Behind the Bar Read online

  ‘We love the balance between high-brow and low. The person who pays $20 a night for a bed at Freehand can exist in the bar alongside the person that lives across the street in a luxurious home and is a regular guest,’ says managing partner Orta. Managing partner Zvi adds, ‘We have something for everyone. The daily house punch goes for $8; for those looking to spend more, there are even $350 speciality bottles of Champagne. Both guests are welcome and we treat them the same.’

  Madame Rambouillet’s 17th-century French salons inspired The Ramble Hotel, in Denver’s River North Art District. After guests leave their rooms with the antique Persian rugs and wideplank hickory floors, the mission is, just like Rambouillet’s intimate gatherings, to gab, learn and share within the confines of the hotel. Death & Co, the second location to follow the New York flagship by Alex Day, Dave Kaplan and Ravi DeRossi, plays a pivotal role in this exchange, with drinks such as the ‘Wabi-Sabi’ (High West Silver Western Oat whiskey, Japanese gin, white chocolate, wasabi, coconut, lemon, matcha) savoured from velvet couches.

  ‘We’ve always thought of Death & Co as more than the four walls of the original East Village location. To us, Death & Co is more about a perspective on cocktails and hospitality – a way of working, how we should treat our guests and our team, an aesthetic for creative but elegantly reserved offerings – and we’ve been excited to express that in other forms for years, especially within the distinctly unique energy of a hotel,’ explains Day. ‘In Denver, we’re given a chance to explore Death & Co’s voice in so many ways: your first sip of coffee in the morning, a casual afternoon low ABV cocktail, an outdoor bar in the summer, or a deeply immersive evening cocktail experience with delicious food – so many creative opportunities, but always understandable as Death & Co. In that way, I think our success at Death & Co Denver and its integration into The Ramble Hotel is tied to our strong collective vision as a team and an almost child-like excitement for the many ways we can express it.’

  Luxury is subtlety; it’s more personalised than ever.

  No. 4

  Jamaican Manhattan

  POOL BAR & GRILL AT ROCKHOUSE HOTEL & SPA, NEGRIL, JAMAICA

  INGREDIENTS

  60 ml (2 fl oz) Wray & Nephew Jamaican brandy

  30 ml (1 fl oz) sweet vermouth

  4 dashes of Angostura bitters

  1 cherry, to garnish

  METHOD

  Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass filled with ice and stir. Strain into a chilled Martini glass and garnish with a cherry.

  Rockhouse embodies an island paradise, what with its plethora of stone, thatch and wood that echo the jungle landscape – furnishings for its rooms, suites and villas are made in an on-site woodworking shop. Perched on Negril’s dramatic coral cliffs, this eco-friendly boutique hotel opened in 1973, when it was a hangout for Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. In 1994, when the current Australian owner took over the property, he ensured that it wouldn’t lose any of that soul. Instead, the hotel deepened its connection to Jamaica by starting a foundation that helps local children through renovating schools and libraries.

  Four-poster beds beg a lie-in, but do rise, if only for a dip in the infinity pool and meals in the three restaurants and bars, which integrate greens from the organic garden into dishes and drinks. In anticipation of sunset, hightail it to the Pool Bar & Grill and gaze upon the Caribbean in the company of a ‘Jamaican Manhattan’ or cooling ‘Jahjito’, which is made with the island’s own Appleton white rum and combines with mint leaves, lime, sugar and soda water.

  No. 5

  Billy the Kid

  FIFTY MILS AT FOUR SEASONS HOTEL MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  INGREDIENTS

  30 ml (1 fl oz) Bulleit Bourbon with Butter Fat Wash*

  30 ml (1 fl oz) Zubrowka vodka

  45 ml (1½ fl oz) Caramel Tea**

  20 ml (⅔ fl oz) lime juice

  25 ml (¾ fl oz) Saffron and Cinnamon Syrup†

  2 dashes of Angostura bitters

  * For the Bulleit Bourbon with Butter Fat Wash (makes 1 litre/34 fl oz):

  1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) melted butter

  750 ml (25 fl oz) Bulleit bourbon

  ** For the Caramel Tea (makes 1 litre/34 fl oz):

  75 g (2½ oz) rooibos, vanilla or caramel tea

  1 litre (34 fl oz) freshly boiled water

  † For the Saffron and Cinnamon Syrup (makes 1 litre/34 fl oz):

  100 g (3½ oz) cinnamon sticks

  100 g (3½ oz) sugar

  pinch of saffron

  1 litre (34 fl oz) water

  METHOD

  For the Bulleit Bourbon, combine the ingredients, then pour into a container and freeze overnight. The following day, skim off the hardened layer of butter. Strain the bourbon into a sterilised bottle.

  For the Caramel Tea, combine the ingredients and steep for 5 minutes, then strain and chill until needed.

  For the Saffron and Cinnamon Syrup, combine the ingredients in a saucepan and heat for 5 minutes until the sugar has dissolved. Strain into a sterilised bottle and chill until needed.

  Combine all the ingredients in a shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Double strain into a mug filled with large ice cubes.

  Mexico City teems with vibrant bars – secretive, polished mixology dens, no-frills cantinas devoted to knocking back ice-cold cervezas and bartender favourites such as Licorería Limantour, making it one of Latin America’s most seductive nightlife capitals.

  Fifty Mils, inside the hacienda-style Four Seasons Hotel close to ‘Bosque de Chapultepec’, where guests are welcomed into a courtyard thronging with fruit trees, arrived on the scene in 2015, and was quickly recognised as one of the best places in the city to savour a cocktail. Drinks here are complex: the ‘Bugs Bunny’, for instance, melds Tanqueray 10 gin with carrot juice, lemongrass syrup, fresh cactus and Fernet perfume; in the ‘Ofrenda’, Zacapa 23 rum is paired with tamarind pulp, grilled pineapple juice and avocado-leaf bitters. Opt for a classic Manhattan and even that will come to the table with a distinctive flourish: it’s served inside a hollow ice cube that the bartender confidently cracks open before guests’ eyes.

  No. 6

  Show Off

  THE SPARE ROOM AT THE HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT, LOS ANGELES, USA

  Created by Yael Vengroff

  INGREDIENTS

  45 ml (1½ fl oz) Yola mezcal

  25 ml (¾ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice

  25 ml (¾ fl oz) mango purée (ideally Boiron or Perfect Purée)

  15 ml (½ fl oz) Giffard Abricot du Roussillon apricot liqueur

  7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) Campari

  7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) cane syrup (2 parts organic cane sugar to 1 part water)

  Chilli Salt*, to garnish

  1 lime wheel and wedge, to garnish

  *For the Chilli Salt:

  1 teaspoon Tajin chilli and lime seasoning

  ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ½ teaspoon sugar

  METHOD

  Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Fill a saucer with the chilli salt mixture and rub the lime edge around half of the rim of a rocks glass. Dip the rim of the glass into the chilli salt. Fill the glass with ice, then strain the cocktail into the glass. Garnish with the lime wheel.

  Unless you’re planted in a red booth at Musso & Frank Grill, retro Hollywood glitz can feel elusive in today’s sprawling LA. But, walk out of that restaurant dating from 1919 and some ten minutes across Hollywood Boulevard, past the 1920s movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and there is The Hollywood Roosevelt, a hotel where you can easily imagine a dewy Marilyn Monroe reclining on a lounge chair.

  In 1929, when the property was just two years old, the first-ever Academy Awards was held here in the form of a small, private dinner. The celebrities, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who once resided in what is now the rooftop penthouse, never stopped coming. That dizzying spirit, reflected through a contemporary lens, is what permeates
The Spare Room, where pals share bowls of Nanu Nanu punch (Pierre Ferrand Cognac, apricot, rooibos tea, spiced pineapple, lemon and Domaine Chandon sparkling wine) before hitting the vintage two-lane bowling alley.

  Spend the day against a backdrop of palm trees at the Tropicana Pool, graced with an underwater mural painted by David Hockney, then end it playing dominoes, snug on one of The Spare Room’s sofas with a potato vodka and carrot-dill brine ‘Salt and Vinegar Martini’. It’s the kind of carefree, off-set living that bygone stars would surely approve of.

  No. 7

  Esperanto

  THE HAWTHORNE AT HOTEL COMMONWEALTH, BOSTON, USA

  Created by Jackson Cannon

  INGREDIENTS

  60 ml (2 fl oz) Del Maguey Crema de Mezcal

  25 ml (¾ fl oz) La Cigarrera Manzanilla sherry

  15 ml (½ fl oz) Carpano Antica vermouth

  1 dash of Regans’ orange bitters

  1 pared strip of lemon zest

  METHOD

  Add all the ingredients except the lemon zest to a mixing glass filled with ice and stir. Strain into a chilled double old fashioned glass, twist the lemon zest over the drink to express the oils, then discard.

  Lucky are the folks who, after seeing a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, need only walk a few minutes over to Kenmore Square to spend the night at Hotel Commonwealth. If they’re die-hard fans, they’ll likely make their way up to the 65-square-metre (700-square-foot) suite chock-full of baseball mementos. Yet there are so many others who flock here, with nary a thought of sport nor sleep, just to drink in The Hawthorne bar.

  In what feels like an arty friend’s living room, with plenty of cushy seating that seamlessly mingles zebra print with bright orange, they reach for a ‘Bookmark’ listing the evening’s cocktails – maybe a demure mid-century Champagne ‘Air Mail’, or maybe a ‘Grand Tour’ with El Tesoro reposado tequila, Amontillado sherry, pineapple and lime.

  The Hawthorne opened in 2011, courtesy of tireless bartender Jackson Cannon – a well-travelled, music-loving booze scholar, who first cemented the city’s reputation for exalted cocktails at Eastern Standard back in 2005. Also inside Hotel Commonwealth, this boisterous brasserie is where you’ll find oyster-gorging regulars asking for banana daiquiris and rum old fashioneds. Consider the understated Hawthorne, then, an evolution of Cannon’s mission to enlighten.

  SPOTLIGHT:

  DAVID ROCKWELL

  the connection between hospitality design and performing arts

  ONE EPHEMERAL EVENING

  Rockwell Group’s portfolio of projects is vast, including restaurants, hotels, retail and products. The New York-based architecture and design practice, launched in 1984 by David Rockwell, is also renowned for its theatre work, imagining sets for Broadway hits such as She Loves Me and Kinky Boots. For Rockwell – as he explains here – the connection between the realms of hospitality and performing arts is a fierce one. Hotel bars, for example, and the sweeping stage, are both propelled by a sense of transience, allowing the designer to create magic over and over again.

  Design is our filter to examine the world, and it informs everything that we do. Often, the lines between mediums and spaces aren’t as rigid as we might think. Theatre and hospitality, for example, are intertwined in many ways, and this symbiotic relationship really drives our work. Just as with a performance, we approach everything we design from a place of narrative. We are telling a story and crafting a point of view; a unique world that’s specific to the project. In both cases, you are exploring temporal structures, lighting, emotional connection and heightening the atmosphere for impact. We always ask ourselves at the beginning of a project, ‘What is the story we are telling?’ and the answer to that question informs every choice we make thereafter.

  At Moxy Chelsea hotel in New York, for example, the story of the flower district weaves a powerful impression on the three amenities we designed. It’s a modern fusion of botanically-inspired elements and Italian Futurism. The Fleur Room, an intimate rooftop bar on the 35th floor of the hotel, is one of my favourite spaces. An extruding bronze bar, recalling the chic precision of intimate bars found in Rome or Milan, contrasts floral accents such as inverted resin cones glowing with imbedded bouquets. These design choices may never be consciously recognised by many who encounter the space, but that doesn’t mean they won’t play on memory, spark specific feelings, and create a lasting impact on the guest experience.

  Hotel bars are often the nexus of a space – the stage. They are where the action takes place and, often in the span of just 24 hours, can take on multiple roles and create a range of experiences. When we create communal spaces such as these, we apply many of the same concepts as set design.

  For example, a sense of choreography – another element of theatre – can guide a guest’s journey. A path through a hotel’s public spaces with thresholds – transitional moments – are where the magic happens. For the Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto and Electric Lemon restaurant at the flagship Equinox Hotel in New York, we sought out those key transitional moments in the lobby, enabling them to transcend to bar and lounge areas. This creates a feeling of movement and flow; the bar space becoming its own world, able to expand or contract depending on volume or occasion.

  No. 8

  Vieux Carré

  CAROUSEL BAR & LOUNGE AT HOTEL MONTELEONE, NEW ORLEANS, USA

  INGREDIENTS

  7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) Bénédictine

  7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) Cognac

  15 ml (½ fl oz) Sazerac rye whiskey

  7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) sweet vermouth

  3 drops of Angostura bitters

  3 drops of Peychaud’s bitters

  lemon twist, to garnish

  METHOD

  Stir all the ingredients except the lemon twist in a mixing glass filled with ice. Strain into a chilled old fashioned glass and garnish with the twist of lemon.

  After presiding over a Sicilian shoe factory, Antonio Monteleone, like many enterprising immigrants of his time, headed for America with unbridled opportunity on his mind. Settling in New Orleans, that ambition led to opening Hotel Monteleone, overlooking the French Quarter’s Royal Street, in 1886. This pool-topped grande dame is purportedly abundant in haunted lairs, but beyond that paranormal fascination there is the equally intriguing Carousel Bar & Lounge, where an ornate merry-go-round, seemingly plucked from a carnival of yesteryear, is the centrepiece. Set inside the whimsical contraption is a circular bar accompanied by 25 colourful chairs covered in illustrations of circus animals. Delightfully and imperceptibly, every 15 minutes it revolves around the room.

  Transcending mere feel-good gimmickry, Carousel, spinning since 1949, has a luminous literary past. Southern American scribes such as Truman Capote (his mother went into labour with him at the hotel), Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty paid inspiration-inducing visits here. Entertainers including Liberace and Louis Prima, after their performances in the hotel’s now-shuttered nightclub The Swan Room, also slipped into the Carousel.

  The boozy Vieux Carré, invented by the hotel’s head bartender Walter Bergeron in 1938, as well as that must-have-when-in-the-Big-Easy Sazerac remain sought-after concoctions from the charismatic, long-time barman Marvin Allen.

  With ingredients that nod to France, Italy, the Caribbean and the United States, the Vieux Carré (which literally translates to ‘Old Square’, an homage to the French Quarter) reflects a lively, multicultural New Orleans.

  No. 9

  Mint Julep

  ROUND ROBIN BAR AT INTERCONTINENTAL THE WILLARD WASHINGTON, DC, USA

  Adapted by Jim Hewes

  INGREDIENTS

  60 ml (2 fl oz) bourbon

  4–6 fresh mint leaves, plus a mint spring to garnish

  1 teaspoon sugar

  130 g (4½ oz/1 cup) crushed ice

  30 ml (1 fl oz) San Pellegrino sparkling water

  pinch of granulated or raw cane sugar, to garnish

  METHOD

  Using a spoon
, muddler or the bottom of a butter knife, gently muddle the mint leaves and sugar with half of the bourbon in a Pilsner glass or brandy snifter for a minute or so until a ‘tea’ forms. Add half of the crushed ice and stir again, then top up the glass with the remaining crushed ice, keeping it tightly packed. Pour in the remaining bourbon and sparkling water, then garnish with a mint sprig and a sprinkling of sugar.

  A Pennsylvania-Avenue landmark minutes away from the White House, the Willard has long been one of the capital’s choice gathering spots for the crème de la crème of politics. Since 1847, Round Robin Bar (in what was then called Willard’s City Hotel) has turned out cocktails for the likes of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman – the latter even called out the Willard’s ‘sumptuous bar’ in a rousing speech to Union troops – as well as to countless gossip-fuelled employees of lobbying firms and US presidential administrations past.

  Jim Hewes began tending the polished mahogany circular bar in 1986, when the hotel reopened deep in the conservative Ronald Reagan years. He’s every bit the knowledgeable historian as he is the skillful bartender responsible for tweaking the beloved Mint Julep. The tufted leather, oak panelling and earthy green walls lined with portraits of such personalities of yore as Woodrow Wilson, expedited by a ‘Papa Doble’ (Hemingway Daiquiri) or Prohibition-era ‘Bee’s Knees’ in hand, all conjure a riveting sensation of covert meetings and political discourse.

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY KENTUCKY STATESMAN HENRY CLAY WAS BESOTTED WITH THE MINT JULEP, FIRST INTRODUCING IT TO WASHINGTONIANS AT ROUND ROBIN. COME SUMMER, THE BAR CONTINUES TO PUMP OUT THE ICY WARM-WEATHER QUENCHER NOW SYNONYMOUS WITH DERBY DAY SOIRÉES. ALTHOUGH MOST VERSIONS OF THE COCKTAIL ARE SERVED IN A PEWTER CUP, ROUND ROBIN PREFERS A PILSNER GLASS OR BRANDY SNIFTER TO FULLY ILLUMINATE THE BEAUTY OF THE DRINK.