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6 strategies to elevate cocktails while maintaining efficiency

Restaurants show their personality with drinks that are also easy on operations

Cocktails are serious business these days, but for bars and restaurants to capture their fair share of the market, they need to bring their A game.

Signature drinks, housemade syrups and fresh juice are now the cost of entry, as far as cocktail-savvy customers are concerned. Barrel-aged cocktails and housemade bitters are nice, but they’re too common to turn heads.

Instead of random new bells and whistles, many beverage directors are strategically figuring out which innovations catch customer attention and work best for operations.

Here are six approaches restaurants are taking behind the bar that leverage their strengths by expressing their distinct personalities while also allowing for operational efficiency.
 
The scientific approach

Drink-making could be considered an art form, but to make great drinks consistently, you need a standardized process. With the growing popularity of fresh and seasonal — and thus less consistent — ingredients, it makes sense for some operators to take a more scientific approach to their cocktails.

Photo: Thinkstock

Chef Riley Huddleston, like many chefs in recent years, has educated himself about the science behind culinary techniques. At his latest gig, at the LondonHouse Chicago, slated to open this spring, he’s taking on the dual role of executive chef and beverage manager, and he plans to bring the science of the kitchen to the bar.

In his previous job as chef of the Godfrey Hotel Chicago, he was also involved with cocktails, and used pH meters to measure acidity and refractometers to measure sugar levels of drinks.

“It’s pretty much using scientific methods, especially in a high-volume environment, to give customers a really consistent product,” Huddleston said.

For bubbly cocktails in kegs, he’ll make sure the pressure is right to ensure the best level of carbonation. For flat, kegged drinks with herbs in them, he’ll make sure the pressure is right to break their cell walls and release their essential oils into the cocktails, he said. For iced cocktails, he’ll minimize dilution by pouring them over flavored ice cubes.

Flavored ice cubes

For a number of years, bartenders have been freezing water in specific shapes and sizes so that ice cubes perform optimally in drinks. Now, some bartenders are also flavoring ice to slow the dilution of their creations, or to gradually change the flavor of cocktails as customers drink them.

Mojito
Mojito. Photo: Godfrey

Huddleston’s Mojito, for example, which he also made at the Godfrey, has ice cubes containing sugar and mint. He blanches mint in salted water for 30 seconds, squeezes the water out and blends the mint with simple syrup and water, “so it’s a nice vibrant green,” he said.

“When it’s being walked through the dining room, people are like, ‘Ooh, I want one of those.’ Plus, you don’t get the mint stuck in your teeth, which is always embarrassing in a group,” he added.

Bryan Schneider, bar director of seven-unit Quality Branded, the New York City-based company that was Fourth Wall Restaurants until this year, also plays with different ice cubes, which he said brings showmanship to large restaurants where customers are unlikely to be close enough to a bar to see their drinks made.

Schneider makes green jalapeño ice cubes by juicing the peppers, adding water and pouring them into square ice cube molds. Schneider said they’re great for tequila-based drinks, and they gradually increase the spiciness of the drinks as the alcohol is diluted.

At Quality Italian, which has locations in New York and Miami, and one to open soon in Denver, he makes a Tricolore Margarita with red, white and green ice cubes made with strawberry purée, jalapeños and Cointreau. Cointreau gets cloudy when water is added to it and turns white when it’s frozen.

For his Transfusion cocktail, made with ginger ale, vodka and grape juice, he adds grape ice cubes.

“You’re bringing that showmanship and visual element that you might lose by not seeing things happen at the bar,” he said.

Kegged cocktail strategies

(Continued from page 1)
 
Batching cocktails in advance in kegs can be a useful approach for high-volume restaurants, but some drinks lend themselves better to keg storage than others.

Quality Branded Manhattan Special. Photo: Quality Branded
Quality Branded Manhattan Special. Photo: Quality Branded

Quality Branded’s restaurants — Quality Meats, Quality Eats, Quality Italian, the New York Smith & Wollensky location, Maloney & Porcelli and the seasonally changing restaurant known over the course of the year as Park Avenue Winter, Park Avenue Spring, Park Avenue Summer and Park Avenue Autumn — are large establishments where batching cocktails in advance and dispensing them from kegs can be a great time-saver.
 
“The idea would be that you get a quick, easy cocktail that comes out of a beer tap,” Schneider said. “We have such high-volume restaurants, it’s a great way to streamline some very popular cocktails that the bartenders can get out very quickly.”

He uses small, five-gallon Corny kegs — about half the volume of standard beer kegs — that will last up to a week.

“You can mix your syrup, your booze, and usually dilute it with a little water to simulate the dilution from shaking or stirring, so it comes out ready to drink,” Schneider said.

But apart from being fast, kegs don’t really add anything to cocktails like a Negroni or a Manhattan.

“You’re not going to make it better by putting it on tap,” he said.

Carbonated cocktails, on the other hand, such as Bellinis or Moscow Mules, actually benefit from being carbonated in a keg.

“It comes out super fizzy and effervescent right out of the tap. Even the vodka gets carbonated,” Schneider said.

Bellinis and other fruity drinks are trickier because peach purée and citrus contain pulp, which gets stuck in the tap lines. The same holds true with drinks containing mint or other herbs.

Schneider solved that problem with Maloney & Porcelli’s Mojito by infusing the mint into the rum and mixing it with lime syrup.

“It’s basically like a minty lime soda on tap, with rum,” he said.

For Quality Italian’s Bellini on tap, he clarifies the peach purée by adding agar agar to it, freezing it, wrapping it in cheesecloth and letting it thaw.

“After you thaw it all of the solids will cling together,” he said.

Schneider calls the resulting drink a Crystal Bellini.

When it comes to citrus, an easier approach is to simply add citric acid, which has traditionally been used in sodas.

Leveraging the soda fountain

Premium and housemade sodas are themselves an important beverage trend, and one that lends itself to the bar program. After all, the most popular mixed drinks aren’t signature cocktails or even perennially popular margaritas, but spirit-plus-soda, such as rum and Coke or Jack (Daniels) and ginger (ale).

Silver restaurant in Bethesda, Md., the new, higher-end sister of 14-unit Silver Diner, has a robust housemade soda program. Beverage manager Quinn Wallis uses them on his cocktail menu.

In fact, that menu has an entire “Spiked Drinks” section that features the sodas thoughtfully laced with appropriate spirits. His tonic is mixed with gin, lemon and Becherovka — a Czech liqueur with flavors of baking spices — for a specialized gin-and-tonic. His ginger beer has bourbon and apricot brandy added to it.

Wallis uses other aspects of his soda fountain for cocktails, too. He has milk shake spinners with which he makes spiked shakes, and also froths the orange juice and pineapple juice for tiki cocktails. Milk shake spinners have traditionally been used in tiki bars for that purpose, he said.
 

Low-alcohol cocktails

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Between soda and full-blown cocktails are low-alcohol drinks, which are becoming increasingly popular. Often made with wine, sake or beer, they tend to pair well with food, which has always been important with wine but is playing a larger role in beer and cocktail consumption, too.

Customers like them because they can drink more than one of them and still keep their wits about them. Bar and restaurant operators like them because they can sell more than one to their customers without getting them drunk.

Also spurring their popularity is the growing number of ingredients bartenders have to work with. Sherry is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and more small-production vermouths are coming on stream, not to mention the craft beer explosion.

Hey Kyuri
Hey Kyuri. Photo: Pubbelly

At single-unit Pubbelly in Miami, mixologist Derek Stilmann has no choice but to make low-alcohol cocktails, since the restaurant only has a beer-and-wine license.
 
That doesn’t keep him from making an Old Fashioned, which is typically made with whiskey, but sometimes brandy, along with sugar, bitters and sometimes fruit.

Stilmann uses sake, which he first infuses with burnt cherry bark and then lets it age in a barrel for around two weeks.

“It’s kind of a solera system,” he said, which is the process, common in rum production, of adding younger liquor to older liquor to moderate the flavor. The result with the sake is that some of it has a richer, more aged flavor, but the freshness of the new sake also comes through.

He also uses unfiltered, cloudy, nigori sake, which adds texture to drinks such as the Hey Kyuri. It’s a bestseller made with nigori sake, as well as dry sake, Cocchi Americano, spicy bitters, ginger syrup, cucumber juice and lime juice. He pours the mixture in a highball glass with a spicy rim made with shichimi togarashi, cumin, cayenne pepper, black pepper, a little sugar and salt.

“It’s not too heavy, not too light, definitely has a good heat to it,” Stilmann said.

He also has a unique approach to ice cubes. For the Shogun Old Fashioned, made with the aged sake stirred with cinnamon syrup, low-alcohol bitters, burnt cinnamon and orange peel, he uses whiskey stones, which are rocks that have been super-chilled and added to cocktails instead of ice, keeping the drink cold without diluting it.
 
Room temperature cocktails
 
One way to simplify the process of deciding what kind of ice is best for a cocktail is not to use any at all.

Ice cubes aren’t an issue for some of Nick Bennett’s favorite drinks. Bennett, the head bartender at single-unit Porchlight in New York City, has started to make cocktails meant to be served at room temperature.

“Given how much concern is given to temperature and the type of ice that cocktails use, and the purity of ice, it’s fun to kind of remove that,” Bennett said.

One such drink is the Fireside Chat, made with Bols Genever, Becherovka, amaretto, walnut liqueur, a little water and an orange twist that’s squeezed and then discarded. He pours it in a brandy snifter.

“You give it a quick little swirl and it all mixes together,” he said.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

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