50 FEBRUARY 2021
BOTTLE SERVICE
THE REASON I HADN’T taught myself how to make a proper cock-
tail during the pandemic wasn’t that I didn’t need to drink. It’s
that cocktails are stupid.
I love wine. I like to sip whiskey and rum. But every time
people force me to order a cocktail, I find a drink on the menu
that sounds interesting (Yuzu! Finger limes! Earl Grey tea!) and
get served a juice box. Making them even less adult-y is that
they come with a treat. The four categories of cocktails, as far
as I can tell, are Sunk, Float, Rim, and Kebab.
But six months into lockdown, I’d already learned how to
bake, speak Spanish, and cook Kashmiri food, so I decided
to give bartending a chance. I got a Zoom lesson from Ivy
Mix, which is the real given name of the author of Spirits of
Latin America, a gorgeous recipe book and detailed history.
Standing behind the bar at Leyenda, the Brooklyn bar she
co-owns, Ivy reached back to pour bottles from bright blue,
green, and red cabinets into ceramic glasses, making me want
to go on vacation even more than everything else made me
want to go on vacation.
The first thing Ivy taught me was that I am the one who is
stupid, not cocktails. After all, I add sugar, salt, and spice to
heighten flavors when I cook. Why should it be different with
drinks? “A piece of chicken by itself is a little dull. Put some
breading on it—carbs are just sugar—and some salt, and it’s really
good,” she said.
She decided to teach me how to make a pisco sour because I
had told her I was attracted to drinks with egg whites, though
I had no idea why. She explained that what I loved was that the
albumen froths up, like a milkshake. I separated a white,
dropped it into a shaker with some pisco, simple syrup, lemon
juice, and lime juice, and got a warning from Ivy: Egg whites
expand. “I’ve had many a bar shift where egg whites exploded
all over me. Nothing says ‘horrible party’ like smelling like egg.”
I carefully pulled apart the shaker, which felt like opening
the nozzle on a pressure cooker. Then she had me add a few
drops of Angostura bitters. As I was spreading them around the
foam with a knife, I got curious about what the hell bitters are
and why a marketing department would choose such a horrible
name for them. I smelled the Angostura—Christmassy, with
cinnamon and cloves—which didn’t seem to fit with my sum-
mery pisco sour. Ivy said that was the point, to balance it out.
Next, Ivy taught me a drink of hers, the Sonambula, again
something I would be attracted to on a menu (Chamomile syrup!
Jalapeño!). After dumping sugar in a cup of tea, she had me
infuse tequila with a couple of slices of jalapeño, seeds still at-
tached. “This is everything I hate about alcohol,” I said beforesipping it and realizing I was totally right. “Oh! The burning!”
“You need apple for that tart,” Ivy replied about combining
sweet and savory. Yes, I thought, but apples taste good. Still,
when I put the poison I’d made together with the tea syrup,
lemon juice, Peychaud’s bitters (roses, spice), and mole bitters
(chocolate, spice), it was the best margarita I’d ever had. Bitters,
Ivy said, help bridge disparate ingredients, in this instance tying
together the chamomile flowers and the jalapeños.
A week later, I got a second Zoom lesson from Francisco
“Frankie” Calvillo, a bartender who has worked for 50 years at
Joe’s Café in Santa Barbara, a steak joint where the menu states
it has the “stiffest drinks in town.” Scooping ice into a glass,
Frankie told me a story. About 30 years ago, he said, a guy gave
him the Timex watch off his wrist and asked him to mix it into
a margarita. Frankie did it, and the man somehow drank it. The
man came back to Joe’s last year but didn’t order that cocktail
again. “He wasn’t drinking anymore. He gave it up,” Frankie
explained. Over the loud bar, Frankie yelled instructions to me
for a spicy margarita. I grilled a jalapeño to sweeten and temper
it, cut off a big slice, and then left it muddled in the bottom of
the glass. I confessed I found the drink too intense. “I don’t
really like this either,” he said. “I’m Mexican, but it’s too spicy.
My lips get numb. I think people are crazy when they ask for
it, but they like it.” Frankie’s bartending lesson was clear: Don’t
lose sight of the fact that people want to get drunk.
Finally, I tested my new skills by making a cocktail for Aisha
Tyler, the comedian who started Courage + Stone, a Brooklyn
company that sells premade old-fashioneds and Manhattans. I
dropped off a Sonambula and a cocktail I found in Ivy’s bookCOCKTAIL HOURRaising the Bar
A cocktail skeptic learns
to bartend over Zoom.
By Joel Stein
ILLUSTRATION: GRAHAM ROUMIEU