Adventures in cocktailing, based in Dallas USA -- drinking globally, acting locally. Barmoire is Marc Ramirez -- journalist, boulevardier, lover of food and drink and winner of exactly one cocktail contest.
The Hudson Whiskey collection. (Photo courtesy of Hudson Whiskey)
In the category of Why Doesn’t This Happen More Often, cocktail-paired dinners is one of the top things on my list. I’ve attended several over the last two years, which for the same time period is fewer times than I’ve been to the dentist, or dropped everything to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on cable, and that’s just wrong.
Well, here comes Whiskey Cake to right the ship. On Monday, Oct. 28, the Plano restaurant and cocktail joint will host Carve and Craft, a five-course dinner highlighted by cocktails featuring the very excellent Hudson Whiskey collection. If you know nothing about Hudson, that’s not a problem: Gable Erenzo, the company’s owner, distiller and brand ambassador, will be on hand to fill in the blanks.
If you know nothing about Whiskey Cake, that’s an issue. The place emerged onto the scene about two years ago and was one of the Dallas-Fort Worth area’s original craft cocktail bars. Its beverage program, still under the able leadership of Sean Conner, mirrors Whiskey Cake’s self-proclaimed “farm-to-kitchen” philosophy, with drinks incorporating items from the restaurant’s adjoining garden.
Plano’s Whiskey Cake, getting down with whiskey on Oct. 28. (Photo courtesy of Whiskey Cake)
From the looks of it, this dinner will not suck. (A menu preview is below.) The best part is, it’s only 35 bucks.
Capacity is limited to 60 and remaining availability is very limited. Call the restaurant to make a reservation, but if you don’t catch this one, there’s more good news: This won’t be your last chance. “We do dinners like this pretty much quarterly,” says Whiskey Cake’s marketing director Katie Allen.
The best way to keep tabs on the action, she says, is to follow the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Here’s an abbreviated version of the menu for the Oct. 28 dinner, which gets underway at 7 pm:
Course One: Hudson New York Corn
Charred octopus with green olive, chorizo, marble potato, and salsa verde
Course Two: Hudson Baby Bourbon
Cold smoked BBQ tuna ribs with marinated watermelon and jalapeno mint vinaigrette
Course Three: Hudson Four Grain Bourbon
Dry-aged sirloin, iceberg lettuce, vintage Irish cheddar, onion marmalade, 1000 island, 3 inch brioche bun
Course Four: Hudson Single Malt
Local sheep’s milk ricotta agnolotti with duck pancetta, black trumpet mushrooms, and horseradish on marrow bones
Course Five: Hudson Manhattan Rye
Cardamom doughnuts with roasted banana, sea salt pastry cream, and maple rye
Let’s do the Time Warp again: Tonight, Smyth revives the Rainbow Room of 1980s NYC.
The craft-cocktail revival is in full swing, with its attention to classic recipes, seasonal ingredients and fresh-squeezed juices. If there’s one man you could credit for relaunching the mixology movement, it’s Dale DeGroff, who presided over New York City’s Rainbow Room starting in the late 1980s.
Tonight, Dallas’ Smyth will honor “King Cocktail” — now author, consultant and founder of New Orleans’ Museum of the American Cocktail — by recreating one of his original Rainbow Room menus for the evening. From the Derby cocktail to the Orange Breeze, you’ll have a chance to be transported back in time, and if Smyth’s Ryan Sumner has his way, 1980s tunes will be on the playlist will help you get there. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean any Huey Lewis and the News.
Don’t forget to make — and keep — your reservations.
SMYTH, 4513 Travis Street, Dallas. 214-520-0900
Craft-cocktail drinkers: You owe this man. The great Dale DeGroff, throwing down at Tales of the Cocktail 2012.
This apple-walnut Old Fashioned earned 2nd-place honors.
“We’re kind of scrunched for space, but I’m doing the best I can,” Ryan Sumner said as he kicked off the Clyde May’s Whiskey Old-Fashioned competition at The People’s Last Stand with a version featuring apple bitters, demerara syrup and the French bitter Suze.
Consider this post Old-Fashionably late: It’s been a couple of weeks since 16 bartenders vied for the top prize of $500, each with up to six minutes to make and present their drink for the judges. Clyde May’s was the vehicle here, an apple-ish, bordering-on-caustic whiskey with some colorful moonshine roots, and each contestant spun a different version of the cocktail stalwart while adhering to its traditional mix of whiskey, sweetener, bitters and water.
Chase Streitz of Sissy’s Southern Kitchen, serving up his twist on the classic cocktail.
Cinnamon, vanilla, peach and, of course, apple were popular flavors. One of my favorite versions came from Greg Matthews of Oak Cliff’s Ten Bells Tavern, who froze Mudsmith Coffee’s steeped coffee into cubes and punctuated his whiskey concoction with a vanilla sugar made with Mexican vanilla beans, hazelnut bitters and a vanilla/hazelnut garnish.
The vanilla-accented version from Ten Bells’ Greg Matthews featured coffee ice cubes.
La Duni’s Daniel Guillen shone, too, gussying up his Old Fashioned with sherry, Campari and a roasted red pepper and pecan jam. And Smyth’s Charlie Tips Ferrin, like his compatriot Sumner, served his summery green apple/walnut drink in little mason jars – “in the spirit of the moonshine that it came from,” he said.
Ryan Fussell of Ruth’s Chris Steak House prepares his drink’s fig garnish.
Brad Bowden of The People’s Last Stand infused his whiskey with smoked peaches, while Ryan Fussell of Ruth’s Chris Steak House strived to use ingredients that would have been available in the 1800s, when the classic cocktail was born. He topped it with a warm fig garnish. (“Figs are badass,” pronounced photographer Mary Szefcyk, clearly impressed with the choice.)
Brad Bowden of The People’s Last Stand infused whiskey with smoked peaches for his entry.
In the end it was Smyth’s Omar YeeFoon who walked away with top honors, flavoring his version with Plantation 5-year-old rum, Angostura and tiki bitters, cane syrup and a light dash of orange oils. With Ferrin placing second and Sumner taking third, it was a Smyth sweep, which if nothing else proved the speakeasy boys could come through in scrunch time.
Smyth’s Omar YeeFoon with the double-stir on his way to the evening’s top honors.
And if you’d like to see Smyth’s Ryan Sumner explain the method behind his Old Fashioned twist, here’s a link to my YouTube video:
Abacus’ Blackberry Smash is among the acclaimed restaurant’s new bar offerings.
AND JUST LIKE THAT, sweet things are already happening behind the bar at Abacus, the five-star fancypants restaurant that has long wowed critics with its Pacific Rim cuisine. The recent addition of bartender-slash-apothecary Lucky Campbell to its staff of able libationists was a sign that the Knox-Henderson landmark was ready to boost its bar program too.
Hint one that change is afoot: The barrel flanking one end of the swanky bar’s bottle stash. Mid-afternoon last Friday, that barrel was filled with Old Fashioneds and presumably destined to age, but by 10 p.m. Campbell was already positing that the bar had sold more Old Fashioneds in one night than in the past two months. By weekend’s end, he said, the barrel was nearly empty.
This is Abacus, people. Wine, Martinis and Champagne cocktails are the rule, right?
But witness the new, Asian-flavored menu (priced from $12-$14), set to roll out today: A deliciously gorgeous Blackberry Smash made with Maker’s Mark bourbon. A Brandy Stinger featuring Tempus Fugit’s top-notch crème de menthe. And preparing to float lava-lamp-style in the extremely dry, Champagne-driven Femme Fatale: pearls of effing Violette.
That’s right: little spheres of lavender-y Creme de Violette, one of Campbell’s lab projects. A jasmine-tea cordial and five-spice tincture are already bubbling in a back room, and even the Martini menu has been primped, with one knockout version offering Islay-Scotch-and-cracked-pepper blue cheese olives, stuffed in-house.
Said bartender Jordan Gantenbein: “I’ve been waiting three years to do this.”
The sensibilities that guide Abacus’ renowned kitchen are seeping into the dimly lit bar. So it wasn’t surprising to find Chef de Cuisine Daniel Burr himself on a stool late one night, helping the black-clad bar samurai as they brainstormed an Asian-themed Margarita variation and suggesting matcha green tea powder as a component.
There are some real curiosities on the new menu, like the clever Banksy with “spray-paint spices,” a Yuzu Collins with Bing Cherry soda and the “Ninja Rita,” with its foam of Togarashi, a Japanese spice powder.
Abacus is having some fun now. This is a place worth keeping an eye on.
Abacus’ grapefruity Rio Star is one of the standouts on its redone cocktail menu.
Central 214’s red-sorrel-accented Last Monkey Standing, one of last week’s cocktail bus tour highlights. (Marc Ramirez)
“There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody…. You’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place — then it won’t make a damn.”
Ken Kesey, as quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
***
So, here’s how things went on Dallas’ first-ever cocktail bus tour: Festively. By 7:05, two dozen imbibers were on the bus, a dazzling white coach and our carriage for the evening. Already, at The People’s Last Stand at Mockingbird Station, the evening’s initial libation had been sampled, some flouncy red thing with gin and Campari and watermelon and rhubarb liqueur.
For $60 apiece, the inaugural “chartered bus tour of some serious libations” would ferry us to six craft-cocktail bars from Uptown to Cedars to Deep Ellum. As you might expect, the evening’s mood was progressively buoyant; few cared that the excursion was less an actual “tour” than a series of stops via luxury taxi.
For one glorious moment, Tate’s Dallas’ Robbie Christian was on the bus — and then he was not. (Marc Ramirez)
It was a group primed for fun, but not one of people looking to fog up their night in clouds of vodka and Red Bull. Those on board were willing to be led down new paths — believers in, or at least curious about, the concept of craft cocktails with their artisan ingredients, fresh-squeezed juices and creative depths. As former Private/Social barman Rocco Milano once described an evening of imbibement to local cocktail enthusiast Manny Mendoza, who’s working on a documentary about the Dallas cocktail scene: “You’re going to be inebriated at the end of the night. The difference is in how you get there.”
Wise words indeed. But to get there you had to be on the bus, and so we were. The idea was to showcase Dallas’ craft-cocktail diversity; not everyone had been to all six spots and certainly not all in one night. First came the Palomar Hotel’s Central 214, where we enjoyed bartender Amber West’s Last Monkey Standing – a bouquet of Monkey Shoulder blended scotch, Lillet Rose, chamomile, lemongrass syrup, lemon and a touch of red sorrel from Tom Spicer’s gardens.
Cocktail fan Manny Mendoza enjoys the Last Monkey Standing at tour stop No. 2, Central 214 (Marc Ramirez)
Then, back on the bus. “Everybody here?” asked tour host and mastermind Alex Fletcher, general manager at The People’s Last Stand. Hmmm. He paused. “OK,” he said, “if you’re not here, raise your hands!”
Havoc.
At Uptown’s The Standard Pour we encountered the Mexican Standoff – a tequila-and-mezcal concoction from Pozo, TSP’s sister-establishment next door and one of my favorite tastes of the night – before hoofing it down the street to Tate’s, tour stop No. 4.
Standard Pour’s Brian McCullough, cranking out Mexican Standoffs. (Marc Ramirez)
Levity ruled the occasion, thankfully never descending into sloppiness. “I’m surprised at how calm everybody is,” said tour co-host Brad Bowden, also of The People’s Last Stand. “I thought there’d be a lot of drunk people walking around.”
The bars themselves, too, performed admirably, firing up twenty-something drinks in quick fashion and keeping us on schedule, and somehow the bus we managed to collect a bartender or two, as well as CraveDFW’s Steven Doyle, along the way.
At Stop No. 4, tour-goers had a choice — a basil gimlet or this bit of Scotch beauty. (Marc Ramirez)
After Deep Ellum’s divey Black Swan came the pioneering Cedars Social south of downtown, where bartender Julian Pagan wowed with his tiki-esque Yacht Rock: “It’s Sailor Jerry rum, Velvet Falernum, cinnamon syrup, lime, and… yeah.” Yeah!
The Cedars Social’s Yacht Rock cocktail. (Marc Ramirez)
By the time the call came to head back to The People’s Last Stand for a nightcap and munchies, we were having trouble corralling even our hosts. Personally, I’d love to see more tour-like features in something like this – more info about the bars we visited, for instance, or the Dallas scene itself, but all in all, it had been a good night. Fletcher figured he’d be lucky to break even with the trial-run event; it was more about getting people out of their cocktail comfort zones.
And that was just fine with Calissa Gentry, a Cedars Social regular who’d taken the tour with friends Elaine Lagow and Genevieve Neyens. “We usually like vodka on the rocks,” she said. “But because we go to Cedars, we try new things.”
Trying new things was the reason Lagow was on the tour, too. “I’d do it again in a minute,” she said.
“By the way, guys, great idea,” said bartender Danno O’Keefe. “I hate you, because I didn’t think of it first.” (Marc Ramirez)
At night’s end, smooches: Genevieve Neyens bids pal Elaine Lagow farewell. (Marc Ramirez)Central 214’s bartender extraordinaire Amber West hopped aboard the tour at Stop No. 2. (Manny Mendoza)
Not for the thrifty: Only 50 of these bottles are available worldwide.
When you’ve got an extra $1,500 bumping out of your pants pocket, it’s always nice to consider buying a new suit, or paying off the loan sharks, or maybe taking that long-threatened trip to Buenos Aires. Now, life has suddenly become more complicated: Glenfiddich is offering tastes of its 50 Year Old Single Malt Whisky (and more) for $1,500 a pop.
Only 50 bottles of the precious, half-century-old elixir are available worldwide, so don’t be thinking you’re just going to run down to your local Goody Goody and grab one off the shelves. (Besides, just one of these limited-edition bottles runs between $25,000 and $27,000.)
Instead, consider this exclusive tasting. And then mark your calendars for Wednesday, Sept. 4, and head down to San Antonio’s hidden-away, whiskey-rich Bar 1919. The 7 p.m. event will also feature a five-course meal from Stefan Bowers, executive chef at nearby Feast (where, by the way, I recently had the pleasure of having the best breakfast sandwich ever), and a sampling of other collectible single malts like the Glenfiddich 30 Year Old and 1974 Vintage.
“This whisky is the jewel in Glenfiddich’s crown and amongst the most valuable whiskies ever released,” says Glenfiddich ambassador David Allardice, who will host the event.
The taste is described as initially sweet with a zesty orange marmalade and vanilla toffee, followed by a series of layers: aromatic herbs, floral and soft fruits, oak tannin and hints of smoke. Being a man of modest means, I will have to take their word for it, but those of you equipped to take this plunge will (purportedly) experience an exceptionally long finish with a touch of dry oak and a trace of peat. Zesty, oaky, smoky, fruity, peaty: There’s $1,500 worth of adjectives going on here, my fancy friends.
Bar 1919 is located in a lower level of the Blue Star Arts Complex at 1420 South Alamo, Suite 001, San Antonio. Attendance is limited, and reservations can be made at (210) 227-1420.
The event invite: If you go, I demand a full report.
These cocktail bars. They’re all over Dallas. But odds are you’ve never hit six of them in one night. What if there was… a cocktail tour bus? Why doesn’t somebody make one of those?
Well, now someone has. The enrichment gets rolling at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 22, and for that you can thank general manager Alex Fletcher of The People’s Last Stand. “Cocktail culture has grown here at such a rapid pace,” he says. “We’ve all solidified our businesses, we have extremely high-end ingredients…. It’s time to show that off a little bit.”
In addition to the Mockingbird Station second-floor lounge, the estimated six-hour, “chartered bus tour of some serious libations” will make stops at nearby Central 214, Uptown’s Standard Pour and Tate’s, and further south, The Cedars Social and Black Swan Saloon.
Price is $60 and includes a cocktail at each stop, which despite the lack of cookies is a deal not even DART can beat. It’s also a chance to get people out of their cocktail comfort zones, both culinarily and geographically speaking. “A lot of people who come (to People’s Last Stand) never go to Black Swan, and vice versa,” Fletcher says. “And a lot of people probably haven’t been to all six of them, so why not get a handful and take everybody out for a night?”
Capacity will be limited to 40, because who wants to be the bus that shows up to a bar on Thursday night with 100 people all wanting drinks at the same time? No, you don’t want to be that bus. “We’re trying not to throw anybody in the weeds,” Fletcher says.
Good call.
To reserve your seat or for more information, call 263-5380 or email plsdallas@gmail.com.
Lucky Campbell: Now making your drank amid some swank. (Sheila Abbott)
Don’t look now, but The Man in the Fedora is on the move again. And apparently, so is his fedora. After five months at Uptown’s Standard Pour, Lucky Campbell has taken his crafty talents to The Bar at Abacus, the five-star Kent Rathbun restaurant in Knox-Henderson.
It’s a significant move for the elegant, Pacific-Rim-themed restaurant, which is looking to ramp up its bar program as Dallas cocktail culture continues its rapid maturation beyond hipster bar territory. “We’ve always had a great wine program, but we wanted to give a little more attention to our mixology and cocktails,” says Abacus manager Robert Hall.
It’s also a big step for the gifted, gravelly-voiced Campbell, who’s swapped his trademark fedora for the clean-cut, all-black duds of the Abacus bar corps. Though that might sound a bit like Superman doffing his cape, Campbell was giddy in his third day on the job, riotous hair tamed back into a ponytail as he roamed his posh, dimly lit new surroundings Saturday night like a youthful Steven Seagal.
“I’ve never worked with a kitchen of this caliber,” he says. “It’s good to be around people who understand what you want to do.”
Campbell’s latest creative venue is a whole new environment for the freewheeling bartender. (Marc Ramirez)
Campbell, whose resume includes the Mansion at Turtle Creek, Bolsa and the ill-fated Chesterfield, is now flexing his frenetic, creative energies alongside barmen Jason Long and Jordan Gantenbein, and he hopes to eventually have some influence on Abacus’ evolving drink menu and bottle selection, which typically trends toward martini spins and classic variations.
The kitchen, he says, has a Zen feel to it, a sort of flowing, if regimented, rhythm that the bar staff hope to instill as well. That means more efficient use of space and time. It could also mean barrel-aged cocktails. “Nobody here is waiting for a drink,” Campbell says.
“I miss my boys (at Standard Pour),” he says. “But I am loving the new gig.”
In a place where creativity is nourished, where the pastry chef and other staff are responsible for the gorgeous artwork gracing the walls, you get the sense that Lucky is feeling very lucky indeed.
Enhance your art appreciation with a cocktail like this. (Photo courtesy of the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art)
Cocktails, cocktails. They’re everywhere. Heck, even P.F. Chang’s has a pretty decent drink menu now. You might have thought museums were the one place that cocktails had missed, but you’d be wrong, because on Thursday, Aug. 15, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is offering an evening of fancy drinks, tasty bites and live music at its own Café Modern.
A solid slate of area bartenders will be on hand to create works that go not under glass but in your glass – from Fort Worth, Brad Hensarling of The Usual; and from Dallas, Mate Hartai of Libertine Bar and Bar Smyth, Emily Perkins of Victor Tango’s and Ten Bells Tavern’s Greg Matthews.
Their palette will consist of products from William Grant and Sons, including Hendrick’s Gin, Art in the Age, Reyka Vodka and Monkey Shoulder Whiskey. If you’d rather get your tipples from a punch bowl, you can try one of two cocktail punches made with Milagro Tequila or Solerno blood orange liqueur.
The museum has offered wine-based events in the past, but this time around, says district manager Sharon Whieldon of William Grant and Sons, “they were looking for something a little more engaging and cocktail-driven for their members.”
So maybe it’s not such a stretch, you know: Some cocktails are quite artful, and many are even classics.
Admission is $60, not including tax or tip. The event runs from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Make a reservation by calling the café at 817-840-2157.
Bartender Rocco Milano and the underground-garage system that once powered his cocktails on tap at the late P/S.
The Museum Tower mess still hasn’t abated, West Nile virus is on the loose again, and yet what everybody really wants to know is: What is Rocco Milano going to do now?
“That’s a popular question,” he says.
The former chief barman at the recently shuttered P/S, formerly Private|Social, is something of a geeky wizard behind the stick, the sort of gent who’d lead workshops about homemade infusions and bitters and then show up with a kiddie wagon full of exotic herbs and roots. At one point during the restaurant’s nearly two-year run, Rocco toyed with idea of adding a deconstructed Margarita to his alchemy, but now it is P/S that is suddenly deconstructed, its modern interior lifeless and marked by disarray.
Remnants of his apothecary dot the premises. Plastic containers of Grand Marnier “dust,” lemongrass syrup, jars of infusions, even the basement garage system that once powered his pioneering cocktails on tap. What’s going to become of it all? “Fuck if I know,” he says.
Some of Rocco’s stash of jarred infusions at last year’s Craft Cocktails TX festival.
One of the city’s finest craft-cocktail geniuses, the Santa Cruz-born redhead will not hurt for opportunity; nearly a dozen job offers were dangled, he says, the very day (July 20) an online item appeared offering rumor of P/S’ demise that night. Mostly, he says, he was concerned for his team, the U2 to his bartending Bono and the collective engine that made the restaurant’s top-notch bar program go. But the place never really recovered from the change in identity that followed chef Tiffany Derry’s departure.
“For better or worse, people had an idea what P/S was,” he says. “And for some people, when Tiffany left, P/S stopped being P/S.“
I’m sad to say that I was among that crowd. Though I didn’t go back to P/S as often afterward, Rocco’s legerdemain with liquor never ceased to amaze, and he was just as eager to share cocktail backstories as he was to turn the uninitiated on to something new.
Rocco looking things over before his bitters/infusions session at CCTX 2012.
So what will he do now? The possibilities range. What does he want to do? “I love educating people about drinks and cocktails,” he says. Whether that’s behind the bar, or as a spirits representative, or in some corporate role – well, that remains to be seen.
But he’s a brand new father now, so as far as what he really wants to do, it’s to spend time with his newborn son. All those clichés, he says, about how much you love the little being who has suddenly and fantastically graced your life – yeah, he’s living them now. Being unemployed has its benefits.
Heading forward, it will be the first time in five years that he won’t be working with P/S sous chef (and one-time bartender) Matt Medling, who was a pastry chef at The Mansion at Turtle Creek when Rocco tended bar there. “He was a great resource,” Rocco says. “Most important, he did not stop me from grabbing cookies.”
He says one of P/S’ fans put it best just after the closure was announced on Medling’s Facebook page, saying the test of any good establishment was what endured in its wake. Because it was at Private/Social that Rocco met girlfriend Jessica Pech, who was a manager at the restaurant: What they now have together will reflect its legacy for years to come.
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
