Have Your Pizza and Drink it Too
New York City bartenders are transforming snacks, apps, and entrées into dynamic drinks.
Bartenders these days are no strangers to the kitchen, diving into extensive prep on a daily basis to transform fresh products by way of infusion, clarification, cordial, shrub, or tincture. The crossover between bar and kitchen has made culinary technique a necessity for any boundary-pushing bartender. But in New York City, they are going beyond highlighting single flavor profiles or ingredients, instead recreating entire dishes in the glass—from flavor and aroma, to texture, proportion, and structure. Whether it’s snacks, appetizers, or entrées, here’s how a few bartenders are making a meal out of drinking.
Cold Pizza
At Double Chicken Please, an investor's love of cold pizza inspired Bartenders GN Chan and Faye Chen to turn margherita pizza into a tomato and cheese-laced margarita. To do so, they needed to carefully balance the savory flavors in an approachable way. “We really had to think about the best way to utilize each element,” says Chan. The duo started with the cheese, opting for an infusion of parmesan into a reposado tequila. For the basil, they added the herb to a lime cordial to back its bright aromatics with sugar. “You could use fresh [basil] or a distillate,” says Chan, “a cordial binds the flavors together nicely.” Next came the tomato, which they juiced and strained into pristine tomato water, and added an oolong tea-infused honey syrup to build depth and body.
The final step was to incorporate the crust. “Toast flavor is not easy to showcase,” explains Chan. “We tried different breads and different levels of toast until we decided to do an infusion.” They ended up adding deeply toasted brioche into the parmesan-infused tequila for an overnight infusion to pull out the subtle aroma and flavor of nutty, browned butter. Finished with an egg white, the Cold Pizza cocktail transforms the slice into a frothy, garden-fresh sip.
Major Tom
Bartender David Muhs claims to have a “mind mouth.” As he explains, “it’s when you’ve been tasting things for so long that you can taste them in your head as you put them together.” Muhs is an avid home cook who has traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia, so when a regular at Sama Street requested a Tom Kha-inspired cocktail, he was ready to deliver. He had just added a lemongrass shōchū to the backbar, so using that as a jumping off point to recreate the lemongrass-infused Thai coconut soup was “a no brainer.” Muhs splits the base with Bombay Sapphire East, a lemongrass and black pepper-forward gin, and also adds a lemongrass syrup. “If I really want to bring out a flavor, I use it in different components. There are three different versions of lemongrass in this cocktail to round out the flavor.” Coconut cream lays the foundation, and Muhs adds a simple ginger syrup to mimic the flavor of galangal, then ups the heat with a Thai chile tincture. To tackle the acid, lime was an obvious addition, but lacked the nuance Muhs was looking for, so he threw in a fish sauce pickled cherry tomato, shaking the fruit along with the rest of the ingredients. “It’s non-traditional, but often in America, you'll see cherry tomatoes in Tom Kha.” The tart tomato balances the Major Tom with subtle savory notes and bright acid, achieving the soup’s signature “sour umami.”
Moveable Feast
At Ci Siamo, Italian flavors drive the menu, so when tasked with creating an agave-based cocktail, Bartender Matt Chavez considered the entire dining experience. “Agave sells, but it needs to make sense,” he explains, “how can we relate this to Italian drinking culture?” For his Moveable Feast, Chavez first thought about what flavors play well with agave distillates—pepper, vegetal notes, and big fruits. His mind immediately went to an antipasti plate. To recreate the combination of cured meats, pickled vegetables, and fresh fruit in drink form, Chavez starts by juicing red bell peppers and adding a few dashes of white balsamic vinegar. He then adds a hit of Calabrian chile-infused amaro to build body and boost vegetal flavors. For the fruit component, Chavez went with a combination of apricot liqueur, lemon juice, and agave syrup. “It’s essentially a margarita riff,” Chavez says. He reaches for a reposado tequila instead of the usual blanco for more full, vanilla woodiness, and splits the base with mezcal for a savory smokiness that helps marry the ingredients together.
Ants on A Log
For Bartender Isabel Tulloch, a bottle of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey inspired her Ants on a Log cocktail at The HiHi Room. “One of the bartenders suggested it in passing,” she says. “It quickly became a total challenge for the whole team.” To capture the three-ingredient snack in a drink, the biggest question was how to translate the flavor of raisins and celery while mellowing out the rich, nutty whiskey. “We tried a couple of things: infusing celery seed, removing the raisin, and muddling celery. It turned out to be a combination of all three.” Tulloch settled on a sous vide infusion of raisins and celery seed into the whiskey, with some fresh celery muddled into the cocktail to order. The infused whiskey is cut with bourbon to tame the nuttiness and sweetness, and Tulloch adds a hit of Cocchi Dopo Teatro to amplify the dried fruit notes along with lemon juice to boost the flavors with acid. Topped with Topo Chico for bubbles and a touch of salt, the cocktail comes together refreshingly bright, creamy, and nutty. “It looks a little kitschy but is really sophisticated,” says Tulloch. “It’s nostalgic. I wanted a menu that made people happy and to be able to reminisce on the good times in our lives.”
Snap Judgement
When snap peas came into season, Bartender Cameron Winkelman recalled a recipe of fluke, snap peas, and chamomile he had seen in the Eleven Madison Park cookbook, and wanted to recreate it as a cocktail at Manhatta. In addition to having accurate flavor representation, he wanted the drink to be refreshing, approachable, and efficient for service. “It was about understanding how the flavors in that dish could translate most easily into liquid,” he says. “The snap peas took a little trial and error; the juice was too bitter on its own.” Instead, Winkelman infused the snap peas into a blanco tequila which, along with a chamomile and warm spice-infused coconut water, became the base for a milk punch. He combines the coconut water, tequila, cantaloupe juice, and lemon juice with soy milk, letting the mixture meld before clarifying and bottling it for service. With prep out of the way, the cocktail comes together in a two bottle pickup—the punch gets topped with tonic and garnished with a snap pea with cantaloupe gel. “There is a ton of flavor packed into the cocktail, but it’s still really quick,” says Winkelman, “at its essence it’s a tequila tonic.”
