Oh Bother

The bartender gave me a half-smile, and shrugged. "Of course, you can't tell the customer no."

*****

Julie and I are in Chicago, and I'm vibrating with glee, as we're about to enter a tiki bar I've been waiting to enter for over a year–Three Dots and a Dash. It's off an alley behind another bar on North Clark (the also-tasty Bub City), and a short skull-themed stairway later, we're third in line to get in at opening time.

The Jet Pilot, it just wants you to be happy.
If by "happy," you mean "rollicking drunk."

We take a seat at the bar, and pick our drinks–she goes with their riff on the Painkiller, and I go with one of my evaluation drinks, the Jet Pilot. The Zombie is my first-choice go-to drink to compare a tiki bar to its compatriots, but at Three Dots the Zombie, although it looks pretty authentic from the menu, is also a $65 drink for 3-4 people. Another time, perhaps. We also tried several of the small plates offered (the tuna crisps, served with a quartet of sauces, was a nice, light counterpoint to the drinks ordered). The drinks arrived in their resplendent ceramic, and we were happy, happy patrons.

The bar filled up fairly quickly (it's a segmented single room, so it's not hard to do). Our first drinks went down at an efficient pace. so a second seemed a reasonable plan of action. The menu proudly touted its "Selection of Fine Rums," and perusing the shelves, it's hard to argue. Sitting on the second shelf, my current darling of the rum world proudly held court with its blue and silver label: Smith & Cross rum, which features prominently in earlier entries on this blog. I call the bartender over.

"So what are you using the Smith and Cross for?"

She looked at the bottle a bit quizzically. "I'm not sure. We use Appleton as our Jamaican rum for most of our drinks. I can ask someone, if you want."

"No no, that's fine. Would you be interested in making me something with it?"

She paused for a moment. We've talked a couple of times up to this point, the usual light chatter and customer check-ins that barstaff should do. "To be honest, I really don't know the rum. We're trained on the menu drinks, and the managers don't really like us to improvise a lot." She half-smiled, and shrugged. "Of course, you can't tell the customer no..."

I can't complain about the bar, the drinks, or the service at Three Dots–quite the opposite. I'm eager to go back and explore more of the drink menu as soon as possible. And, our visit was within the first six months of opening, which means that, although they've had a proper shakedown by the public (the first crop of staff who won't work out have left, and the ones that will work out have some experience with the menu), they're still new enough to be adjusting to what is a non-standard bar menu (the tiki drink set is going to be a departure from the bartenders who may be accustomed to expertly mixing a never-ending parade of rum and Cokes or Old Fashioneds).

But, truth be told, I've been a bit spoiled. I have bartenders locally (hi Ravens Club, hi Alley Bar, hi Last Word) who are endlessly inventive, mixing drinks based on experience, mood and the occasional challenge from me. At places like Frankie's Tiki Room or the Zig Zag Café, I've shown up on their doorstep on a mission, and they've waxed poetic about both drink and spirits recommendations. I am so very curious about this amazing hobby of mine, and I've been fortunate to run across a bunch of bartenders, mixologists and drinking companions that support me in the quest part of the experience (and the drinking part, too).

I am VERY mindful of when it is appropriate to be all "make me something bartender's choice blah blah demerara rum" up in here. If the place is rockin', with drinks flying across the bar, I know not to interrupt or even get too chatty; I always figure that if I try a "make me something" move when a place is busy, Ray Foley is going to magically appear and Gibbs-slap me. "Get there early, hang out a bit, then back off as the place fills up" works pretty well as an MO for me.

Still, if there's a rum sitting on a shelf at a bar, and that bar is a tiki bar proclaiming its specialization in rums, it's a bit of a disappointment that I can't play a little bit. For all of the Bud Lights and rum and Cokes that crossed the bar in front of me (and going to an amazing bar like Three Dots to order Bud Light ought to earn SOMEBODY a Gibbs-slap or two), you've got a rum on your shelf that I like, and I want to see what you can do with it. So, I loved the experience, I'm ready to go back–but if that bottle of Smith & Cross is still sitting there, someone's going to make me a drink using it. You Have Been Warned.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

The Nuremberg Toy Fair is a Big Deal for the industry I work in. It's held in the sprawling Messe complex outside the city, and it's the largest toy trade show in the world. I spent a week talking (and playing) with a variety of game designers and industry folks, having a generally wonderful time. However, on the last day of the fair, everyone pulls down their booth (well, not everyone–most people have already left by the weekend, leaving schlubs like us to pull things down) and heads for the non-Nuremberg hills. This left me alone to feed myself in Nuremberg. The FOOLS!

Sure, I'd been eating wonderful regional German food at Steichele and Landbierparadies. The German beer had been frequent and copious, and although I hadn't eaten at Hutt'n yet, I had been by to pick up my now-annual bottle of Weihnachtslikör. So, forgive me if I decided to go non-traditional for my last meal.

Take a walk northeast from the Weißer Turm U-Bahn stop up towards the river, and just before you would cross the bridge to travel over to the Trödelmarkt (a tiny little shopping area on an island in the middle of the Pegnitz), you take a left down a dark residential street for a couple of blocks, and you'll find yourself at the Kon Tiki.

"Dinner?" I was asked (apparently I always look American) as I walked in the door, and a quick nod later I had an apertif thrust into my hand as I'm being escorted to my table. An auspicious start, thinks I.

I get to the table, peruse the drinks menu (dinner can wait), and I notice at the bottom their "Kon Tiki Surprise." Now, I am a bit self-conscious about things that include the word "surprise" in their description. If I'm in a group, one can order anything in the spirit of group experimentation, but, say, ordering the Mai-Kai Mystery Drink by myself would make me feel just a bit pervy (and not in a good way), doubly so since EVERYBODY'S WATCHING. So, maybe the Kon Tiki surprise is a really good drink, maybe two Samoan linebackers are going to burst out of the kitchen and beat the crap out of me. Only one way to find out, I suppose...

So the server comes back in a couple of minutes. A small sigh of relief: no parade, no sombreros to be forced onto my head, just a large, insanely garnished drink with a couple of sparklers stuck into the enclosing pineapple.

"Heh - better put those sparklers out before I start drinking..." thinks I.

The server sets down the drink, smiles, pulls out a lighter, and then sets off a car flare in the middle of my drink. You think I'm kidding. BEHOLD. I now have a 3-foot jet of flame shooting out of my drink, dangerously close to a triple-strong pool of alcohol, and I'm in a small alcove and EVERYTHING I'M SURROUNDED WITH IS BAMBOO.

So, yeah, Cloverfield-like, when confronted with a life-threatening event, I immediately pull out my phone to take a picture. This way, when they pull my charred, bamboo-fused remains from the ashes of the restaurant, my final moments will be sitting in the iCloud in order for my wife to print out and place in a frame on my coffin. (Most likely, with the caption "See what I had to deal with?")

This was the highlight of the experience, but only by a narrow margin, as the next thing to hit the table was my appetizer. Now, I've had pu pu platters, where I get to take my skewer of beef and add a little char at the table; I've had sizzling stone appetizers, where I get to place my paper-thin slices of meat on a hot rock and grill them. What I've not done in the past is cook raw meat over Sterno. Not that namby-pamby Sterno can that gets served inside a metal can on a wire rack underneath a hot place with a spoon to remove your food with–here, I get a bunch of raw flesh on skewers (completely murdering a pineapple just to have something to stick the skewers into), and a CUP of Sterno, alight in a coffee mug that's been wrapped in aluminum foil. I. Have. Proof.

I'd like to say that I have a recipe here, or at least a moral of some kind, but I don't. I enjoyed my dinner, the Surprise drink threw me under a bus more than one drink has in some time, and I got back to my hotel contented and char-free. Whether their trust in their guests is misplaced is debatable, although they've been open for 35 years without too much of a body count (presumably). I do know that the Ann Arbor fire marshall prevented a restaurant from serving s'mores with a Sterno can sealed inside a large iron centerpiece, so one can imagine the conniption our marshall would experience if presented with either of the above experiences. In any event, this record simply stands as homage to a nice evening out in Nuremberg. And next year, when I go back for dinner, you'll have this for my shrine at the funeral home if I don't get my pictures taken fast enough.

The Doctor is Funk

We're going into the realm of Beachbum Berry, and his excellent book Beachbum Berry Remixed. The book abounds with stories and recipes from the original king of tiki, Donn Beach. One of the most important things to remember when reading page after page of his creations is that, by and large, Donn was making this stuff up from whole cloth - certainly he knew the ingredients and flavor set of the Polynesian paradise his establishments evoked, but this was far more about his vision and his bartending skills than any wholesale lifting of native drinks.

One notable exception that proves the point, perhaps, is the Doctor Funk. This was a very real drink from Samoa, from a very real person named Dr. Bernhard Funk. A native of Germany, born in 1844, he migrated to Samoa around 1881 as reputedly the first medical practitioner in Apia (the capital city of Samoa). He was friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, and was his bedside doctor when the author died in 1894 in Samoa.

There are several references to his medical skills in works (including Fanny Stevenson's collection of letters from his husband), but he seems to also have had some impressive cocktail skills. The Doctor Funk was a notorious drink spreading out across the region, and his signature recipe had people waxing prosaic about the drink. My favorite was the quote attributed to Paul Gauguin by a skipper: "'E said Dr. Funk was a bloomin' ass for inventin' a drink that spoiled good Pernod with water." Other contemporaries were far more complimentary of the concoction.

Dr. Funk had a rich life, and even went native enough to marry the daughter of a Samoan chief. He was interested in meteorology, wrote a Samoan-English-German dictionary and medical handbooks, and constructed a recreation center at Lake Lanoto'o. Unfortunately, his deteriorating health drove him back to Germany, where he died in 1911. Friends carried out his last wish: he had a granite stone transported back to Samoa and placed on the shore of Lake Lanoto'o with a memorial service on his behalf. I recommend this thread at Tiki Central for much more (and there is much more) about the good Doctor.

All of this brings us back to the drink that is credited to him (and Donn Beach, in its modern version). The recipes can vary greatly (absinthe vs. pernod, different rums, and so on), but we'll take the advice and recipe as set out by the good Beachbum in the aforementioned book. It's a drink that comes to a remarkably happy balance based on the ingredients; the Pernod offers a distraction from the lime, the pomegranate syrup adds just enough sweet to balance the forward flavors, and the rum...well, you'd never know it was in there. A delightful riff on the usual lime-and-rum tiki flavor set that is a worthy tribute to a very interesting man.

Doctor Funk (from Beachbum Berry Remixed, 2010)

.75 oz. fresh lime juice
.5 oz. pomegranate syrup
1 tsp. Pernod
1.5 oz. light Puerto Rican rum (I use Bacardi white)
1 oz. club soda

Add the first four ingredients to a shaker with plenty of ice. Shake vigorously (a bit of water does this drink no harm). Add the club soda directly to the shaker and then pour the shaker unstrained into a glass.

Tiki Love

Let us talk of the tiki.

I've already documented my tiki-flavored introduction to my fascination with alcohol in an earlier blog entry, but the fantasy-Polynesian world perpetuated by those who adhere to the theme remains a delight of mine. I will once again push off the story of the Zombie, but I will hint at one theme that story will expound upon: the origin of these drinks, the early 1930's post-Prohibition versions of the classic tiki drinks, were designed to be beverages for adults, not candy liquid.

This drink is pictured in the

Black & Silver Polka Dot 

Cosmo Pilsner (16.5oz), 

available on the 

Contemporary Complements website. 

The black tiki mug is from 

Frankie's Tiki Room 

in Las Vegas.

That said whenever I try a new recipe, I must always bear in mind that my wife likes drinks to be a bit on the sweet side. Where many of the classics of the genre are tart combination of lime or grapefruit juice, I always need to have a bit of pineapple juice handy to bring the sweetness up to my wife's preferences. It's not a big deal to spike her drink after decanting my own, but it does illustrate a guiding principle in my mixology missions: it don't matter what you did to it, if they ain't gonna drink it. If I can bring up the sweetness a bit (using appropriate and moderated means, of course) in order to make my primary audience more enthusiastic about the drink, then bring on the grenadine and pineapple.

Today's drink does not suffer from said lack of sweet. The Blue Hawaii has a creator (Harry K. Yee of the Hawaiian Village Hotel, circa 1957), a mission (help Bols sell blue curacao), and a profile that definitely settles it on the sweet end of the spectrum. It has a seafoam green-blue color that's almost a shame to hide in a tiki glass, but it's very much the kind of drink that won't surprise you coming out of said glass. As always, make your own sour mix (see the Long Island Iced Tea recipe for my sour mix notes) to take out might be a bit too much sweet, but otherwise this is a drink that's very easy, uses basic alcohols, and is as tiki as a Hawaiian lei.

Blue Hawaii

3 oz. fresh pineapple juice
.5 oz. blue curacao (I use Bols)
.75 oz. rum (I use Bacardi white)
.75 oz. vodka (any midrange will do, such as Absolut)
1 oz. sour mix

Shake vigorously with ice, pour into tiki mug or tall glass.

This recipe appears in Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari, and is also available on his app, Beachbum Berry's Tiki +, for the iPhone or iPad.

Mixology, Bartending and Me

What triggers a passion?

Well, I certainly drank my share in college and beyond. I have specific drinks tied to specific locations and events: beer by the pitcher at Rick’s in Ann Arbor (leading to my only public singing experience in New York City), crap-but-cheap Long Island iced teas at Uptown in Bowling Green OH on Tuesday nights, fuzzy navels by the lake at Rose Hulman on a warm spring day, my first sip of julieska at the Arosa Keller in Essen Germany. For the most part, though, a drink was something that was combined with another activity or experience.

With games, my epiphany was at the hands of James Ernest, showman, poker player, game designer and CEO of Cheapass Games. James was the first person to challenge me to separate the game experience–the social involvement, metagame aspects and material components involved with playing a game–and think about the mechanics and rules that make up a game as a device for social experiences. It let me experience (and, nowadays, evaluate) games not only for their emotional and social pleasures, but to appreciate WHY a game does or does not work on a purely mechanical level, and then see how the game experience either magnifies or obscures a design’s mechanics.

For alcohol, it was a 2007 NPR interview with Jeff Berry, upon the publication of Beachbum Berry’s Sippin' Safari. The book is a celebration of the tiki craze in the US, and the interview focused on the Zombie–a drink normally presented as five random rums, pineapple juice, and whatever else fruit juice was on clearance at the dollar store last week. This is a drink that was shrouded in mystery and history, and Jeff told a story of corporate espionage, detective work, and sheer joy for the topic that absolutely hooked me (well, at least made me go out, buy the book, and act as the starting point for another story that I’ll tell later this year).

All of a sudden, alcohol became a medium of creation isolated from the usual social trappings. With a palette of ingredients millennia in the creation, I now had a sense of how to play with a well-stocked bar to make drinks and appreciate how the component parts combine to create something better.

This also brought me into the mixologist craze, and what an interesting experience that has been. I’ve discovered some great bars, tried some fairly exotic mixers, liquors and drinks, and certainly broadened my appreciation for what can be done with alcohol. Things like shrub and falernum are now recipes I can rattle off from memory, and the complexity and subtleties of a contemporary cocktail can be a marvelous opportunity to simultaneously drink and dissect.

That said, a 2011 issue of Imbibe featured an interview with Ray Foley, a voice for working bartenders and bar service for decades and who has both a passion for bartending and scorn for those who would push the occupation of bartender into a niche, boutique corner of the industry. This is the man who invented the fuzzy navel, and say what you want about the joys of homemade cardamom-infused limoncello, Ray Foley has been responsible for serving more drinks than you or I ever will. A good drink should be shared, and the easier and more accessible a drink is, the more people that will have the opportunity to enjoy it.

I am not an expert, or even trying to achieve that status (I have friends who are far more gifted in that regard), but on this blog I’ll try to walk the line between highbrow and lowbrow, a hand extended into each world, trying to snag things that everyone will find, if not necessarily practical or to their tastes, at least interesting to hear about.

Tomorrow: a reason to talk to me!