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 Entertainment | May 2006 
Two Parts Vodka, a Twist of Science
 Peter Meehan - NYTimes
| | At Moto in Chicago, Mike Ryan uses a laser to tease smoke out of a vanilla bean; it will flavor the red wine that will be poured into the glass. (Peter Thompson/NYTimes) |
At David Burke's Primehouse, a weeks-old steakhouse in Chicago, the house vodka martini is garnished with a lollipop — a lollipop made from "reduced olive brine, olive flavoring and salt crystallized in isomalt" that is stuffed with blue cheese, according to its creator, Eben Klemm. The restaurant's house manhattan is made with leather-infused bourbon, sweet vermouth and a bitters-spiked maraschino purée, dropped into the drink as a liquid that coalesces into a "gumdrop" when it hits the side of the glass.
Mr. Klemm, director of cocktail development for B. R. Guest, which owns Primehouse, is one of a handful of freethinking bartenders who have taken to the idea of employing the techniques of avant-garde cooking to their work behind the bar, a trend that's being called "molecular mixology."
Another Eben, Eben Freeman, the former bar manager at WD-50 in Manhattan, worked with its chef, Wylie Dufresne, and its pastry chef, Sam Mason, to turn cocktails into papers, gels (kind of like Jell-O shots with a pedigree) and powders, like a "rum and Coke" made of rum powder from a flavoring company and soda-flavored Pop Rocks, for fizz.
Mr. Freeman will be one of the featured bartenders at tonight's Taste of the Nation event at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, where he will serve spoonfuls of a Cape Codder — vodka and cranberry juice — rendered, with the help of Mr. Dufresne and a little agar-agar, into tiny translucent orbs.
Mr. Dufresne and Mr. Mason regularly use Campari, Chartreuse and other distinctively flavored liquors in the kitchen, but they have left the cocktails largely to their bar staff (which for the most part, serves up creatively composed, excellent cocktails, but not obstinately modern drinks like those in this article).
One chef who has gotten in on the act is Homaru Cantu at Moto in Chicago.
Mr. Cantu uses a grade-school science trick — baking soda plus acid equals fizz — for his Fizzing & Foaming Hurricane and a very not-grade-school trick involving a Class 4 laser, typically used for military experiments and eye surgery, according to Mr. Cantu, and a vanilla bean to "caramelaserize" a wineglass — that is, to coat it with the flavor of vanilla — before filling it with red wine and pairing the altered wine with a beef course on his restaurant's tasting menu.
José Andrés and his chef, Katsuya Fukushima, include two cocktail courses in the 20-plus-course menu that constitutes a meal at Mr. Andrés's Minibar, inside the Café Atlántico in Washington. One is a whiskey sour topped off with a passion fruit foam; the other is a little spray can, from which you can mist as much mojito into your mouth as you like.
The pair are currently perfecting two new drinks, a "dirty" martini and a carbonated mojito "espherication." For the martini, they blend olive juice, vermouth and gin with xanthan gum and calcium chloride and drop it into a sodium alginate and water solution to form stable olive-shaped blobs. It is served as a lone olive in an empty glass; it reverts to a liquid state when popped into the mouth. The mojito is made with rum, lime and mint and shaped into a sphere through the same process, then carbonated in a pressurized container filled with carbon dioxide to mimic the bubbly mouth-feel of a real mojito.
All the drinks at Minibar pay homage to the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià's cocktail work at his influential and experimental restaurant El Bulli, near Barcelona, in one way or other; Mr. Fukushima said the dirty martini is based on Mr. Adrià's technique for "liquid melon ravioli."
In his book "El Bulli 1998-2002," Mr. Adrià describes 1998 as the year of "the cocktail invasion" — the year that cocktails were thrown into the creative mix at El Bulli. From that point forward, the restaurant has featured cocktails re-imagined in an appropriately El Bulli fashion on its menus: a gin fizz, half hot, half frozen, or a shandy made with beer and lemon foam.
Mr. Adrià's work with cocktails is the likely (and best-documented) genesis of this new mixological trend. Many of his early drinks employed flavored foams — frothy flavorful superlight mousses of a sort — one of Mr. Adrià's signature techniques. Foams are, generally speaking, made with a flavored liquid — like a fruit juice — and gelatin or egg white in a whipped cream canister charged with nitrous oxide. Because foam is relatively easy to make, it is the one new cooking technique that has seen the most widespread use behind bars. Other early cocktails of Mr. Adrià's manipulated the specific gravities of liquids — a technique that bartenders were using as far back as the turn of the last century to layer liquors of different densities.
When I brought up the topic of these contemporary cocktails with David Wondrich, who writes about drinking for Esquire, he noted that practical — if not precisely molecular or scientific — knowledge of how the ingredients behind a bar interact was once part of the bartender's stock and trade.
A talented bartender would have a handle on the specific gravities of different liquors so he could layer them one on top of another to make a rainbow-striped pousse-café, or would know when to add a spoonful of superfine sugar while mixing a tall drink to really get the drink to fizz.
Mr. Wondrich is skeptically optimistic about the new trend. "Look, if we keep making the same five drinks over and over and putting a "tini" suffix on them, we're not going to get any new deliciousness out of the process," he said. "But I think it needs time to filter into what is doable, what is satisfying and what is just for show."
Determining what is satisfying is a matter of taste and though Mr. Klemm says Primehouse is doing a breezy business in his lollipopped martini and leather-infused manhattan, he said: "People are much more conservative about their cocktails than they are about food. I bet people go in to WD-50 and say, 'Bring on the fried mayonnaise, bring on the craziest stuff Wylie's got — oh, and can I get a cosmo to start?' "
As a result he has kept his experimentation behind B. R. Guest's bars to an acceptable minimum: restrained accents on drinks in Chicago, one foam drink at Vento in the meatpacking district, one at Barça 18 on Park Avenue South. (Chris Dexter, a partner at Del Toro, a tapas restaurant in Chicago, facetiously suggested a Red Bull foam to make that bartender's bane, the ubiquitous nightlife combo of Red Bull and vodka, at least a touch more interesting.)
Mr. Klemm says he wants to keep introducing drinks that make people "rethink how tastes and textures, especially classic combinations, can work together." But, he hastily added, "There's no way that I'm ever going to be able to serve liquid nitrogen margaritas at Dos Caminos," another B. R. Guest restaurant. "We have frozen margaritas, but how much more frozen do I want to get?"
Mr. Andrés and Mr. Fukushima have found few hurdles difficult to clear on the "doable" count. They have worked a number of molecular mixology touches into the high-volume drink menu at Café Atlántico, Mr. Andrés's pan-Latin restaurant. There is celery air on the bloody marys and sea salt air on the margaritas. (Air is, for the uninitiated, lighter than foam, and made with lecithin instead of gelatin.) In a playful, if not exactly molecular touch, they serve a "magic mojito": an unsweetened mojito decanted from a cocktail shaker into a glass filled with cotton candy that immediately dissipates into — and sweetens — the drink.
Many of the bartenders and chefs I spoke with complained that "molecular mixology" is not a wholly accurate designation for a trend that is less about molecular science and more about techniques that chefs are adapting and discovering in their kitchens.
The name is a tweak on molecular gastronomy, a term for the application of scientific principles to cooking, coined by Hervé This, a French scientist. Mr. This (pronounced teece) was the main attraction at a symposium that Bols, the liquor company, held for bartenders from around the world on the subject in Paris last year.
But when pressed for a better name, no one quite had a likely successor on the tip of his tongue. Mr. Klemm prefers to think of it as cognitive mixology, reflecting both the bartender and the drinker's thought processes as they relate to the drink. Mr. Dufresne was no help, either. "It's my job to cook," he said. "It's your job to come up with names for it."
So, for the time being, molecular mixology will have to suffice. At least until, after one too many martini pipettes at Moto or perhaps in the thaw that follows the brain freeze after a too-big swig of liquid-nitrogen-cooled Scotch, someone stumbles onto something better. |
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