Nightlife: Kings of the classic cocktail

Nightlife: Kings of the classic cocktail

February 13th, 2009
Star Tribune

By TOM HORGEN

On a Friday afternoon in early January, a dozen bartenders and servers were lined up at the bar inside the Bradstreet Craftshouse Restaurant. It was their last day of intensive training at this new cocktail lounge. Although some of them had worked top-tier bars in the Twin Cities, none had been through anything quite like this before. On their laps were heavy binders stuffed with pages of drink recipes. They took copious notes as a master bartender from New York lectured.

“Shake it like you mean it!” he ordered, as three bartenders mixed a drink involving rum, lemon and an egg yolk.

“I feel like I’m back in college,” bartender Nikki Ockenden said later.

With serious money and talent behind it, Bradstreet brings a connoisseur’s cocktail lounge to the heart of downtown Minneapolis.

The bar takes the place of Infinity, the hotel nightclub that closed last year inside the swanky Graves 601. The hotel’s 34-year-old president, the jet-setting Ben Graves, has reimagined the space as a restaurant with a giant focus on the latest in big-city nightlife trends: mixology.

The Twin Cities bar scene is no stranger to mixology — where cocktails are crafted with the care of a gourmet meal — but it’s still a niche calling. Bartender Johnny Michaels has been leading the charge at La Belle Vie, but even he said the heavy-hitters whom Graves brought in from New York have given him pause.

“I’m looking at them as being the main competition,” Michaels said.

New York is the epicenter of the current mixology craze. From there, Graves brought bartender Toby Maloney and his business partner, Jason Cott — the guys in charge of that January training session. The duo is known as Alchemy Consulting. Maloney has tended bar at New York’s top cocktail bars (Milk & Honey and Pegu Club). The New York Times recently dubbed them masters of minimalist bartending for their ability to make drinks with fewer than five ingredients. They also own the lauded Violet Hour bar in Chicago and will soon move on to another project in Nashville. Maloney’s dedication to the era of the classic cocktail comes across even in his work uniform — a pinstripe suit, wingtips, thick tie and pocket square.

Graves’ vision for the Bradstreet decor and name come from one of his longtime muses, early 20th-century interior designer and socialite John Scott Bradstreet. Bradstreet was a tastemaker of the time in Minnesota (his chairs and tables are on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and in mansions statewide).

While Graves assured me that the small-plate dining at Bradstreet is just as important as Maloney’s drinks, there is no doubt in my mind that cocktails take precedence here. The Bible-thick menu lists 50 drinks, most of them under $10.

Blitzing your senses

When describing their bartending style, Maloney and Cott often use the word “organaleptic.” This goofy-sounding word (which they made up) is more of a guiding philosophy. “I want my drinks to attack all five of your senses,” Maloney said. To totally “get” the mystique of Alchemy’s bartending, you kind of have to drink the Kool-Aid.

It’s easy to do once you see Maloney in action. To inundate your senses, Maloney and his bartenders use a lot of toys. One of his favorite things to play with is ice.

“Ice is to a bartender as a stove is to a chef,” he said. “And I know that saying we have an ice program sounds like the most pretentious thing in the world.”

Bradstreet’s “ice program” includes six different kinds of ice. Most stunning is their “ice sphere,” a single baseball-sized globe that they drop into lowball cocktails. It’s molded with a heavy-duty copper device they brought from Japan. Bradstreet does have normal ice cubes, but even those aren’t normal. They’re made by what Maloney calls “the Ferrari of ice machines,” a high-end KOLD-DRAFT.

At Bradstreet, everything is made fresh, from the fruit juices to the simple syrups. Most important on this list is the bitters. Any serious mixologist uses bitters. “They are like the salt and pepper of cocktails,” Maloney said. Bradstreet has almost 20 kinds of house-made bitters — which are on display behind the bar in little eyedroppers. One drop can change the entire profile of your drink. Bitters are created by adding numerous botanicals to high-proof grain alcohol.

“They can make a good drink sublime,” Maloney said.

Anticipatory bartending

In the end, much of Maloney’s style comes from the way he moves. He calls it “functional flair” (he’s not juggling bottles).

During Bradstreet’s first Saturday in late January, Maloney whirled and twirled behind the bar. In a sort of furious dance, one arm rattled the metal mixing tin, while his opposite shoulder wiggled at light-speed. “I’ve severed tendons in this arm and ripped all the ligaments in this shoulder,” he said.

The tableside tricks don’t stop: They’ll light orange fizz on fire, crack egg yolk into your drink and (my favorite) “spank” the mint. It’s the final ingredient to a drink Maloney calls “Juliet and Romeo” (a gin cocktail made with cucumber, lime and rose water). After pouring the drink, Maloney palms a pinch of mint leaves over the cocktail. Then he draws back his other hand and claps his palms together. Smack! The aroma of the mint bursts out in all directions. I could smell it from 3 feet away.

As Bradstreet’s first Saturday came to a close, Maloney himself was in need of a drink.

“When I’m not thinking about cocktails, I’m dreaming about cocktails,” he said. “I have enough cocktails in my life.”

From behind the bar he pulled out the most charmingly crappy of crappy beers: a Grain Belt Premium.

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