Boozehound - Jason Wilson [73]
2 ½ ounces pisco
1 ounce freshly squeezed Key lime juice
1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar
1 medium egg white
1 dash Angostura bitters, for garnish
Combine the pisco, lime juice, sugar, and egg white in a blender. Process for 30 seconds, until frothy. Add a handful of ice and process for 1 minute, then pour into a highball glass. Garnish with the dash of bitters atop the foam.
Adapted from a recipe by Eduardo Huaman Tito of the Hotel Mossone, Huacachina, Peru
VICEROY
Serves 1
This cocktail was originally created for Campo de Encanto acholado (or blended) pisco—the pisco whose development I witnessed on my trip to Peru. The white-wine-and-citrus aperitif Lillet Blanc is a perfect complement to the grape-based pisco.
1½ ounces pisco
1 ounce Lillet Blanc
½ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice
½ ounce simple syrup
1½ ounces tonic water
½ Mint sprig, for garnish
Fill a highball glass with ice. Add the pisco, Lillet Blanc, lime juice, and simple syrup. Top with the tonic water and stir gently. Garnish with the mint sprig.
Recipe by Duggan Mcdonnell of Cantina, San Francisco
CHAPTER 8
OF POLITICS AND RUM
WHO CAN SAY ANYTHING THAT GIVES YOU THE MOMENTARY WELL-BEING THAT RUM DOES?
—Ernest Hemingway
DRINKING TRENDS COME AND GO, but tiki will always be with us. It keeps returning every few years or so, like the mustache, or animal-print fabric, or knee-high leather boots. Tiki drinks occupy a space somewhere in the Venn diagram of the American psyche where escapism, irony, and kitsch overlap, cutting across so many cultural divides. Hipster wannabes with badly drawn tattoos love tiki. Shoppers at Urban Outfitters love tiki. Suburban cougars on the prowl love tiki. Guys in Tommy Bahama shirts who listen to “Cheeseburger in Paradise” love tiki. Marlene Dietrich loved tiki. Richard Nixon loved tiki.
Who doesn’t love tiki? Only one person immediately pops to mind: Donald Trump, who shuttered Trader Vic’s in the late 1980s after he bought the Plaza Hotel. He called the famed tiki bar “tacky.” Yes, Donald Trump called something “tacky.” You see, this is the strange sort of mind space we get into when we start talking tiki.
The late 1980s might have been one of the few times in late-twentieth-century America when tiki was decidedly out. So it’s odd that my first experience with tiki drinks happened during that period. But if you were a college freshman in Boston, as I was, and you didn’t have a fake ID, there is a good chance you and a group of friends might have ended up some night in a Chinese restaurant, perhaps in a part of town that was once called the Combat Zone. And you and your friends might have ordered a drink called a Scorpion Bowl, served in a large volcano bowl with a flaming shot of 151-proof rum in the center, from which you all drank with long straws. Perhaps you ordered more Scorpions, and there were races. Perhaps that turned into another one of your “bad night in college” stories. Anyway, because of my own Scorpion Bowl experience, I sat out the last tiki resurgence, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But wait long enough and tiki—much like my old, grunge-era flannel shirts—comes around again, as it did in the late 2000s. Some of the classic-cocktail crowd feel tiki is a classic enough genre that’s been overlooked. Luckily, this new generation of fine bartenders will be making sure that drinks such as the Mai Tai, the Zombie, the Navy Grog, and, yes, the Scorpion Bowl are made the right way, or improved as necessary.
The fact is, though tiki is often inseparable from tacky, tiki bars were conceived in the 1930s and 1940s as upscale nightspots. During their heyday, famous tiki joints such as Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood and Trader Vic’s in Oakland were the kinds of places