Food-forward cocktails are in vogue for high-end bar programs.

Bri Lopez, at Leeward Lid Coffee House, pours Bibeta, a non-alcoholic drink with beet verjuice, grapefruit, satsuma oleo and soda. Ben McCanna / Staff Photographer

The line between dinner and drinks is blurring, and it’s not because you’re overly conservative.

Fans of au courant cocktails or anyone with an adventurous palate these days can enjoy drinks around town with everything from fresh spinach and carrots or roasted beans to Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, brown butter, lobster, North African shakshuka sauce – even fresh. and sour Thai tom yum soup.

Craft cocktail lounges and upscale restaurant bar programs such as Portland’s Blitz and Burrows, Broken Arrow, The Danforth, Evo and Leeward are leading the food-first drink trend locally. These culinary cocktails use delicious ingredients to open up new flavor possibilities, bringing diners closer to their zero-food-waste goals.

“People want to try something new and exciting,” explains Nick Polo, Evo’s general manager. “People are thinking more outside the box in cocktail programs, not just in Portland, but around the U.S. You start incorporating food into the drink, and you can take the roof off what you think a cocktail can be.”

Chloe Frechette, senior editor of Punch, an online magazine covering the world of wine and spirits, says what we’re seeing today is an evolution of the culinary cocktail. The modern era began in the early 2000s with West Coast-style cocktails that relied on fresh produce and juice, ditching the sour mix and other low-end conveniences, and creating a “farm-to-glass” approach.

In the year In 2022, Double Chicken Please, the buzzy New York City bar known for food-based cocktails like cold pizza and mango sticky rice, was ranked sixth on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Bars list. “It feels like a natural progression for me,” Frechette said. It’s gone from cocktails that incorporate fresh food to cocktails that replicate food.

“The cocktail scene in Portland has come a long way,” said Bree Lopez, head bartender at Leeward. “We generally have a more informed customer, and I think they understand what makes a good cocktail.”

A labor of love

More and more, what makes a good cocktail are thoughtful recipes that push the boundaries of customer expectations.

As fresh-ingredient cocktails gained traction in the Outs, leading-edge bars like Manhattan’s East Village began toying with techniques like fat washing, a simple please-don’t-tell. PDT’s influential Benton Old-Fashioned—a bourbon drink infused with hickory-smoked bacon from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams and Bacon in Tennessee—has ignited creative fires at bars around the country.

“I think that’s turned into what a lot of bar programs are doing at this point,” says Carlo Caroscio, the Danforth’s head bartender.

One technique of fat rinsing allows bartenders to incorporate fat-containing ingredients such as bacon, butter, sesame oil, and cheese into cocktails. The method involves immersing the featured ingredient in the base of the cocktail for hours or days, depending on the size of the group and the amount of flavor desired. The fully mixed liquid is filtered and cooled so that the remaining solidified fat easily slides over the top.

Another important technique is clarification, or what the bartenders call milk punch. The process is similar to that of heating beef with egg whites to strain the beef into a crystal-clear broth, producing a “raft” of cooked albumen that traps the tiny bits floating in the murky mixture.

In milk punch, bartenders combine milk (usually heated) with a nutrient-rich drink base and an acidic ingredient such as citrus juice. The curdled milk and condensed proteins clarify the drink like a consomme raft. As a bonus, the strained liquid—retaining color and flavor from the processed foods—gains body and a lush, smooth mouthfeel.

Joe Formaggio at Leeward: Two gins and two vermouths infused with Parmigiano Reggiano rinds and garnished with lemon oil. Ben McCanna / Staff Photographer

At Leeward, the house is the Martini Joe Formaggio, a gin and vermouth concoction with Parmigiano Reggiano cheese rinds, an umami-packed leftover that stacks up fast in a high-end Italian restaurant. Lopez said the idea for the drink came from customers who wanted blue-cheese-stuffed olives in their martinis that were always sweet and lean.

These complex drinks are made in large batches, so they can be poured to order. But the parts themselves take several days to fully insert.

“They are more labor intensive. It’s a labor of love,” Lopez said. “It’s also a creative outlet.”

Building bar-kitchen symbiosis

Like the bars at other top local restaurants, Lopez said one of the goals of her bar program is to cultivate a symbiosis with the kitchen in a way that customers appreciate. She recalled a pasta and squash dish last fall on Leeward with brown butter, roasted sage and roasted pepitas.

So Lopez made a fat-washed scotch with butter, the oregano syrup from the pepitas, and dried sage for the rim of the glass. “It was fun talking to the guests, and it was great to have cocktails and that food in the same place for a while,” Lopez said.

As Polo puts it, “If the drink doesn’t talk to the food and the food doesn’t talk to the drink, there’s no fusion.”

“If someone on the bar team makes a drink, the first people they like to try is the kitchen,” Polo continues. “Engaging the chefs’ palates is key to the drinks’ success.”

“It’s amazing to be able to tap into a chef’s mind for input,” agrees Lopez, who regularly consults with Leeward Kitchen when researching and developing new drinks. Her bar menu has 13 featured cocktails, including some low-abv and non-alcoholic drinks like the Bibeeta, which gets its main flavor and color from bees roasted in Verjus.

Lopez works closely with the bakery department. One current experiment involves dried pulp left over from juicing carrots for a non-alcoholic carrot cocktail: Leeward’s pasta chefs are seeing if they can use it in their carrot cake gelato dessert.

“We try to use each other’s waste as much as possible,” Lopez said.

“There’s a lot of second-hand products that come out of kitchens that can then be used in the bar,” says Jesse Robb, general manager of Broken Arrow. “Good for the restaurant is good for the planet. Broken Arrow is a reduced waste bar program. That’s definitely something woven into the concept of the restaurant.

The Lola Brown cocktail features carrots drenched in aquavit, on a broken bow. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Staff Photographer

Brian Walnicki, bar manager of Rob and Broken Arrow, recommends the Lola Bunny, one of his winter cocktails. The drink is made by infusing fresh carrots with the herby aquavit that is abundant in the Broken Arrow kitchen this season.

Like other bars exploring the parameters of food-centric cocktails, Broken Arrow also has some really interesting combinations, like the Espresso Martini served with butter syrup flavored with cinnamon, vanilla, allspice and tea. The Broken Arrow team uses a powder emulsifier to keep the liquid uniformly smooth and lend more body.

The emulsifier add-in is an example of how today’s innovative bars are using techniques that first emerged in the fine dining molecular gastronomy phase of the early 2000s, led by top chefs such as Ferran Adrià, formerly of El Bulli in Spain, and Grant Achatz of Alinea. in Chicago.

“Restaurant bar programs are starting to expect their bar managers to practice thinking about these techniques and flavor profiles the same way people in the kitchen think,” Robb said. “It’s a new hope. I don’t think it’s a new set of practices across the board, but it’s certainly a new level.

“These drinks don’t taste weird. They’re not pushing the boundaries of what they can enjoy,” she continued, noting that the decades-long popularity of umami-laced drinks like briny, dirty martinis suggests that “people have subconsciously opened up to more sweet drinks. “

“We put a lot of thought into these drinks, not just random food scraps,” Walnicki added. “People are surprised at how much they enjoy these drinks and, in fact, how comfortable they are. Not only will you reduce waste when drinking cocktails, but it will taste as good as you want to make at home. I think this turns people off.

I’m confused but excited

Still, one part of these types of drinks is that the common man cannot easily produce them at home. Lopez explains that innovation and time-consuming techniques are part of what justifies putting it on the bar menu. “Or someone says, ‘I can do this at home, so why pay $16 when I’m out?’ Does he think so?” Lopez said.

“At Blyth, we’ve always wanted to be able to serve cocktails that you can’t make at home, so this is a natural progression for us,” said Caleb Landry, co-creative director of Blyth & Burrows with Adam. Sosa. Blyth & Burrows now serves food-focused cocktails, which may take longer than other craft cocktail spots in the area.

Their bold concoctions are noteworthy: cocktails based on clam chowder or lobster rolls, Landry’s on breakfast toast, goat cheese, blackberries and honey, and another spinach-infused drink called The Spinacher (after Popeye’s Boat). In cash, fungus and gin.

“We definitely do it for giggles. But if it wasn’t done well, we wouldn’t put it on the menu,” Sosa said of their amazing creations.

Blyth & Burrows co-creative director Caleb Landry pours Spinacher, named after Popeye’s Boat and made with gin, lemon, cashews, sugar, spinach and fenugreek. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Staff Photographer

Their signature food-focused cocktail is the Tom Yum Punch, a gin drink in which they clarify a house-made Thai Tom Yum soup – infused with lime leaves, lemon grass, Thai chilli, galangal, ginger, chilli paste and fish sauce.

Tom Yum Cocktail at Blyth & Burroughs. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Staff Photographer

“It’s been on the menu for a number of years, and will probably be around until the end. “It’s a little intimidating on paper, but once people try it, they’re usually hooked.” Susa said. “You take people out of their comfort zone a little bit—they’re confused but happy, they’re not expecting what’s coming, but they’re still having a fun experience.”

The food fad in cocktails may seem gimmicky or overdone to some. And some bartenders say they prefer to follow a free course from trends.

“In my 20 years of working in cocktail bars, I’ve seen the trend of mixing food and spirits come up more than a few times,” says Andrew Volk, co-owner of Portland’s Hunt + Alpine Club. “I always love to see new bartenders pushing the envelope to find what works in cocktails. At Hunt, we make drinks that aren’t as trendy, but instead highlight techniques and stellar products.”

Still, craft cocktails say they love the creative outlet bars offer. “It allows you to broaden your horizons a little bit and not stick to one approach,” Landry says.

“It was a liberating and fun exercise for bartenders to think about cocktails as something other than gin and vermouth,” says Frechette, who visited Portland last summer and enjoyed the Caprese Milk Punch. And Basil – through Vecchia.

“It’s a trend I’m happy to see,” Frichette said. “It tricks your taste buds, and I think a lot of people enjoy that experience.”

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