It's no secret, News Me Baby is a big fan of Jonathan Gold. Here, his latest incredible article.
Read along as Mr. Gold turns the act of shaking a martini into a beautiful piece of poetry. Am I being dramatic? No. There's a reason he won that Pulitzer.
It is nearing one a.m., and the music has started to fade, and the quarrel that seemed so important over dinner has already crumbled out of memory. The friends you ran into on the street outside hurried home long ago; people who slide out of bars before midnight are built of different, sterner stuff. The evening slips by at a silky, languid pace. A pretty girl is at your side — the girls are all pretty in this dim, masculine light — and Eric Alperin, the young man on the other side of the bar, who — like all serious bartenders in Los Angeles at the moment sports the vest and rolled-up sleeves of a picnic-scene extra in a silent movie — is measuring out a fantastically complicated series of liquids from a row of unmarked laboratory beakers. Some half-dozen of them come together into a frosty, ice-filled metal shaker into which the bartender plops a single fresh egg white separated from its yolk with an elaborate wire device.
Alperin shakes the canister, and then shakes some more, arms extended at a perfect 45 degrees, his body motionless, the rhythm falling somewhere between a rhumba and a foxtrot. (At this level, bartending must be a great core exercise.) As the ice wears down, the sound softens from a crack to a rattle, and at the moment just before it deteriorates into a slushy sound, he cracks open the shaker, pours the contents through a filter, stirs in a bit of seltzer, and gently sets down a cylinder of marble-white liquid, thickened with a hint of foam, which goes down your throat like cold milk and has a subtle, persistent back taste of what you know to be orange-flower water. This is a Ramos Fizz, perhaps the greatest of all the New Orleans cocktails, and you have never had one so fine.
Continue reading..."The New Cocktalians"
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment