A Proper Drink by Robert Simonson

Author:Robert Simonson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

To make the honey-ginger syrup, combine 1 cup of honey with one 6-inch peeled and sliced piece of ginger root with 1 cup of water in a small pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Refrigerate overnight, then strain, discarding the solids.

XX. THE BALLET DANCER AND THE MONK

WITH HIS WORK AT ABSINTHE, Marco Dionysus may have been San Francisco’s first big mixology prodigy, but in terms of press and publicity, Scott Beattie became the city’s first star. Beattie took a very different route than Dionysus, less about classical models and more about what California had to offer here and now.

“I was really influenced a lot by reading Michael Pollan’s books,” said Beattie. “I was trying first of all to find delicious products, whether herbs or flowers or citrus or spirits—to put a face behind the ingredients I was using.”

Beattie wasn’t alone. The California style of mixology was, for many years, all about fresh ingredients. It was garden-to-glass. More than that, it was garden in a glass, going back to the fresh limes squeezed for every Margarita at the Zuni Café in the 1980s and the fields of mint plucked for Mojitos served at Enrico’s.

“Mainly, I picked mint all day long,” recalled Thomas Waugh, who, as a young man, worked at Enrico’s. “Hours on end. My hands were dyed green.”

“In New York, everything came out of bottles,” said journalist Camper English. “In San Francisco, everything was made fresh to order.” There were no jiggers, no measuring; pours were counted. Freshness prevailed over precision.

“We didn’t think a lot about the variance in size between this half lime and that half lime,” recalled Beattie. “It was just, ‘Oh, this is half a lime. It kinda works, but kinda doesn’t.’”

Scott Beattie was born and raised in San Francisco. He studied English literature at Berkeley, supporting himself at Perry’s, the famous fern bar, and Postrio, Wolfgang Puck’s fine-dining destination. By senior year, he was taken with the restaurant business. He began entering cocktail competitions. When the dot-com bubble burst, he retreated to Napa in 2001 and got a job at a place called Martini House in St. Helena. Beattie’s father, who lived there, had a citrus garden at his house, and Scott began infusing vodkas with the fruits. His Bloody Mary was informed by different peppers. “It’s kind of an Alice Waters thing,” he explained. “You know where the ingredients come from.”

Restaurateurs Nick Peyton and Douglas Kean, who had a little place in St. Helena, had become friendly with Beattie. The duo were planning a fine-dining restaurant, Cyrus, in Healdsburg, for 2005. They wanted to have a classic hotel-style bar and asked Beattie to head it. He wrote a forty-page spirits menu, with descriptions of every bottle on backbar, and visited local distilleries. But it wasn’t enough.

“Once I really absorbed what they were doing there,” said Beattie, “how they were trying to do this restaurant that was going to be as good as The French Laundry, and received

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