A Visit to Tujague's

So, when recently in New Orleans, I went to Tujague's, one of the oldest continually operating bars in the United States. It's been on its corner of Decatur Street facing the French Market since 1856. I always meant to pay a visit, but somehow, during past visits, the chance always escaped me. So I made a point of it this time around.

The neon signage is peerless. The ceilings are high. The mirror behind the old bar is as big as an elephant, and was 100 years old already when it was shipped from France in the mid-1900s. It's a rare bar that has a brass rail, but no stools at all. So you stand there, one foot on the rail, like those suited, mustachioed ruffians seen in old photos of yesteryear.

In various glass cabinets are numerous mini-bottle of every liquor and liqueur you can name, some old, some new. They are a reminder of how Tujague's got through Prohibition; bartenders kept dozens of such little receptacles in their aprons, ready to dispense liquid illegality into waiting cups.


The bar area is not huge. 30 people would fill it up. But there were only a handful of locals when I visited. I ordered a Sazerac, my usual drink when testing the waters at a New Orleans bar. Big Easy taverns tend to reach automatically for the Herbsaint when this drink is mentioned, even though original ingredient absinthe is now available. I guess old habits, and local brand loyalty, die hard.

I was a pain, and asked for absinthe. I also said "not too sweet," because everyone lays on the simple syrup these days. I didn't think I needed to give specific instructions on the Peychaud's Bitters. Maybe I should have. Because I was handed the reddest Sazerac I've ever seen. It was fine. Nothing special. And still too sweet. I wish people took more care when making this drink. It's not like the bartender was busy.

Someone next to me order a Grasshopper. Somewhere down the line, the idea became established that this is a signature drink at Tujague's. But the locals at the other end of the bar, upon spying the mint green mixture, said "What's that?" So that sort of put the lie to that bit of conventional wisdom.

I wandered around the dining rooms with my drink and found more cabinets full of small bottles. I also found a few interesting frames artifacts. Among the more amazing: a signed photograph of Julian Eltinge, now unknown, but during the early 20th century the most famous female impersonator in American, and a Broadway star; and a sheet from an old register proving that young Cole Porter and his family from Peru, Indiana, were frequent guests during a visit in 1902.

New York Rules, Apparently

One feels a bit sheepish around out-of-towners boasting that New York City has the best cocktail culture in the nation (even if one knows that this is true). Folks from other estimable cities do tend to brandish the most enormous chips on their shoulder when confronted with the (to their minds) outrageous myth of Gotham's cultural superiority in various departments.

So one learns to keep one's trap shut and extol the virtues of the West Coast, the South, the Midwest, the Northeast, etc. And they all do have virtues to extol, believe you me. But then one's confronted with factual circumstances like the results of the Spirit Awards at this Tales of the Cocktail, which just concluded in New Orleans. Among the winners: Pegu Club, Clover Club, PDT—all in New York.

Here are the results:

Best American Bar: Pegu Club, NY

Best Hotel Bar in the World: The Merchant Hotel Belfast

Best Cocktail Writing 2009: David Wondrich

Best New Product: Bols Genever

Best American Brand Ambassador: Simon Ford, Plymouth Gin

Wolds Best Drinks Selection: The Merchant Hotel Belfast

Amercian Bartender of the Year: James Meehan, PDT, NY

Best New Cocktail/Bartending Book: Dale de Groff, The Essential Cocktail

World’s Best Cocktail Menu – The Merchant Hotel Belfast

International Bartender of the Year: Tony Conigliaro, UK

World’s Best New Cocktail Bar: Clover Club, NY

World’s Best Cocktail Bar: PDT, NY

Tales of the Cocktails Helen David Life Achievement Award: Peter Dorelli, London

Now, I tend to think that all awards are stuff and nonsense. Is there really a "World's Best Cocktail Bar"? I don't think so. So take it with a grain of salt. But, you have to admit, New York's got something to offer.

Meanwhile, I've got to find a way to get myself to Belfast.

Some Planter's Punches

Recently, I spoke to Stephen Remsberg, the courtly New Orleans lawyer and rum collector. And whenever I think of Remsberg, I think of Planter's Punch, which he has called his favorite drink. I remember well a witty, and self-deprecating demonstration he once gave on how simple it was to built a glass of this tasty punch.

Over the past few evenings, I've tried a few version of the drink, which has as many interpretations as there are days in the year. I began with a recipe attributed to Dale DeGroff, then moved on to the Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide, publishing in 1972. Vic offered four different formulas, including two attributed to himself. Lastly I gave a whirl a version published by David Embury in 1948, republished in Wayne Curtis' book "A Bottle of Rum." Here are the recipes, and what I found.

DALE DEGROFF'S PLANTER'S PUNCH

1 oz. dark rum
1 oz. light rum
1/2 oz. curacao
2 oz. orange juice
2 oz. pineapple juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup
1/4 lime juice
1 dash grenadine
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake all ingredients well with ice and strain into iced Collins glass. Top with small amount of soda. Garnish with orange slice and cherry.

TRADER VIC'S PLANTER'S PUNCH—1

1/2 lime
1 dash rock candy syrup
1 dash grenadine
1 oz. lemon juice
2 oz. dark Jamaica rum
2 oz. soda

Squeeze lime juice over ice cubes in a planter's punch glass; save lime shell. Add remaining ingredients. Stir. Decorate with lime shell, fresh mint, and a fruit stick.

TRADER VIC'S PLANTER'S PUNCH—2

3 oz. dark Jamaica rum
1/2 oz. grenadine
Juice of one lime
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon bar sugar
Soda

Stir all ingredients except soda thoroughly with ice cubes. Strain into a 12-ounce glass filled with shaved ice. Fill glass with soda. Stir gently.

DAVID EMBURY'S PLANTER'S PUNCH

3 oz. Jamaica rum
1 oz. sugar syrup
2 oz. lemon juice
2-3 dashes Angostura bitter
Soda

Shake the ingredients vigorously with crush ice and pour, without straining, into a tall glass. Pack the glass to the top with more crushed ice, fill to within one-half inch with soda water, then churn with a bar spoon until the glass starts to frost. Decorate with fruit.

DeGroff's punch is probably the outright tastiest. Irresistible, really. No surprise there, since, to Dale, a top priority is always that a drink should taste good. The addition of pineapple juice and curacao do the trick in spades.

Trader Vic's version No. 1 I found the most disappointing. An outright failure, actually. Much too much lemon juice, and too little sweetener, make this cocktail too acidic, while the meager measure of rum and too ample contribution of soda water down its impact.

Vic's version No. 2 is much better. More rum, more sweetener, less lemon juice—it's all to the good. And the additional grenadine give the drink a pleasing ruby hue.

Embury's I would call a classicist's Planter's Punch—nice and simple. The large dose of dark rum and 1 ounce of syrup easily take on the 2 ounces of lemon juice, and the hearty spurt of Angostura lends a nice edge. I'd put it up with DeGroff's in palatableness, though the taste profile is quite different. It also gets points for being terribly easy to make at home. But, really, all except Vic's No. 1 are worth a try.

Not a Neon Sign You See Every Day

In the window of a Peruvian restaurant on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.

Some Wines From Michigan

I know they make wine in all 50 states, now, but that doesn't mean I have to try them all.

Still, when Shawn Walters, the winemaker from Forty-Five North Winery, in Leelanau County, northern Michigan, contacted me and asked if I would like to sample his wines, I was intrigued. The winery seemed to have a good reputation. They made a couple Rieslings, which always gets my attention. I had recently tasted some pleasing wines from Pennsylvania and Virginia, so there was hope. And it's hard to tamp down my natural curiosity. So I told him to send them on.

A little background. Forty-Five North is owned by the memorably named Steve Grossnickle, who used to have an ophthalmologist practice in Indiana, and bought property in Leelanau County in 1983, while a farm intended for grape growing was purchased in 2006. The name of the place translates Grossnickle's ambitions: Bordeaux also lies at the 45th parallel, albeit 4500 miles to the east.

Walters sent me bottles from both their first (2007) and second (2008) vintages, and, from what I tasted, there's more than a bit of beginner's luck going on here. All the wines made for fine, suitable drinking, and a couple were more than fine.

All the whites were extremely light in hue, owing to the northerly climate, I should imagine. Nearly water white. The 2008 Semi-Dry Riesling had good acidity and was well-focused. The nose was appealing: white melon, white peach, nectarine, apricot, and grassy fields. The palate showed high fruit, but not big fruit, if you know what I mean—lime, lemon, gooseberry, white cranberry and lemongrass. (This wine is now sold out; I'm not surprised.)

As for the Select Harvest Riesling 2008, honey and pear scents were evident. In the mouth, there were lovely flavors of Barlett pear, tangerine, white peach and honeysuckle. It had a medium finish. Not a lot of depth, but perfectly pleasing.

Of the reds, I liked the Cabernet Franc 2007 as a bright, light, summer red of medium body and medium finish. It had a full fruit nose of cherry and plum, with some spice, cocoa and chocolate. It was light going down. The palate mirrored the nose. Red and black cherries and plum mingled with flavors of cocoa and chocolate, plus some green notes hidden there in the middle.

But the prize, perhaps, of all the bottles I tried was the Pinot Noir Rose 2008. I've tried a lot of disappointing roses made from Pinot Noir; this wasn't one of them. Very likable, it began with a cherry-strawberry-raspberry-gooseberry nose. The acidity was good, but modest in its effect; overall this was a fruit-forward wine, sporting flavors of strawberry and Prince Ranier cherries. A touch of creaminess and a little tannic edge added to full and interesting flavor profile. At $18, it's a good, if not fantastic, buy.

The alcohol levels on these wines were low—below 12%, with the exception of the Cab Franc (13.5%)—allowing you to enjoy them over dinner well into the third glass.

Not every wine worked. The Pinot Gris was simple and lacked dimension. But if I lived in upper Michigan, I'd be awfully thankful to have this winery around.

A Beer At...Reynold's Cafe

My latest "A Beer At" column for Eater took me all the way up to 204th Street and Broadway, to the frozen-in-time Reynold's Cafe:

A Beer At... Reynold's Cafe

The jukebox at Reynold’s Café played a Spanish ballad one recent rainy Saturday afternoon. It then played “Maria” from “West Side Story,” sung by Johnny Mathis. This Washington Heights corner tavern is just that kind of place. If it was once, like the neighborhood, an Irish stronghold, the bar is now shared by more recent Hispanic immigrants. Unlike the two gangs in “West Side Story,” however, the bar’s patrons—mostly old men—long ago made their peace. The groups don’t exactly intermingle, but neither do they fight. And there is room for joking. As one garrulous Irishman said from the bar, for all to hear, “Since I’m in a Spanish bar, I wanna say My Irish mother said that on her mother’s side, she can trace her lineage to Seville.”

The Gaelic quaffers tended to favor the question-mark-shaped, wooden bar. They wore windbreakers and baseball caps and drank bottled beer. (There is nothing on draft at Reynolds Café.) The longnecks saved their places when they went outside for a smoke, which was often. The Hispanic men drank wine, convened around small round tables, and wore nattily dressed in suits, Cuban shirts and straw hats. What both sectors seemed to have in common—unless I am very much mistaken—was gambling. There was an intense examination of newspapers, and much cash brandished in hand and counted. A lumpen, bald man never left off the video poker game in one dark corner. Could this explain the presence of odd illustration on the wall entitled “The Gamblers” and the old photograph of a bygone casino?

The barkeep, wearing a short-sleeved, button down shirt, a proper tie pulled up to the collar, and a shiny black toupee, seemed the sort to keep a secret. He said, in an Irish brogue, that the bar dated from Prohibition and the current owner has run it for 45 years. Nothing was said about the mounted deer head above the bar, or the more alarming bits of taxidermy: a bobcat’s head and a full-length ferret. The men’s room, used frequently, is behind an exceedingly narrow wooden door at the end of the bar. The ladies’ room is not as convenient—it’s down a flight of stairs as tight as those that lead below deck on a ship. No matter. There were no women about.

More Mathis played: “Chances Are.” The Reynolds crowd is not an unsentimental one. An elderly Puerto Rican handyman, employed by the bar to do odd jobs, is treated by the regulars as some sort of mascot, back-slapped and hailed from across the room. And the playing of the weepy anthem of selfless love, “Angel of the Morning,” might lead to a spontaneous sing-a-long. The original version, not the later cover by Juice Newton.
—Robert Simonson

Stick to Swizzles

I can't tell you how sick my wife is of hearing me say, with utter seriousness, the word "Swizzle." For the past few weeks, I've been researching this category of West Indies cocktail—talking with bartenders about Swizzles, soliciting recipes for Swizzles, sampling Swizzles. Each time I mentioned a new tidbit of information on the topic, my better half would roll her eyes and walk into the other room.

You can't blame her. It's a funny word. And cocktail people can start to sound a little touched in the head when they start talking with deadly earnestness about things like garnishes and the right kind of ice. Still, she was impressed when she finally sat down and tried a properly made Queen's Park Swizzle.

I was fortunate enough to write about Swizzles for the New York Times Summer Drinks issue. Here's the piece.

It’s Not So Mysterious: The Secret Is in the Swizzle

By Robert Simonson

WHEN Katie Stipe, a bartender at the Clover Club in Boerum Hill, gets an order for a mojito, she recommends that the customer try a Queens Park Swizzle instead.

“We steer them to it as a far superior version of the same sort of drink,” she said. Indeed, the cocktails share many ingredients: rum, citrus, sugar, mint. So why bother converting a customer? What makes one different from the other? Well, the swizzling, of course.

A Queens Park Swizzle is the best-known representative of a crushed-ice-laden and slightly mysterious cocktail category. The genre was born in the West Indies, probably in the 19th century, but has become increasingly popular in New York bars of late. Among other noteworthy examples are the Bermuda Swizzle (still wildly popular on that island) and the Barbados Red Rum Swizzle, a onetime staple at Trader Vic’s.

These drinks are not shaken or stirred, but rather swizzled with a genuine swizzle stick. Now, if you’re picturing one of those colorful plastic doohickeys that bars and resorts stick into their drinks as a combination advertisement and souvenir, stop right there.

The implement in question is an actual stick. It is snapped off a tree native to the Caribbean. Botanists call it Quararibea turbinata, but it is known to locals as the swizzle stick tree. The sticks are about six inches, with small prongs sticking out at the end, like the spokes of a wheel without the rim, and they are used as a kind of natural, manually operated Mixmaster.

These are halcyon days for behind-the-bar theatrics, and nothing lends the bartender’s art a touch of razzmatazz like a deftly deployed swizzle stick. “It takes a little showmanship,” said Stephen Remsberg, a New Orleans lawyer known for his extensive rum collection (1,300 bottles) and knowledge of rum drinks. “You insert the swizzle stick in the drink. And with both hands moving in coordination, simultaneously backwards and forwards, you simply rotate the shaft of the swizzle stick between your palms as quickly as you can.”

It is believed by some that the success of any swizzle lies entirely in the mixing prowess of the bartender.

“There really isn’t any difference between a simple rum punch and a swizzle except the technique used for making them,” Mr. Remsberg said. All agree that one thing happens when the drink is prepared in this way — and has to happen, for it to be a swizzle. “With the ideal swizzle you get a nice frost on the outside of the glass,” Ms. Stipe said.

Beyond that, what the method contributes to the drink — aside from a lively sideshow — is somewhat open to debate. Wayne Curtis, a cocktail authority and the author of “And a Bottle of Rum,” suspects that the stick’s significance is mainly cultural and ritualistic. Not that that’s a bad thing. “Ritual is fine,” Mr. Curtis said. “There’s a lot of ritual in the cocktail world.”

Richard Boccato — who put the Queens Park Swizzle on the menu at Dutch Kills, a new bar in Long Island City, Queens, that he owns with Sasha Petraske — thinks there’s more at stake. “The act in the swizzling is what makes the drink aesthetically pleasing to the guest,” Mr. Boccato said. “They enjoy watching it, for sure, but it’s also something that integral to the preparation. It’s very much what brings the drink together.”

But Mr. Petraske regards swizzling as simply a more controlled way of stirring. “It’s a way of not disturbing the muddled stuff that’s at the bottom,” he said. “Aside from that, I can’t think of any difference it makes.”

The swizzle is just that kind of cocktail. The more you chase after its essence, the less you understand. The cocktail expert David Wondrich said, “Vague answers are all you’re going to get.” That’s perhaps just as well, because it seems a shame to invest too much analysis in a practice so pleasingly theatrical, and in a drink that’s so easygoing and refreshing. “It’s almost like an adult snow cone,” Ms. Stipe said.

There’s one additional mystery surrounding the swizzle. Despite the demands of the cocktail craze, a real swizzle stick is not easily found in New York. Nearly every bar that serves swizzles gets the needed tools through some Caribbean connection. Mr. Boccato brings some sticks back from Martinique every time he visits his father, who lives nearby on St. Lucia.

“I’m surprised no one’s come out with a plastic version,” Mr. Curtis said.

While you're at it, take a look at the other fine articles in the section, including a A to Z guide to home bartending and a look at the lives of sober bartenders. And Eric Asimov looks at the problems in New York's beer scene.