Zwack! Or, How I Almost Invented a Cocktail

Stepping off the office elevator one morning, a colleague and I found ourselves face to face with a young project manager with whom we occasionally worked.  “Would you like some Zwack?” she asked cheerfully.  As if in a bad sitcom, the colleague and I looked at one another, then back at the PM and said, in unison, “What?!”  The PM reached into her bag and pulled out a squat, spherical bottle.  “Zwack,” she said.  “It's Hungarian,” she elucidated after an awkward moment or two.  The label did indeed read “Z-W-A-C-K,” with a symmetrical, Swiss-looking cross underneath.  The story apparently was that PM's husband, a former U.S. army soldier, used to participate in joint exercises with the militaries of various NATO countries, particularly Hungary.  Ever since, his army buddies have been bringing back beverages native to whatever country they happened to visit.  “Are you really giving it away?” I asked skeptically.  “Yes,” she assured me, “we have a ton of it at home.  There is no way we could go through all of it.”  I had no idea what the company policy was regarding accepting offers of free booze, but being reasonably sure that it was being offered in good faith and with no expectation of any return favors, I took it.

The PM's heartfelt assurance that the stuff was not available in the US was proven false after a single glance at the back label (“Imported by Diageo North America, Inc., Norwalk, CT”), but that made it no less interesting.  Zwack is a liqueur made with a proprietary blend of herbs and spices, in the manner of Italian amari, the original recipe dating back to the late 1700s.  Medium amber in color, it has a nose of citrus, especially orange, as well as gingerbread and molasses.  The herbs are evident, but muted.  On the palate, it is more sweet than bitter, with flavors of orange, a hint of tea, and a medicinal quality not unlike that of Benedectine, but more subtle.  It is as if Cointreau and Chartreuse has a love child who turned out to be an introvert.  Now I had a bottle of the stuff.  But what to do with it?  Hungarians reportedly drink shots of ice-cold Zwack, but to me it had "cocktail" written all over it.

Rewind a couple of years and two thousand miles or so due west.  On a visit to Oregon, I had discovered Rogue's Pink Spruce – a locally made gin aged in Pinot Noir barrels.  A bar in Portland made it into a convincing Aviation Cocktail for me, and knowing I could not get it back home, I brought back a bottle.  The problem was that it proved not to be interchangeable with a traditional English gin in most contexts.  With a nose that was musty and not particularly fresh and a sharp burn of alcohol on the front palate, it was both more assertive and less refined than the gins I was used to, though with careful tasting, I detected some cucumber and spice on the finish.  The key difference, though, was that it was sweeter than any other gin I've ever tasted, Portland's own famously sweet and floral Aviation included.  Somewhat disappointed, I shoved the bottle into the back of a cabinet.

Although my embrace of the nouveau-cocktail culture has been slow and skeptical (let's face it, I'm just too old to hang with the faux-speakeasy kids), thanks to a couple of places in Asheville and Philadelphia I have grown fond of the Martinez, a mix of gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino and orange bitters that may or may not have been the predecessor of the modern martini.  Its main challenge, however, is that it calls for Old Tom gin, a relatively sweet precursor to the modern English gin, which only the most dedicated of home mixologists would keep on hand.  Could the Pink Spruce be an effective stand-in?  The answer proved to be a qualified yes.  After a few experiments with proportions, I had a reasonable facsimile.  But why not keep going?  Could Zwack's pronounced citrus flavors work synergistically with the bitters to mask the dank basement quality of the Pink Spruce?  This time, the yes was far more resounding, if I say so myself.  What I ended up with, though not that similar to the original Martinez any longer, was balanced, not too sweet, light-bodied enough not to coat the tongue but with enough layered depth to keep you focused and prevent you from drinking too many too quickly (Pink Spruce clocks in at 90 proof, after all).  I am still trying to come up with a good name.  My working name, in a nod to the Corpse Reviver, is Rosemont #2 (#1 still being under development), though if someone has something Hungarian-sounding to offer, I'd love to hear about it.

Rosemont #2
2 oz. Rogue Pink Spruce or Old Tom gin
¾ oz. sweet vermouth, preferably Dolin
¾ oz. Zwack
Generous dash of orange bitters

Fill a cocktail shaker half-way with ice.  Add the ingredients and stir vigorously for 30 seconds.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a swath of orange peel.

Highland Park 30-year-old Single Malt

Found myself at Jack Rose last Monday. I knew that the place had a mind-boggling collection of rare and vintage Scotches. What I didn't know is that most of them are available by the half-ounce taste. Well-aged Scotch is infamously unaffordable, but in half-ounce increments many are almost accessible to working stiffs once in a great while. For $6/taste, C.S. and I ended up trying Highland Park's 30-year-old single malt. It wasn't the "standard" 30-year, either. It appeared to be some kind of limited edition, long since out of production no doubt, but of course I've neglected to write down the exact name. The experience, however, needed no writing down. Color: dark amber, far darker than any other Scotch I've ever tasted. It looked like maple syrup. Nose: pronounced butterscotch (no surprises there) with some citrus and a sharp burn of alcohol. Palate: Butterscotch on the front, noticeable sweetness, very intense. On the mid-palate, surprisingly tannic. I tasted strong black tea. Finishes with a bright, acidic, almost lemony note - a Highland Park family trait shared with the relatively more plebeian 12-year-old. Quite possibly the best beverage in any category I have ever tried.

New Beligum and the earthquake

I guess I’m supposed to be writing about the earthquake, but there’s not a lot to write. Initially thought someone was jack-hammering downstairs, but as the intensity increased, people started coming out of their cubicles, saying “must be an earthquake.” One co-worker was seriously scared – the look on his face was the definition of paralyzing fear. All he could find the strength to say was “run fast.” I guess with both Fukushima and Haiti still fresh in everyone’s mind, I can’t blame him too much. The company sent people home. Cell phone service completely knocked out. The Metro was running, but on a 15-mph speed limit. I walked the five miles home, stopping for a pint along the way.

So instead, I am going to write about New Belgium. Long a staple of the craft beer scene out West, it is available here in Virginia as of last night. Rustico held a release party of sorts, which C.S. and I checked out. Once again I wasn’t taking notes, so I’m commenting from memory.

Ranger IPA (6.5% ABV, 70 IBU): Nice, clean-tasting IPA, balanced but slightly tilted towards bitter hops. Relatively light in body and color. Excellent when the weather is hot but you still want a pronounced hop flavor.

Trippel (7.8% ABV, 25 IBU): Seriously fruity and a little sugary for my taste. The brewers are mum on what they add, besides coriander (which I actually couldn’t taste), but some candy sugar has got to be in there. Not that there is anything wrong with that – adding it is an old Belgian tradition after all – but makes for a bit too much artificial sweetness for my taste.

Kick (8.5% ABV, IBU unspecified): Even more seriously fruity and sour cranberry and pumpkin lambic. Not at all my style. I only got a 3-oz. taste. It’s the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing.

I didn’t bother ordering a Fat Tire. Like everything else, it came in 12-oz goblets, which I thought was completely silly. Out West, it’s the quintessential session beer, and it will always remind me of weekend afternoons whiled away with friends on the rooftop of Grapevine in Scottsdale.

Jason Wilson, Boozehound

If you are going to go to school to study writing, don't do it at Drexel University. That is where Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits ostensibly teaches writing, and if the book is any indication, he is not very good at it. But I am getting ahead of myself. Boozehound is actually not a bad book. It's worth checking out by anyone who has any interest in distilled spirits and cocktails, primarily for the recipes. To his great credit, Wilson closes every chapter with a sizable selection of recipes, usually a mixture of classics and new-fangled concoctions, sometimes of his own creation. By the end of the book, all but the most obsessive amateur mixologist will be armed with a year's worth of experimental material.

As to the rest, Boozehound is largely true to food-writing form. Wilson travels around the Western hemisphere on his publisher's dime, visiting distilleries and bars, interviewing distillers and marketers and tasting a variety of spirits, some quite unusual, and marvels the whole time at his great fortune of being able to do this. Last I checked, this was called showing off.

Where Wilson really lost me, however, was the anecdotes of his supposedly misspent youth. Suburban New Jersey in the 1980s is an endless source of amusement to him, even all these years later. You would think that a college professor, ostensibly happily married with two kids, would have moved beyond this, and traveling around the world tasting exotic spirits would blow making out with a big-haired girl in a Camaro out of the water, but apparently not. Maybe it's just me. I never had the exhilarating experience of almost getting lucky with the most popular girl in the class on a high-school trip to Paris. But for my money, a well-mixed cocktail is best garnished with a twist of lemon peel, not a heap of teenage escapades.

The Astor Martini, or How I Failed to Broaden My Horizons

Going out of your comfort zone now and again is healthy, or so they say. Try something new for a change, you may surprise yourself. It'll broaden your horizons. My friend Clive, who knows a thing or two about beverages, recently shared a recipe for what he calls the Astor Martini: graprefruit juice, Campari and - here's the clincher - vodka. Ketel One vodka, specifically. Well, it is definitely grapefruit season, and Campari has been a staple in my home bar ever since Clive introduced me to the Negroni all those years ago. The problem is vodka. I do not drink it as a rule, and I tend to avoid cocktails based on it. The sole exception is the Bloody Mary, but even that is a rare treat these days. This despite, or maybe because, my origins lie in a place that invented the damn thing. So Ketel One was out of the question.

When I inquired about the possibility of using another brand, Clive equivocated, relaxing his dictum a bit but insisting on a certain minimum level of quality. Well, no doubt to his great disappointment, vodka quality is a foreign concept to me, and I am not likely to change the situation any time soon, due more to a lack of available liver capacity than interest. So I reached for the only thing I had ready to hand - a bottle of U.K.-made Three Olives that I bought a long time ago for a party.

Clive's photos show an unmistakably ruby-red grapefruit, but I had a yellow one on hand (really a pale pink once you cut into it). After a minute of squeezing, measuring, pouring and shaking, I had my cocktail. The original is apparently served without a garnish, but to me there is something incomplete about an ungarnished martini-style cocktail, the minimalist appeal notwithstanding, so seeing as I've already sacrificed a grapefruit, I gave the glass a generous swath of its rind. Then I strained and looked. Clive's photos show a decidedly red, almost blood-hued concoction, but mine came out unapologetically pink. I am talking blatant, 1980s nylon windbreaker pink. Girly pink, if I may use the term. Good thing no one is watching, I thought.

I sniffed - not much. A little pleasant citrus scent. I sipped. I must admit the flavor was appealing. Nice balance of sweet and sour, with just enough of the trademark Campari bitterness coming through to make it interesting. A little coriander, I thought - probably an ingredient in the famously secret Campari brought to the fore by the grapefruit. And then... nothing. The drink was a pleasant fruity bauble. Not nearly sweet enough to fall into the liquid-candy category - the grapefruit's tannic character saw to that - but it didn't exactly pack a punch, either. Perhaps it's the comfort zone thing, but I expect most drinks served in a martini glass to be potent, occasionally even overwhelming. After you take a sip of a properly made martini, you shouldn't want another one for a good long time - this is the reason why they should not be made too large and must be served as cold as possible. Same with the Manhattan - the best ones are made with a high-proof spirit like Rittenhouse Rye and a rich, viscous vermouth like Punt e Mes. The Astor, by comparison, was a breezy, whimsical thing, smooth to a fault, best served over ice at brunch. To be fair, the drink did originate at a Miami Beach hotel, and Clive recommended using it to "evok[e] holidays in balmy, exotic climates." My mind must be so far removed from such delights that even a cocktail can't bring it back.

Or did I do something wrong? Could it be that the vodka really does make a difference? Would the legendary (and expensive) Ketel One have added a whole new dimension to the drink, a level of depth and complexity that my semi-swill-grade flavorless alcohol vehicle just could not match? Maybe. In fact, I hope so. I am definitely looking forward to tasting a properly made specimen made by someone who know what he is doing. Until then, seeing as my days of plying unsuspecting female guests with deceptively smooth fruity cocktails are long since over, I am unlikely to attempt another one.

2007 Leelanau Cellars Vignoles

The last of the bottles I brought back from Michigan last summer. Vignoles is an obscure grape used for blending in France, but a couple of wineries in Michigan make it as a varietal. L. Mawby even makes it into a sparkler. Anyway, Leelanau Cellars' Vignoles -- very fruity on the nose, melon, maybe a little cucumber. Some sweetness. On the palate, just a touch off-dry, rich and viscous for a white, with excellent acid. Definitely a food wine. I paired it with some pasta with an asparagus and ricotta sauce, and it worked well, the richness of the ricotta offsetting the wine. But it would stand up to something significantly more garlicky as well.

New Orleans: Food

New Orleans is justly famous for its cuisine, though like anywhere else, it is easy to eat badly, and pay too much for it. The French Quarter is chock-full of restaurants, most of them tourist-grade "Creole" joints serving cut-rate versions of the same few local specialties - red beans and rice, gumbo, shrimp po-boys -- and charging too much for them. J. and I did end up having a late lunch at one, recommended a couple of days earlier by a cab driver, and while my bowl of red beans and rice was decent - reasonably creamy with nicely greasy andouille sausage -- it was not particularly memorable.

That said, at least a couple of places, though touristy, are worth the trouble. The first, of course, is Café du Monde. Located across Decatur Street across from Jackson Square, it is it open around the clock and is justly famous for its beignets - French-style donuts. A little over $2 gets you three large, hot puffs of fried dough, dusted with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar, and I must admit they are good. Not earth-shatteringly, transformatively good, but tasty. They reminded me of nothing so much as zeppoli - the Italian version of the same concept - that I used to eat at pizza parlors in Queens as a teenager. The thing to drink is Café du Monde's café au lait, which was also excellent. Served in normally sized coffee cups instead of giant mugs, it is a true au lait, made with equal part coffee and hot milk, not simply a couple of Mini-Moos dropped in as an afterthought. The black coffee is good as well. Spiked with ground chicory root - a throwback to the times when coffee was expensive and had to be cut with a cheaper substitute to be affordable, the story goes - it has just a slight bitter bite, but is otherwise balanced and smooth. Always fresh, too - the place goes through so much of it.

The other must, located almost directly across the street from Café du Monde, is Central Grocery. Most visitors think of New Orleans as the most French of American cities, being as it was the center of French Louisiana at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, but Italian cultural legacy is prominent as well, and dates back almost as far. Central Grocery is the oldest Italian store in the city still in existence, and is famous for its muffaletta - a giant sandwich of Italian cold cuts, provolone cheese, and olive salad. A vinegary mixture of coarsely chopped green olives and god knows how many other kinds of marinated vegetables, it is this "salad" (really more of a relish) that elevates the muffaletta into the realm of the sublime. Many restaurants in the Quarter offer them, but Central's is the only real thing. The trick is not to eat it right away (if you can resist - good luck), but to let it marinate a while so the flavors meld and the brine of the salad soaks into the bread just a little. When I first got into town, J. had already arrived, and had bought a muffaletta (half of one, technically - a whole, also available, is made with an entire loaf of bread) for lunch. Half or her half had been sitting, wrapped, in her bag for a couple of hours before we met up and I had a chance to eat it. It was unbelievably good - sharp, vinegary, with a great contrast of textures between chewy olives and soft bread, heavy on the cheese and relatively light on the meat, it was utterly unique and delicious. I immediately wanted to run and get another. We got them again on our last day in town, just before leaving for the airport, and while they were good, they didn't pack the punch they did after they've been sitting for a while. Evaluated objectively as a sandwich, they could stand to be a little more generous with the meat.

On two occasions, after having had late lunches and no specific plans for dinner, we ended up at the Bourbon House, located in the Astor Hotel on the edge of the Quarter. Most appetizers and entrees are overpriced and uneven. J.'s shrimp creole was decent one night, lousy the other, my soup barely qualified as mediocre. But the place is more than redeemed by its oyster bar. I had not had gulf oysters before, and they were a revelation - salty, strong-flavored but not metallic like some other varieties, meaty, and absolutely enormous - each one easily the size of three normal ones. They more than made up for other disappointments.

Bourbon House's other claim to fame is that it is the official bar of the Louisiana Bourbon Society, and as such features a mind-boggling selection of bourbons and ryes. On one of our visits, I had a manhattan made with Wild Turkey Rye, which I had not had before. It was a letdown - watery and bland. I blamed the bartender, not the rye. On the other visit, however, I ordered a pour of Four Roses bourbon, which apparently had just become available outside of Kentucky, for dessert. It was delicious - sweet and intense, and much better priced than most quality dessert libations would run you nowadays.

To be continued...

Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I

The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.

The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.

Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.

The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?

While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.

It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.

Coffee

My friend K.R. and I recently got into a conversation about coffee. She loves a good cup, and always brews good beans at home, as do I. The year before last, she gave me a Christmas present of delicious freshly-roasted beans from a boutique roaster in, of all places, Bisbee, AZ. So I asked her where she got her beans these days. “Murky,” she replied without hesitation. “I didn’t know they roasted,” I said. “It’s Counter Culture beans,” she replied, fully expecting me to know who these people were. I had a vague recollection of reading about them in the WaPo, and, generally trusting my friend in matters of food and drink, resolved to stop in for some beans the next time I was in the neighborhood.

See, I was a coffee snob before I was any other kind. Since childhood, in fact. I grew up in a tea-drinking part of the world. In the capital where I lived at least, coffee was invariably instant, always imported, and was such a hot commodity that it almost never made it to store shelves, having been skimmed along the way by those with access, like distributors and store managers. So much so that the urban folklore of the time featured a satirical two-liner on the topic, untranslatable, but culminating in a pun along the lines of instant coffee instantly dissolving. I have my mother and her circumstances to thank for my love of the stuff. Her parents, while instilling in their daughter a love of reading and learning and the patience of a stoic, were not necessarily great parent material when it came to the pragmatics of life, so from a relatively early age my mother spent very little time at home, bouncing around instead from friend to friend and relative to relative. In her late teens, she was fortunate to have been befriended and semi-adopted by a couple of transplanted Armenians, great lovers of food, brandy and, of course, coffee. Real coffee – ground powder-fine and brewed slowly in a small copper pot with an almost equal proportion of sugar until it foamed up and rose to the surface. Suspend your vigilance for a moment, and it would be all over your stove – “runaway coffee” it was called. Served in small cups, it was dark, syrupy and sweet. In the US, when it is mentioned at all, it is usually referred to as Turkish coffee, to the Armenian diaspora’s great consternation. My mother has been drinking it ever since. When I was young, she would pour a bit into the bottom of a cup and fill the rest with warm milk. As I got older, the ratio of coffee to milk increased. By the time my family was a year or so away from moving to New York, I could drink the stuff straight.

In the bagel shops of 1980s Queens coffee was something else entirely. Sold in 8-oz. Styrofoam cups, it cost around 50 cents. Today that sounds refreshingly no-frills, but in reality the stuff was foul. Luke-warm, sour and stale, no amount of sugar and Mini-Moos could redeem it. I hardly ever drank it, preferring to go home to mom’s tarry goodness. There was cappuccino to be had, but not easily. I first tried it in Italy in 1987, where you could get one anywhere for about 1,000 lire (around 85 cents in those days), and a virtually identical cappuccino, minus the marble counter, could be had for only twice that at any number of Greenwich Village Italian cafes, but for a clueless kid from Queens, that wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence. We had a place in the neighborhood that served them, but those were Kappucinos – squirted noisily from a machine fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus from seafoam, into a stemmed glass mug of the type you’re likely to get if you ask for an Irish Coffee at a neighborhood bar, topped with Cool Whip from an aerosol can.

My exposure to “modern” American West Coast-style coffee came when I was in college in Rochester, NY. It was the nineties, all things Seattle were the rage, and quality brewed coffee was beginning to spread into second- and third-tier American cities, especially those, like Rochester, that had enough students to support a coffeehouse culture. The place to be was Java Joe’s downtown (still in business, apparently) – it was located on the same block as the main building of the Eastman school, and on weekends turned into a jazz club featuring student bands. The only guitar teacher I have ever had played there. I spent my fair share of time there, but my regular spot became Moonbeans, now sadly defunct, at the corner of Unversity and Atlantic, a few blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years of school. Atlantic hit Univeristy at a sharp angle, and Moonbeans occupied the first floor of the cool old building on the corner. It was the sort of place that was briefly in vogue but, sadly, is already starting to disappear – mismatched old couches, bookshelves with actual books on them, some board games and a chess set for use by patrons. When I didn’t have a pile of philosophy reading to get through, I would bring my friend S.L. and we’d sit at the bar, making lame attempts to chat with Jill the barista, on whom we both had an enormous crush. Moonbeans’ house brew was Sumatra – the first time I encountered a varietal coffee. It had a flavor I had never experienced before – intensely smoky and strangely compelling despite its bitterness. Doctored up with a fair amount of sugar (because I was weaned on Turkish coffee, to this day I drink all coffee sweeter than most people), it became the defining flavor of my college days, thanks, no doubt, to lazy afternoons reading Kierkegaard at Moonbeans as much as to the drink itself.

From there, it was coffee, coffee and more coffee. When I moved to Phoenix after graduation to be with J., we made a point of exploring every coffeehouse in the area. I read Korby Cummer’s seminal The Joy of Coffee and, on its recommendation, bought a French press – still my preferred method of brewing. I sought out a local source of quality beans. When I moved to DC in 1998, I lived a couple of blocks away from Java House, a café that roasted its own beans, at 17th & Q, and quickly became a regular there. Come to my house today, and, as much as I love the Asian tradition of automatically serving tea, you will not be able to avoid being offered a cup of coffee. Which brings me to the present day and Murky.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks after my conversation with K.R., I found myself heading West on Wilson Blvd., so I swung in. I picked up a bag from the shelf, and my heart sank – it was instantly obvious that they have outsnobbed the snob. Being from a specific part of the world or a certain country was no longer enough. The beans I ended up buying had the precise location specified. Not just Papua New Guinea, but the Waghi Valley of that country. Below, the label listed the specific varieties of cofea arabica (the coffee plant) – Bourbon, Typica and Arusha. Then came the description, or should I say tasting notes, worth quoting in full:

Wonderfully complex, this coffee has a rich, syrupy body with notes of thick chocolate, vanilla, and dark honey, with a savory note throughout. A classically balanced cup from a fascinating coffee growing region.

I love coffee, it’s great. It tastes delicious and helps me to get going in the morning. I can tell the difference between fresh and stale beans, and I’ve been known to mope for an hour if the coffee I was served was too weak. But coffee is not wine, people! One of the best things about coffee is that it helps you clear your mind so you can discuss other things, not coffee itself! What happened to just sitting down with a cup of coffee and enjoying it without having to think about it? There is a reason meeting for coffee is still a valid activity even in our age of Facebook tyranny – it helps friends socialize. Must I analyze everything in order to enjoy it? By the way, the 12-oz. bag cost almost 14 dollars – obscene even in our culture of paying prices for artisan products that would have seemed outrageous a decade ago.

I must admit that the coffee was absolutely delicious. Some of the best I have ever had. Rich, flavorful and complex, it lived up fully to its promise of chocolate notes. I cannot fault Murky and Counter Culture for the quality of their product. But the combination of the description, price, and heightened expectation made it something more than just a cup of coffee while making it difficult to relax while drinking it. It demanded to be noticed. It was the narcissist of beverages. I have not been back. I prefer to keep the pleasure of sinking into my reading chair with a good book and a steaming cup of coffee, or catching up with a dear friend over a café table, without being distracted by High Coffeeness.

Philadelphia, Day One Continued -- Pumpkin

Showered and changed (and recovered from the torrential thunderstorm that caught us as we walked the last four blocks to our hotel), we caught a cab to head out to dinner. Our original plan, on the recommendation of our friend C.S., was Mattyson, but apparently it is the hot place in Philly right now, and was completely booked up by the time I called. We settled for Plan B, which was a restaurant just South of downtown called Pumpkin. We had gone to Pumpkin on out first trip to Philly four or so years ago and had an amazing meal, so I did not hesitate to go back.

Pumpkin is a part of Philly’s vibrant BYOB scene, which alone makes a trip to the city worth it. Why couldn’t it be more widespread? Anyway, Pumpkin is tiny – a single minimally-decorated room that seats 26 if memory serves. The menu changes daily based on the ingredients at the chef’s disposal. Though nominally divided into appetizers and mains, all the plates are about the same size. Our waitress – one of only two working the room – was friendly and knowledgeable, and her service was excellent throughout the meal. I started with the Mediterranean rock octopus (a smaller variety with a more tender flesh compared to the giant “regular” octopus) served with chorizo, fingerling potatoes and romesco (tomato and bell pepper) sauce. It was unbelievable. Definitely the best octopus I have ever had. Up until then, my reference was the giant grilled octopus tentacle I had in Toronto’s Greek Town about ten years ago, but Pumpkin blew it, pardon the pun, out of the water. J., on the waitress’s recommendation with my enthusiastic encouragement, opted for razor clams. They proved to be delicious as well – large and plump and very clammy-tasting.

My second course was the most unusual thing I had had in a while – fresh sturgeon. It came from the Columbia River in Washington. I had no idea there were any sturgeon species in North America. It was excellent – very firm, with a deeply flavored, dense and oily flesh. It had some swordfish and some tuna in the taste, but in the end was its own animal. It was served with brussel sprouts and salsify, scattered with a few corn kernels, and accompanied with a dollop of a creamy sauce I could not quite identify. J.’s choice was the skate wing, which was also very good – tender, with a powerful lemon kick and served with the largest caper berries I have ever seen – they looked like figs. My only complaint, if it can even be called that, is that my sturgeon clashed mightily with the wine we had brought -- a half-bottle of the 2006 pinot noir from Baileyana in the Edna Valley of California. It was crisp, light-bodied and spicy with a pronounced flavor of cranberries on the palate, but the fish was just too, well, fishy for any red, even one as versatile as a pinot noir. That, and the fact that after the two courses, J. and I were too full to have dessert, delectable though it looked.

By the time we left the restaurant, the rain had stopped, and we walked back to the hotel through the rapidly cooling night, past a few inviting-looking bars and restaurants and across Rittenhouse Square. We had initially thought about going to the Apothecary – another happening place and Philly’s outpost of the burgeoning craft cocktail scene, but realized we really were not in the mood to deal with crowds of hipsters, so we got our nightcap back at our hotel’s bar. Situated as it was in the lobby of the hotel, separated only by a large divider, it retained some of the hotel-like sterility of most bars of its ilk. A few small round tables with two deep leather chairs at each helped a bit, and that is where we settled. I must say that the unremarkable atmosphere was deceptive – our drinks were excellent. Our waitress, who looked too young to know anything about real cocktails, looked confused when I asked if they had rye, but the bartender – a middle-aged guy who clearly knew his job and took pride in it – overheard me (the music was mercifully quiet) and nodded. I got one of the best rye manhattans I had ever had. J.’s French 75 – a forgotten classic if ever there was one – was very good as well. We sipped our drinks, mellowed by the long day and the delicious food, contemplating the fact that we were now married and attempting, unsuccessfully, to find some difference in how we felt.

PX

Went to the PX with my friend K.R. on Wednesday night. The PX was the DC area’s first entry into the craft cocktail scene that has been picking up steam over the last year or two. In craft mixing, the bartender is a chef, creating unique drink recipes from unusual, frequently purpose-made ingredients that emphasize seasonality. The PX reportedly makes its own bitters (no fewer than four kinds), squeezes its own fresh fruit juices, and even makes its own sweet vermouth, by which I assume they mean infusing it, rather than making the underlying red wine from scratch. Interestingly, this subculture very much favors the term “cocktail” rather than “mixed drink” or simply “drink.” As recently as the martini revival of the 1990s, a cocktail was something your grandparents drank long before they were grandparents. Something they set on top of the Motorola in the corner before they went to get another platter of deviled eggs for the guests. No longer, apparently.

Word had it that the PX’s theme was Prohibition-era speakeasy, and indeed the initial impression was that it was. You apparently had to have a reservation to get in. The place, located on the second floor of a large Old Town Alexandria townhouse, is completely unmarked, and is entered through a nondescript side door that for all the world looks like it leads into someone’s kitchen. A blue light hangs above the door, lit when the place is open for business. Ostensibly, a coat-and-tie for men and no-jeans for women dress code is enforced.

We duly made our reservation (by e-mail), showed up at the appointed 6:15 p.m. and, finding the blue light on, rang the doorbell. A young woman, exceedingly insincere in manner, led us upstairs with the words “I will show you to your table.” We passed the small bar on the way and found ourselves in a room, of residential, rather than business, proportions, looking and feeling like someone’s living room, and decorated in a decidedly non-1920s style. Four faux-modern couches lined the walls. The woman pointed to one of them. There was no table. What initially looked like a coffee table in the middle proved to be a pair of vinyl-upholstered ottomans pushed together. I asked whether it was possible to sit at the bar – we saw at least four empty stools as we walked by. She replied that another party had those seats booked. I made a mental note to ask for bar seats with my next reservation and sat down. K.R. and I were the only people in the room. The music – an off-putting kind of postmodern cabaret – was a little too loud. After a moment’s discussion of whether we would be violating protocol if one of us sat on one of the other couches, I moved, so K.R. and I could face each other and not sit in a perpetual about-face. We opened the white cloth-bound menus to study the concoctions on offer.

Though PX’s rumored speakeasy theme was being rapidly eroded by the room and the music, I was still hoping for extremely high-quality versions of classic cocktails. All I really wanted was a top-notch manhattan, preferably made with rye. Instead, all manner of madness adorned the menu – things made with ginger syrup and pomegranate molasses and topped with milk foam. Miss Fake came back to take our order. Seeing me on the “wrong” couch she paused but said nothing. I asked whether I could order a “regular” cocktail or was restricted to the menu. She said I could have whatever I wanted as long as they had the ingredients in the house. I asked if they had rye. She replied that they didn’t. Not all was lost, however, as the menu did feature a Manhattan, made with Maker’s Mark, the famous house-made vermouth, and house-made cherry bitters. Its name, inexplicably, was “My Wife’s Manhattan.” I ordered it. K.R. went with one of their custom creations that involved, I believe, tobacco leaves (I should have taken notes), and we settled down to chat. A couple of minutes later, Mademoiselle Plastique returned with a group of five besuited young professionals in tow. Seeing me still on my self-selected perch, she glared. “Would you like me to move back over there?” I asked with as disarming a smile I could manage (not my strong point), gesturing at my original spot. “Yes, please,” she replied coolly, arranged the yuppies on the other couches and left. I was starting to feel awkward, sitting as I was in an essentially private room with a bunch of people I didn’t know. K.R., whose supply of relaxed sociability I could not hope to match even on my best days, thought it was kind of cool. I could not possibly agree.

A few minutes later still, our drinks -- excuse me, cocktails – arrived, delivered by the Couch Nazi herself. To our delight, she informed us that the bar party had cancelled and we could have their seats if we were still interested. Damn straight we were interested! Once at the bar, it was as if a cloud had lifted. Though there were people on either side of us, we did not feel intruded upon. Bars are the ultimate setting for public privacy, I realized – with everyone facing either straight ahead or their companion, you do not see other patrons’ faces unless you go out of your way to do so, even though they are a scant few inches away. And the very mental concept of a bar – its meme if I may – is inextricably public. The bartender, whose name unfortunately I did not catch, was a down to earth, friendly fellow, and, to K.R.’s apparent delight, was happy to discuss his craft and the scene. The décor in the main room, too, was much more twenties-appropriate. Dark wood paneling, lots of mirrors, glass chandeliers. None of it was genuinely antique, but the look worked.

More importantly, I finally took a sip of my manhattan. I must say that with all due respect to the bartender’s craft, I was disappointed. It was dark red in color, not as cold as I would have liked, and seriously sweet. I think of the manhattan as a winter drink, so I guess you can make a case for it being less than ice-cold. And I don’t begrudge the PX the desire to showcase their house-made vermouth. And who knows – maybe this is just the new way. But it was not what I was craving. K.R., on the other hand, was delighted with her liquid cigar. I took a sip and had to admit that it was quite good – a nice balance of sweet and sour, and pleasantly smoky, though far less intense than we were led to believe.

A few interesting facts about the place emerged as we chatted with the bartender. They did have rye, it turned out. Sazerac, no less. He gave me a taste of it neat. You do not have to have a reservation. In fact, the bar is where the walk-ins are seated. The bar party was obviously a figment of our rye-averse hostess’s imagination.

Fascinated, we watched the bartender at work. Eventually, it was time for another cocktail. K.R. picked another unheard-of concoction, this one with lots of ginger, while I made a one-eighty and ordered a martini. The bartender offered three choices of gin. I picked Plymouth, which I had never had before, and which he described as an “English gin, not a dry gin.” I thought gin was dry by definition, but what do I know? In the event, the martini it produced was excellent. He used the dreaded technique of the 1990s revival – put the ice cubes in the glass to chill it, pour in the vermouth and let it sit while shaking the gin, then dump it out with the ice, so all you have left are trickles of vermouth on the side of the glass, if that. But those trickles, combined with the not-dry nature of the gin, produced a delicious balance of flavors – it was neither bitter nor sharp, and had a clean, grassy complexity.

We watched the bartender some more. The place had gained quite a few customers by this point, and as his pace and the variety of his output increased, my friend’s curiosity and excitement increased proportionally. Every libation that passed in front of us on its way to the waitress’s tray looked fascinating and beautiful, if sometimes a bit bizarre. The drink that finally convinced us to stay for a third round was something opaque, pink, with white foam on top and garnished with pomegranate molasses. House-made, of course. It was not my territory, though when the bartender offered us a taste of the molasses (he squeezed some right onto our fingertips), I could not resist. It was intensely sour but delicious. And the drink needed it – just about any adjective I could think of would sound pejorative if not downright sexist. It was actually very distinctive in its own way. Just way too sweet and intensely fruity. Pure liquid candy.

My choice was a negroni – quite possibly the most serious cocktail in existence. A drink that demands to be taken on its own terms. A combination of bitter (Campari) and earthy (gin), with a generous dash of sweet vermouth to make it palatable, it is a beverage for contemplation. The PX’s version was spectacular – the sweetness was pronounced (that house-infused vermouth again), but it was more than adequately offset by the generous helping of Campari, for a counterpoint of two distinct but complimentary flavors with a less-than-usual amount of gin tying them together just enough to create a harmonious whole.

We thanked the bartender, paid up and ambled out into the unseasonably warm evening, resolving to bring our friends on the next visit and stick to the bar from the get-go.