Special Proprietary Cocktails

AC and I don’t drink all that much. A glass of wine here. A snifter of brandy there. And we rarely, if ever, go out expressly to drink—except for what we call “special proprietary cocktails.”

One of our favorite activities of late is to scope out restaurants (to be fair, most of them are of the high-end variety) that offer a very special drink list. Usually this involves a restaurant’s take on an old favorite and/or something entirely new and inspired or something entirely new and bizarre. Currently, Restaurant Eve reigns supreme among the handful of restaurants where you can throw down ten bucks for a cocktail and not feel like a tool. Sommelier Todd Thrasher has designed roughly half a dozen proprietary cocktails, and while nearly every one of them is worth trying, we are particularly fond of the following three: the seasonal cocktail, the pickled martini, and the mojito.

The seasonal cocktail is always good. It usually involves rum, mashed seasonal fruit (we’ve had ones with pomegranate seeds, strawberries, and mango), and a ton of mint. It’s magical. And it’s $9.50, but you'll feel like you're really getting your money's worth just watching the bartender hunched over your cocktail furiously mashing and muddling away. But it’s totally worth it beyond just making the bartender sweat for five minutes. For one, these are not beverages that one simply drinks. You get one, and you savor it. A nibble of mint, a slurp of mango, a gulp of liquid. Repeat.

The mojito, of which we are particularly fond, isn’t your standard-issue mojito. Sure, all the constituent parts are there (rum, mint, lime), but for added fun, and a boatload of flavor, the bartenders throw in a house-made mint syrup. It’s that attention to detail that takes a delicious mojito into the realm of the sublime.

The pickled martini is, frankly, from a different place entirely. Perhaps Jupiter or something. Seriously, whoever conceived of this was an evil genius. This drink takes your basic martini recipe and then shocks it with pickle juice, a pickled gherkin for a garnish, and “pickled air,” an emulsion resembling a topping of pickle-flavored bubbles. It’s fantastic. But there are a few key elements to enjoying this drink. For one, you MUST be a pickle fanatic, which I am. If you only so much as dilly-dally with the pickles every so often, this drink will be a nightmare for you. Secondly, this drink takes time. You don’t stop in for the pickled martini. You order it, slip your shoes off, find a comfortable chair, and get started. Every sip of this drink is a baseball bat to the head of briny tartness. Best thing is to share it with another pickle freak.

So, with that, cheers.

—AK