Author Archives: Hope Ewing

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About Hope Ewing

Writer. Bar person. Angeleno. Author of Movers & Shakers: Women Making Waves in Spirits, Beer, and Wine - Unnamed Press 2018

R&D Night at MessHall

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It seemed odd, at first, to be “guest bartending” at a bar where I already work. But the MessHall bar houses an amazing array of spirits and fresh ingredients, and we love playing around with new recipes, even if it doesn’t all go on the menu. So last night I clocked in as “guest” and served some off-menu drinks. 

  

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Every week, MessHall opens its patio bar to someone to try out some new recipes or showcase a spirit. 

MY R&D NIGHT

Having just published this here article on PUNCH about Skinos Mastiha Spirit, I decided to use some of the recipes I collected from Athens cocktail superstars Spyros Patsialos and Thanos Prunarus to further prosthelytize my love of liqeurs made from tree sap. Additionally, I had some drinks of my own I’d been cooking up for a while and wanted to test them out on some unassuming Wednesday night diners in Los Feliz. 

Here was the menu:

The copy was hastily written. So sue me.

The first and last drinks are riffs on the Skinos recipes. I didn’t have all the ingredients handy for Spyros’s Mantequilla, so I substituted blood orange syrup for his passionfruit syrup,  and Branca Menta as a similarly minty-ish-herbal-oddball bittering agent comparable to the Underberg bitter. The result, after a little tweaking, was awesome. 

The Ruby Jane (my own recipe) and the Mantequilla #2 (original recipe c/o Spyros Patsialos of huntingspirits.tv)

Prunarus’s Jalisko Flower was the other hit of the evening. Skinos and celery bitters are a natural match (carrots and celery!), and the tequila really brightens up the mix. Not having the time to do an infusion with the tequila, I snagged some of MessHall’s handy Kaffir Lime tincture and used it to rinse the glass and add a spritz to the nose. Just wonderful. 

Jalisko Flower, recipe c/o Thanos Prunarus, Baba au Rum, Athens

I think the winner of the stirred drinks was Colabórame (not pictured), a perfectly clear mix of pisco, dimmi, and salers apertif with a drop of mole bitters, which when combined somehow tastes of a really good espresso–a very subdued note in the ingredients by themselves, but somehow thrust to prominence when they are stirred over ice and sprayed with a little grapefruit oil. 

Guest bartending is like moving, though, in that unless you’re a celebrity you really only get one or two goes at it before your friends stop feeling obligated to come support you. So maybe I’ll do this again, if they let me, but not for a while. It was a blast while it lasted, though. 

Lemme talk about pisco for a sec

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We went to Lima last week. I’ll probably write something about it at some point, after I’ve had time to digest the last of the ceviche and the feelings and stuff. 

What I want to talk about now (for a change) is booze. [Obligatory food-and-drink-piece-meaningless-generalization]: Thanks to the cocktail resurgence of the past 15 years or so, people seem more than ever to be up to discovering new liquors. Gin is showing its boundless flavor possibilities, fruit and herb liquers are gaining traction, tequila and Irish whiskey have emerged from the ghetto of shooters with strong showings as delectable sipping and mixing spirits, mezcal has gone from scary-worm-booze to delightful artisanal tipple. It only makes sense that pisco, the unaged grape brandy that is the national spirit of TWO South American countries, would come on board. 

Some of the good stuff. Pisco puro quebrantas.

National Tresasure

Brazil has the caipirinha, Argentina has Fernet and coke, and Peru has the pisco sour.  Chile also has the pisco sour, although the spirit is different, and the drink recipe is different, and there is all this contention over who invented it, but you know what? I only went to Peru. And I prefer Peruvian pisco, it turns out. Peruvians are hard-asses about pisco production: it can only be made from eight types of grapes, it has to be made without adding any water, meaning it’s once distilled to proof. THIS MEANS that pisco from Peru is all grape juice; fermented into wine and then distilled ONE TIME into a clear eau-de-vie (or aguardientes) that lands…BOOM…into the bottle at around 80 proof. 

Think about it this way: vodka is generally distilled five times. This makes it the most neutral of neutral spirits, taking out all the “impurities” (aka things that impart flavor) through a shit-ton of boiling and condensing. Whiskey is distilled two or three times and aged in wood casks to add flavor and color (I like to think of brown spirits as wood-infused. In a good way.). Pisco gets one trip through the still, then rests in non-reactive containers. So all you’re tasting is the grapes and the yeast. Depending on the grapes used and the production style, it can be super clean and silky or it can be real fiery or flowery or funky. The best part about all these intense regulations is that by law, you can’t add a bunch of fillers or artificial crap into . Pisco is just pisco. 

So?

I mean, there is the uncontestable pisco sour. Persian limes (special limes), egg white for froth, a little sweetness, and the fiery aguardientes have been making this drink a bar staple since the 1800s. One of a few origin stories for the cocktail centers around the historic Hotel Bólivar in central Lima, which today makes a version with pisco macerated with coca leaves for a distinctly vodka-redbull-without-the sugar-headache tingly feeling. [NOTE: despite unrefined coca’s complete illegality in the US, I like to quote author Mark Adams from his  travel memoir Turn Right at Macchu Picchu on its potency: “coca leaves have about the same relationship to cocaine that Sudafed cold tablets have to crystal meth.” We were perked up, but nobody wanted to talk ecstatically to strangers and dance on tables all night. The leaves lent an herbal note to the sours that, combined with the silk of the eggwhites and the quebrantas burn, was exceedingly pleasant. 

Coca Sours at Bolivarcito in Lima – breakers of language barriers

 You can get a pisco sour just about anywhere that serves alcohol. We had one at the coffee shop. We had one at the cevichería. We had one at the sushi resto and the club-y bar. The sour is frequently accompanied on menus by the Chilcano–a long drink with lime and ginger ale/beer over ice (mule style); and the Capitán, a short, stirred drink with sweet vermouth and bitters (Manhattan style).  However, having the privilege of drinking at some of Lima’s most interesting bars and restaurants, all I wanted was to see what the mixologists were up to. 

  

Clockwise from top left: Shilico from ámaZ, Tobaco y Chanel and Capitán Cacao from La Barra, pisco puro (neat) from the very puzzled waiters at the sushi spot, Edo.

We went to Ámaz early on, which was good, because it was fantastic, but also bad, because I really had no idea how fantastic until I’d had some time to decompress. The Amazonian food menu has had people cooing for some time, but the bar has all the fixings to make a cocktail snob go all squishy with excitement. My selection: Shilico — Pisco, camu camu, bianco vermouth and Aperol. Translation, respectively: 1) the national spirit, 2) Amazonian berries, 3) the forgotten (and subtly tastiest) vermouth, 4) Campari’s more easy-going cousin. Boom. Pow. What. Up.  

At La Barra (the casual-ish arm of the sooo famous Astrid y Gastón) we had a twist on a capitán with punt-e-mes and creme de cacao (a liqueur that seems much more at home in South America), a gin and tonic with melting spun sugar and lavender ice cubes, and a rum drink with tropical fruit and honey served in a maté gourd with a metal straw and a side of burning pipe tobacco for el nariz. Fricken wonderland. 

Every other place we went, I kept trying to try new piscos, just for sipping–a habit that my Peruvian hosts found funny and a little worrisome. The neat pour does not seem as pervasive as it is stateside, but I’m thinking with the rise in popularity of satiny and aromatic mosto verdes, this might change. But what do I know. I was only there for a week. 

Yeah, but soooo?

Lima’s bartenders have shown that pisco is mixable in just about every way you can think. Long drinks, short drinks, infusions, flaming theatrical pieces.  They have the heritage and the raw materials. And with the investment-backed juggernaut of Pisco Portón pulling a Jameson on the marketing landscape, I have the feeling you’re going to see more and more pisco in US bars. Which is exciting. Because it’s an approachable white spirit that’s more interesting than vodka. Don’t argue with this. It is. 

So go drink some fricken pisco. Here are a couple I like that you can get in the US: 

Capurro – a legit Peruvian pisco available mostly (I believe, somebody correct me if this is wrong) as an acholado or blend. I like blends. It means somebody really took the time to think about how it should taste.

Campo de Encanto – Puro? check. Acholado? check. Multiple grape varietals? Indeed. This stuff is pretty sweet. 

Any other recs? LMK. 

On formality and acting like an old person and a child simultaneously

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I have this habit. I think it comes from working in nonprofit development, where every word out of one’s mouth must be vapid and obsequious. If I’m emailing or calling someone for the first time, for some reason, I feel obliged to refer to them formally, as a Mr./Ms. For example:

Dear Mr. McDonald,
I am writing with an inquiry about your delicious (if deadly) hamburgers.

When I feel many people would probably be perfectly comfortable writing:

Dear Ronald,
I have been a conflicted fan of yours for ages.

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The Campers

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They were occupying the only four-top in my section when I arrived. Customers of the happy hour server. This table represented one third of the seats for which I was responsible. Ours is a popular dinner spot. We turn the tables three, four times a night. They’d finished eating. Yet still, they sat.

I’d gone from friendly inquiry (“anything else I can get for ya?”) to obsessive water re-filling, to water withholding, to ignoring them, and finally, to making pointed eye contact whenever possible. No, they didn’t need anything. But they would not leave.

They were professional-looking middle agers. People who should know better. I’m fairly certain they were not stoned. The check was handed off and paid. And still, they sat.

Tables around them came, ate, drank, enjoyed desserts and digestifs, paid, left. One turn, two turns. Three. They sat. They laughed. They side-eyed me when I passed.

Just before the kitchen closed, they picked up their coats and left their empty water glasses behind. My sigh was exaggerated, but my colleagues sympathized. The night was a wash, worse than brunch. Looked like I’d be eating lentils and getting the budget cat food this week.

So I decided to follow them home. Don’t ask me how I found the address. The host is a friend of mine who doesn’t deserve firing.

When I arrived at their spacious bungalow with my tent, I was pleased to find a strip of city land adjacent to their property, an unused thoroughfare previously occupied by a defunct tram line.  I made camp on a spot with a view into their kitchen window.

It’s been two weeks. I cook my lentils on my coleman stove and wave when they come out on the deck. The police have been understanding. One of the nice officers’ daughters is a server. No telling how long I’m going to stay–until I feel good and ready to leave, I suppose. I’m not here to extort them. I just want them to get used to my face, the sound of my laughter when I stream movies over their Wifi. To remember these things, when they are tempted to linger in someone else’s space.

Poetry and Wine

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Back in grad school I took a course called “On Beauty,” where we read theory and fiction and poems and talked about aesthetics and deep/superficial things like that. I was a fierce champion of non-visual beauty, and wrote a final paper that talked about numerous fictional characters experiences eating and drinking and touching things. It got real: I quoted Helen Keller and Jean Genet in the same sentence. I was proud of it. Until now it was probably the most unrepentantly pretentious thing I’d done.

I bemoaned that while sight and hearing have huge amounts of critical work devoted to their aesthetics, taste and smell seemed to be plopped into a ghetto of “commercial” (IE restaurant) reviews. I wondered, if a painting can use one element (paint) to represent the range of human experience visually, can’t we have an equivalent for smell? Where my perfume critics at?

Then I moved to California and started going to wine tastings. And there it was.  Continue reading →

How to Yelp Like a Human with Empathy

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The problem with Yelp is it’s so personal; reviewers only think about themselves: “I don’t think anyone should go to this restaurant. It’s the worst.” There’s just not enough empathy to think about how other people might experience it. It’s only from their lens. Also, Yelpers don’t have any professional protocol. They sit down and say, “If you don’t do this, we’re going to give you a bad Yelp score.” We’re like, what the fuck?

David Chang, Momofuku Chef/mastermind and lover of burritos.

Sure, there are some valid, non-hateful reasons to look at a restaurant’s Yelp page. Paraphrasing Chang: it is great for finding an address, but any chef worth his kosher salt wouldn’t give a Yelper’s dramatic recounting of his or her tragic date night a second thought. My professional opinion as a server is that Comments are the worst part of the Internet, and Yelp is all Comments, all the time. And I have almost-successfully trained myself not to read the comments, on YouTube, on the NYTimes site, and in life.

The problem is, however, that review sites are likely the first or second search result that appear when you search for a restaurant or type of food in your area. Which means restaurant owners and managers read these comments like it’s their job. ‘Cause it is.
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ISO podcasts

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Seems like this is the year that everyone discovers downloadable audio programs. Which is great. Because in a world of quick-gratifying images, the idea that people still want to listen to someone tell them a story for fifteen minutes or an hour at a go soothes my little verbal-centric heart.

I have a distinct memory of being in a fantastically uncurated thrift store in Astoria, Queens, probably 2007 or 2008, swaddled in a virtual bubble of headphone solitude, listening for the first time to Dan Carlin talk about the Black Death as an apocalyptic event on par with the craziest zombie movie. If you know me, you understand how tailor made this moment was. Pawing through racks of dusty, faded tops in search of a $120 shirt that would cost me $4.50, listening to a lively, enthusiastic voice bring up history from angles I’d never thought of before. It kickstarted my morbid fascination with Plague (another post, y’all), for one, but got me hooked on audio for sure. There have been few times when I have felt more myself than that.  Continue reading →

Crappy New Year, or Tip Your Bartenders Tonight

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Tonight I’ll be partaking of a longstanding holiday tradition and working through New Year’s Eve. By choice.

Since gleefully reentering the food service world after years as a narcoleptic office rat in late 2010, I’ve made it a point, in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, to mention to my employer that if anyone is needed to bar-tend, serve, or stand around looking official on New Year’s Eve, I’m their girl. Because New Year’s Eve sucks. It is the worst holiday in the modern cannon. If I can’t peaceably hang out at home and watch The Twilight Zone, I’m gonna be making some money.

Part of this comes from too many years living in New York City, where my already crowded and overpriced town becomes, for one special night, four or five times more crowded and infinitely more expensive. Hordes from Connecticut, from the Island, from the far, far reaches of rural Jersey, from the midwest, from the deep south, from Philly and DMV, even Bostoners descend. As if every other place in the world had conspired to dump its worst people on us to fill the streets with shouting and vomit. Due to supply and demand, every nightlife establishment right down to your friendly neighborhood dive bar tacks a $20+ charge just to get through the door, and a mandatory prix-fixe of food you wouldn’t normally eat, just ’cause. It’s impossible to do anything, and impossible not to. Because it’s New Year’s Eve, and our culture and crappy, crappy movies have brainwashed us into thinking that if we don’t have fun in a crowded room full of awful strangers tonight, of all nights, what hope do we have for the rest of the year?  Continue reading →

What I’m worried about this week, or why I’ll never step in front of a camera again

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Today at the farmers’ market, we were approached by a woman saying she was “from ABC” and wanted to ask us a few questions about the market. Thinking this was an opportunity to give some props to an institution I really like, I consented, only to find myself in front of a camera 50 seconds (and and whirlwind waiver-signing) later. Blinking back my surprise, I awkwardly answered some questions about organic food and “GMOs”. I remember talking vaguely about wanting to buy from smaller producers as opposed to giant farms, and deflecting prodding questions about GMO technology by saying I wasn’t really up on the science. I wouldn’t say it was ALWAYS a bad thing to manipulate DNA for specific traits in plants. There’s a nuanced argument, here, for sure, but am I going to present this in what I thought was a 5-second fluff piece? Nah.

During the whole process, the man asking the questions stood off camera and jabbed this microphone in my face (as if trying to jam it into my mouth). Red flags were flying in my head. I finished the “interview” by telling them I’d come to buy some end-of-season peaches and first-of-the-season apples. Yawn.

I scrambled off, regretting that my time in Los Angeles has made me so open to talking to strangers.

Before I could disappear back into the crowd of welcoming hippies, hipsters, and yuppie parents, the producer stopped me and told me they were from Jimmy Kimmel Live. My heart dropped when I remembered the waiver I’d stupidly put my name on when I thought I was going to sing the praises of the friendly local nectarine sellers to the TV news audience in Pasadena.

She went on to tell me that they couldn’t use any of my interview. They were going around farmers’ markets, trying to get some numbskull armchair food-activists to spout some ignorance about FRANKENFOOD. But since, when asked what GMOs were, I’d replied “genetically modified organisms,” I was useless to them. She said.

My goodness, I hope so. I hope this doesn’t get chopped up and manipulated and I wind up being some asshole on the Internet.

Cause this was what I was wearing.

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I’m supposed to stay out of the sun, ok?