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Bar-Bary Coast

Wolfgang Weber from the Spume blog and Wine & Spirits Magazine has started a Google map of "classic" (in one way or another) eateries and drinkeries along the Barbary Coast Trail in San Francisco.

I've never walked the trail myself but now that he's turned it into a bar crawl I'm much more likely to give it a try.

The map is editable If you happen to know of any classic spots along the path that aren't labeled yet I think you can add them.

January 22, 2009
Heaven’s Dog Preview

On Monday I had the chance to check out Heaven's Dog, the new Charles Phan (Slanted Door) restaurant and bar opening on in San Francisco on Friday.

On closer inspection, bar and restaurant would be a more adequate description of the place. There's a small noodle bar/kitchen on one side- almost an adjacent business connected by the bathroom hallway, and a section of the larger, L-shaped room for seating. The long part of the "L" is the bar, cut out of a beautiful, curving vertical slice of a tree, and there is so much room behind it there were more than eight bartenders working at the same time on Monday night. The small part of the "L" is the seating for the restaurant.

The cocktail menu consists entirely of Charles H. Baker (author of The Gentleman's Companion) drinks. I forgot to bring home a drink menu but the drinks I tried were largely acidic citrus rather than juicy, and very booze-heavy. One drink is simply dark rum with honey syrup and a twist of lemon stirred over a huge hand-carved chunk of ice. Another drink uses the pineapple gum syrup made by Small Hand Foods for Pisco Punch all over town, but in a different way… that I can't recall exactly but it was my favorite drink of the night.

When I last wrote about this bar, I noted the all-star staff. Well, it got even starrier. Erick Castro of Bourbon & Branch will be joining for a couple days a week. Also working one shift will be Erik Ellestad, the blogger making every cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book, whom I wrote about in a Chronicle story a while back.

That also makes it a four-Eric bar. Erik Adkins, Eric Johnson, Erick Castro, and Erik Ellestad. So when you check out the place, make sure to ask for Eri(c)(k).

January 14, 2009
A Vintage Pisco Punch Story

I was stumbling through the internet the other day and came acrross this vintage story on Pisco Punch, written by Lucius Beebe and published in Gourmet Magazine in 1957.

Some choice quotes:

Once in the hands of Duncan Nicol it was translated, as by consecration
in the name of a divinity more benevolent than all others, into Pisco
punch, the wonder and glory of San Francisco's heady youth, the balm
and solace of fevered generations, a drink so endearing and inspired
that although its prototype has vanished, its legend lingers on, one
with the Grail, the unicorn, and the music of the spheres…

He meant it, too, about the two drinks to a customer. If a favored
patron like Fire Chief Scannell or James Flood, the Nevada bonanza king
who was himself once a saloonkeeper of note (both of them were known
tosspots), wanted more, he could walk around the block, thus qualifying
as a new customer. When millionaire John Mackay, perhaps the richest
man in America at the time, wanted a third, he like everyone else raked
his silk hat off the stag-horn rack, walked demurely around the block,
and returned to get if. Nobody took liberties with Nicol…

Pisco came into the fullest flowering of its celebrity, became a generic term, and entered the local language. A writer in the California Alta
elegantly referred to a drunken character as “more than piscoed.” Neill
C. Wilson, the western historian, coined the simile “as comfortable as
a Pisco jag.”

If you're a pisco nerd like me, it's a must read.

January 8, 2009
Sharing the Sherry Shrub

In Gary Regan's weekly cocktail newsletter, he shares with us Neyah White's recipe that won the Vinos de Jerez cocktail competition. The recipe is below. It sounds easy because it's only two ingredients, but naturally one of those two ingredients involves seven other ingredients and takes two weeks to make.

To see the recipes for the runner-up winners by Nate Dumas of the Clover Club, Joel Baker of Bourbon and Branch, and Daniel Eun of PDT, you'll have to go to Gary's website. They're a pretty amazing variety of drinks.

Sherry Shrub

Adapted from a recipe by Neyah White, Nopa, San Francisco.

Winner of the 2008 Vinos de Jerez Cocktail Competition

22.5 ml (.75 oz) House-Made Shrub*
60 ml (2 oz) La Gitana Manzanilla sherry
1 lemon twist, as garnish

Stir over ice and strain into a small sherry glass. Add the garnish.

*House-Made Shrub

Adapted from a recipe by Neyah White, Nopa, San Francisco.

1 quart fresh elderberries, trimmed from stems

1 cup fresh huckleberries

5 cups evaporated cane sugar

1 quart cider vinegar

1 oz kosher salt

5 brown cardamon pods

1 oz. jigger of white pepper corns

In a large bowl, mildly press fruit with
bottom of shaker tin till every berry is at least bruised. Muddle
spices in a mixing glass till all the corns are at least cracked. Add
sugar, cover and let sit 5 hours or until a good syrup has formed (this
should happen in a cool place, refrigerate if not available.) Add salt
and vinegar and stir till salt has dissolved, cover and return to cool
storage and let age for at least a week. Then filter successively
through a china cap then a cheesecloth. Bottle in clean, sterile
bottle leaving a few inches of air under the cap. It is now ready to
use, but another week of aging allows for a deeper, more lingering
flavor. The beauty of this cocktail is seasonality and custom
flavors. It must be stressed that this is a seasonal concept and it
should be made with whatever produce is peaking the week you make it.

January 6, 2009
The History of the Ice Trade

I recently finished reading The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story by Gavin Weightman. The book is the story of Frederic Tudor, whose wacky idea of cutting ice in winter from ponds in Massachusetts and selling it to people in warmer climates in the summer turned into a 100 year industry until refrigerated ice became readily available. Tudor's ice was shipped as far as Martinique, India, San Francisco (around the tip of South America where there was plenty of ice already), New Orleans, and throughout the American South.

Of course, my interest in the book was purely cocktail-related. The sale of ice was directly responsible for the creation of drink categories including juleps, cobblers, and smashes, and created the need for cocktail shakers as well as straws. Iced drinks became popular with Englishmen in India, but didn't catch on in England (not for lack of trying to sell it there). American cocktails stood out from English and other ones in their need for ice (as evidenced by books like Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks), and grew in format and in number because of this ingredient.

As we know the cocktail was an American invention and probably its first native cuisine, we can probably chalk up a lot of the credit for America's famous drinks and bartenders (pre-Prohibition) to this one guy who created a world-wide industry out of nothing but freebies- frozen lakes, sawdust to keep it cold through the summer, and room in ships' holds as ballast on trading routes.

The book itself isn't the "page-turner" as described on the cover, nor does it delve too deeply into the discussion of the impact on cocktails, but with an understanding of what came later in American cocktail history, it's fascinating for its implications.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

January 5, 2009
Party Tips from Esquire

I think it's a little odd to put your New Year's party tips in the January issue of a magazine instead of December, then to give away all the content online before it's even January, but that's why I'm not a rich and famous magazine editor.

Nor am I a David Wondrich, who wrote all the booze stories for the issue. They include:

Esquire's Guide to Hosting

A complaint about oversized Martini glasses

And batch-sized recipes for party drinks: the Gin Daisy, Manhattan, and an original drink called the Saint Valentine (umm, wrong month again?) that includes rum, port, Grand Marnier, and lime juice.

December 30, 2008
Cover Girl

Did you get your copy of Imbibe Magazine in the mail today? I did. Oh neat, look at that 12-page cover story on scotch whisky. I wonder who wrote it…

Wait a minute, I did! That's my story. Hooray!

December 24, 2008
The New Noilly

Cocktail nerds are abuzz these days with the news that the recipe for Noilly Prat vermouth has changed, as has the bottle. Word is that the American version, which was designed to be mixed into cocktails, will now be replaced with the European, which is more often sipped on its own and not mixed. It is said to be more intense and woody than the previous version.

Spirit Me Away compares the old and new formulas.

December 23, 2008
Recommended Bottles in the SFBG

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week I have a story on some recommended bottles to pick up this winter season. Here's the picture.

December 19, 2008
New Bars and Old New Bars
San Franciscans should immediately leave work and run screaming to their local newsbox to pick up this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian. Why? Because you'll find me waiting for you inside. In the Scene insert I have two stories. One of them is on some new recommended bottles of booze. The other is on new watering holes that have opened in the city this year.

I realized that I've written the New Bars story for the past three years. Maybe it will be fun to compare my brilliant observations over the years. Let's find out:

New Bars Story 2006
- "At least 15 bar-bars, five wine bars, and five clubs opened in the city, as did a bunch of restaurants that serve great drinks. It takes a strong liver to keep current, further blurring the line between journalism and alcoholism."
- "Several bars went from upscale to downscale this year, proving that not every lounge needs to be ultra."
- "Three more art bars opened in 2006, following the success of all the other art bars in town."
- "American whiskey bars are big, big, big this year, and now there are three new venues in which you can order a sazerac cocktail or a rye Manhattan."
- "A large number of new restaurants have such great cocktail programs they cause certain writers to spend inordinate amounts of time and money in them without ever trying the food."
- "Now that every neighborhood in San Francisco has a wine bar or three, the new venues are starting to specialize."
New Bars Story 2007
- "Whereas in previous years the lines between bars and art galleries got blurry, this year it’s hard to categorize venues as bars or restaurants or wine bars or cocktail lounges or nightclubs."
- "Most of the new wine bars are not really bars at all, though- they’re either wine retail outlets with tasting bars inside, or they’re small plates restaurants by another name."
- "Some of the best drinking is to be had in eateries with all those fresh fruits, vegetables, and other ingredients in the kitchen just begging to be muddled into cocktails where they belong."
- "The line between bar and club blurs ever more when there is DJ and bottle service and they serve light appetizers and are open at 5PM. Clubs are opening earlier for increased happy hour drink sales and are demoting space for the dancefloor; in effect becoming cocktail bars with a club crowd."
- "For a while, all the beer and wine-only bars were selling soju and sake cocktails in an attempt to stay trendy. This is still true at restaurants without full liquor licenses, but now we’re seeing more beer-focused venues that build the concept around the brew, not the food."
- "It seems the least popular type of drinking establishment to open this year is the thing we used to know as a bar, where they don’t serve food (or the food only serves to keep you drinking, like the popcorn machine in Tenderloin bars) and there isn’t a dancefloor or cocktail waitresses or bottle service and there still exists a magic time called happy hour."
New Bars Story 2008
- "Not too long ago I’d come home from a night of barhopping with ringing ears and smelling of cigarettes. Now half the time I get home reeking of braised calamari and elderflower with an earful of soft jazz. Most of the new watering holes to open this year were restaurants and hotel lobbies with extravagant bar programs and cocktail lists."
- "Now that good drinks are in demand at every new restaurant, bartenders are barhopping from venue to venue."
- "Though hotel lobby bars have traditionally been places to find traditional drinks, now many of them are promoting innovation and eco-cocktails."
- "A different grape spirit, pisco, a brandy from Peru or Chile, is showing up on the menu at dozens of the best bars in the city."
- "Since sitting quietly and sipping is the new raving until dawn, there isn’t too much point in building new warehouse nightclubs. Instead, a few older spots were freshened up and sometimes renamed."
Hopefully the full story will go online soon for the not-in-SF readers. In the meantime, check out CitySearch's Top 10 New Bars of 2008– which includes a few of them I missed.
December 18, 2008