winning place to show (see what we did there?), grab your gaudy hats, your bow ties and blazers; settle your sockless feet into those horsebit loafers and join Sissy’s from 3 to 6 p.m. for the big race and all its pre- and post-hoopla.

The day’s drink specials – starting with brunch at 11 a.m. – will also include a Grapefruit Julep, Kentucky Punch and Presbyterian Bourbon Press. Reservations are available.

SISSY’S SOUTHERN KITCHEN & BAR, 2929 Henderson Ave., Dallas. 214-827-9900.

Charity, Events, Fashion and style, Nostalgia, Theme parties

Drinking in the style of yesteryear: Get your glad rags on for a cause

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Benefit party
Picture yourself walking around here with a cocktail in your early 20th-century best. (Courtesy of Dallas Heritage Village)

So. You’ve been looking to unleash your inner Bonnie or Clyde. Minus the bank robberies, and especially minus the fatal ambush. Really, it’s about the threads. And the giggle juice.

Well, now’s your chance, pal: History With a Twist is returning to Dallas Heritage Village on April 26. Be a wisehead and get over there.

The second annual event celebrates classic American cocktails and the style of the Prohibition Era. Vintage early 20th-century fashion is encouraged, so break out your jazz suits, your cloche hats and your fedoras, and take a stroll down the village’s throwback Main Street while tipping a few fancydranks from big-cheese bartenders Michael Martensen and Brian McCullough.

Hors d’oeuvres will be on hand, as will tunes from the Singapore Slingers, a small orchestra specializing in pre-swing American dance music. I’ve never heard them, but they sound swell. Also expect a silent auction, photo booth and vintage car show.

Tickets – available here – are $75 or $125 a couple, with proceeds benefiting the village’s historical education activities. The event runs from 7 to 11 p.m. It’s going to be hotsy-totsy.

DALLAS HERITAGE VILLAGE, 1515 S. Harwood, Dallas. 214-421-5141.