At Season’s Beckon
Planning a seasonal change to a cocktail menu is very much like planning a Dinner Party: you consider the expected guests, the availability of seasonal ingredients, what you already have on hand, and what you might use in more than one way to avoid waste.
You start by knowing your audience. There was a rather niche cocktail idea I was excited about working on a few years ago, and my friend for whom I then worked for paused and then suggested that it was, perhaps, “a little too much for Evanston.”
Luckily, in a downtown bar, the constraints are more more related to seasonal availability of ingredients, their price, and how they play together.
A cherry blossom and gin cocktail I created for our Spring menu elicited far more interest than I’d ever expected, whereas a richly flavored, but perhaps more Fall-appropriate, take on an old-fashioned became more of a connoisseur’s choice. It’s started to dramatically pick up in sales this Fall.
You absolutely never know exactly what will spark interest, and unbeknownst to the layman, past inadvisable liquor buying inspires the ingredients of a great number of cocktails, and can sometimes produce enduring customer favorites. What a bartender concocted from a surplus of Crown Royal Black led to one of the most-ordered cocktails at Chicago’s late Boardinghouse, and when I was the beverage director at Table Fifty-Two, bottles previously gathering dust provided the inspiration for a number of specialty cocktails for the holidays. If something doesn’t appeal on its own, you just need to consider how you might make it appealing. (a tip: vanilla beans soften and lengthen the taste of Malort). After all, a lot of good creativity can come out of working with what you have.
So while many seasonal menus may be trying to move a flavored vodka or too large order of Maker’s Mark, there’s also a great deal of room for creativity within seasonality, the existing cocktail canon, and of course, nostalgia and imagination!
I like my drinks to have a narrative. Both non-alcoholic cocktails I came up with this Summer were named after favorite women in my life—one inspired by my Aunt’s cranberry bread, the other inspired by a spirit-free cocktail my friend of two decades created when we worked together up the street. My take on the old-fashioned is named after my friend’s grandfather, with the root beer bitters in it referencing his success in the root beer business in Chicago in the sixties and seventies.
The cherry blossom cocktail was inspired by a Koto performance in honor of their first bloom in Japan by master musician Asuka at the start of the cherry blossom season a few years back. (This is her Koto version of “Get Ur Freak On:
As a friend recently pointed out, seasonality isn’t everything—people still seek a refreshing cocktail in the Fall or Winter and it doesn’t need to be all about apples, brown spirits, hot beverages and baking spice. There’s room on the page for variety, and variety is good.
If you’re not a bar whose theme is single spirit focused, Scofflaw in Logan Square, Chicago is a good example of one that is (scofflawchicago.com), you always want to invite the vodka, tequila and mezcal drinkers to the party as well, not just the gin, rye and bourbon enthusiasts.
And if you don’t have a mezcal cocktail on your list cocktail right now, you should! Tequila and Mezcal mix beautifully with almost anything, while retaining their rich character.
For this Fall, I’m combining clove-smoked, steel cut oat-infused tequila with lemon juice and a java plum and cassia cinnamon syrup. If you have a good smoking gun and a heavy duty butane torch you can set almost any dried woody spices on fire (plus it’s fun)! Oats suggested back to school for me, and they also seem to be having a moment on the Starbucks menu. Plum suggested itself due to the ongoing popularity of Marian Burros’ “Plum Torte,” which has republished in the New York Times every September since 1983. (https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/3783-original-plum-torte?smid=ck-recipe-iOS-share)
A well-curated cocktail menu can make a nod to seasonality without being too obvious about it. For instance, this Fall, a friend is debuting a pear-infused vodka cocktail with orange, coffee and cinnamon that finds its inspiration in the experience of enjoying churros in Fall, drawing on his personal experience of the season.
Generally, I find that most interesting bars or bartenders either deconstruct and reconstruct classic cocktails, none more skillfully than Dale DeGroff (
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-new-craft-of-the-cocktail-everything-you-need-to-know-to-think-like-a-master-mixologist-with-500-recipes-dale-degroff/13839770
), create cocktail nods to favorite foods the way Jeni Britton Bauer does with ice cream, the recently decorated Double Chicken, Please, NYC is the best example (doublechicken.com), or throw out the kitchen sink all together and go full exotic, Cantina OK in Sydney, Australia’s list is my favorite (https://www.okokok.com.au/)
While I tend to find inspiration in ingredients found in everything from cooking, baking and chocolate-making to perfumery, foraging and the Ayurvedic tradition, that experience of riffing through traditions is in the end about trying to balance novelty with good construction and some nod to classic flavor marriages.
While not many people in Chicago have enjoyed homemade cherry blossom syrup before, the combination of flavors in the cocktail recalls the perennial New England favorite, the Raspberry-Lime Rickey, which I first enjoyed as a teenager at Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Cambridge, MA. (https://www.mrbartley.com/).
To paraphrase Diana Vreeland “the palate needs to travel.”
And funnily enough, sometimes the exotic just costs less—hence the inclusion of java plum. The brightly colored powder I sourced was available in smaller quantities for less than a pound of plum powder would have cost from Chicago’s own endlessly delightful Rare Tea Company (http://rareteacellar.com)
The key ingredients are always seasonality, availability and most importantly, receptivity—the beginner’s mind revisiting the aesthetic touchstones of a palate developed over time.
Saul Bellow wrote about the virtues of being a great “noticer,” in his 1997 novella, “The Actual,” and keeping your spyglass as open as possible is critical to creativity.
There’s a whole world of flavor out there. You can find Buddha’s Hand and purple potato at Jewel now, but in the early 2000s when I started my Chicago food and wine odyssey at Charlie Trotter’s, those ingredients were unheard of. That restaurant’s pull towards a global palate inspired me, and conversely, subsequently working in the very specific milieu of Alsatian cuisine at Jean Joho’s Everest and American Southern at Table Fifty-Two, expanded my aesthetic understanding within more specific traditions.
My mother always had this quote hanging on our fridge from Scottish novelist Muriel Spark: “When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.”
Last Spring I was standing at the bus stop being battered by the Chicago wind that in March knives across Lake Shore Drive off of the lake, and was trying to think of an ingredient to add to a housemade cocoa butter rum liqueur that would either frame or season the chocolate creaminess, and suddenly I literally barked out from inside the bus shelter: “golden raisin!”
Golden raisin ended up going into an entirely different cocktail, but as the painter Viktor IV observed on canvas, “Process is development, development is growth, and it is always beginning.”