the times Saturday June 11 202212 Food + Drink
KATIE WILSON FOR THE TIMES. HAIR AND MAKE-UP FIONA MOORE AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS USING COSMETICS A LA CARTEBeetroot
negroni
Ingredients
25ml gin
15ml Campari
15ml sweet vermouth
15ml freshly pressed
beetroot juiceMethod
Stir all the ingredients together over
ice in your favourite rocks glass until
the liquid is ice cold. Top up with
fresh ice to serve.
Recipe from Apricity,
apricityrestaurant.comfrom Apricity,
restaurant.comW
hile Tom Cruise is
happy to reprise
his role as Maver-
ick in the new Top
Gun film, there’s
no sign as yet of a
sequel to his other
Eighties hit, Cocktail. Nobody’s loss, but if
he did, the drinks he served would require
serious updating. Tequila sunrise? Sex on
the beach? Tastes have changed, and no
self-respecting drinker would consider or-
dering such a fruit-heavy concoction
these days. An asparagus martini, on the
other hand? Now you are talking.
Yes, the new fashion is not for fruit but
for vegetables, and everything from beet-
root to porcini mushrooms is popping up
on cocktail lists. They won’t, of course,
make your cocktail any healthier, but will
make it tastier. Unlike fruit juice, the main
role of which was to contribute an unso-
phisticated whack of sugar, these unusual
ingredients give bartenders a whole range
of flavour profiles to play with.
Scarlet Ganzoni, the bar manager at Isa-
bel in Mayfair, can ease you in gently with
a cucumber smash, with bergamot, Bolivi-
an coca leaf water and fresh cucumber, or
she can take you straight to the Experi-
mental section of her new spring menu,
where you’ll find an avocado martini with
vodka, Ancho Reyes Verde — a chilli li-
queur from Mexico — pureed avocado,
agave syrup, lime juice and a black lava salt
rim. It looks and tastes like a cross between
a margarita and alcoholic guacamole, in
an entirely good way.
“We are increasingly seeking inspira-
tion from gastronomy rather than alche-
my”, Ganzoni says, “so a lot of kitchen
ingredients are finding their way into
drinks. You’ll see a lot more salt, spice and
umami flavours that you wouldn’t find a
few years ago.” And, yes, vegetables.
“We all eat avocados once or twice a
week, on toast or in guacamole, so we
wanted to translate that flavour into
cocktails,” she says. “You’ve got the salti-
ness, the spiciness, the citrus of lime and
then the avocado, so it’s a very similar
flavour profile to guacamole.”
If that sounds too out there (trust me, it’s
delicious), how about a carrot old-fash-
ioned? Carrots are slow cooked in a sous-
vide with turmeric, coriander seeds and
whisky before they are chilled, strained
and mixed with Drambuie. Here the carrot
provides an earthy, slightly sweet back-
note rather than a full-on vegetable hit.
You don’t have to travel far to find more
vegetable-forward drinks. A few streets
away is Apricity, the zero-waste restaurant
from Chantelle Nicholson, which has been
Adding vegetables to cocktails is the latest thing at
fashionable bars. Tony Turnbull takes a sip (or three)
garnering much praise since it opened last
month. Rather than throw away the trim-
mings from the asparagus, they steep them
in vodka to make asparagus martinis. “The
vodka gives the martini a savoury, slightly
vegetal flavour,” Nicholson says. It shares
some of the freshly cut grass flavour profile
of a New Zealand sauvignon. As the aspar-
agus season comes to a close they will
move on to fig leaf martinis, and in the
autumn there will be pumpkin margaritas,
but until then, there is a beetroot negroni,
again made with trimmings and peelings.
If Isabel’s avocado martini is like liquid
guacamole, LPM London’s tomatini is like
an alcoholic gazpacho, which instantly
makes you feel as if you are sitting in the
south of France. Which is only right and
proper — the original La Petite Maison
was in Nice. Created by the bartender
Jimmy Barrat, the drink is a bright, fresh
and frighteningly drinkable mix of vodka,
tomato and white balsamic vinegar, and a
world away from a bloody mary. “I don’t
like tomatoes when used in juices,” Barrat
says. “So my approach was to treat the to-
matoes as what they are: a fruit.” The May-
fair restaurant uses Campari tomatoes, but
any sweet tomato will do.
At the Langham Hotel a new cocktail
menu has been launched at the famed
Artesian bar, created by the head bartend-
er Giulia Cuccurullo. One of the most pop-
ular orders is called the future — a mix of
gin, lemongrass, vermouth, mint, olive oil
and enoki mushrooms. Cuccurullo blends
the mushrooms with extra-dry vermouth
and leaves it to infuse for 24 hours before
straining. “You don’t taste the mushroom,
but it gives the drink a hit of umami.”
If that sounds provocative, wait until
you try her amo and odi, or love and hate.
For the odi she has reinterpreted one of the
world’s least loved cocktails, the Long Is-
land iced tea, with banana and watermel-
on. The amo is a mash-up of two of the
most popular cocktails, the negroni and
the old-fashioned, and adding three of the
most hated flavours: artichoke, blue
cheese and the Artesian’s “secret umami
essence”, which she reveals is made from
anchovy. The result is a whisky-based ne-
groni with a bitter edge and, at the end of
the finish, the faint but undeniable tang of
stilton. So after vegetables, could the
cheese-based cocktail be the next step on
the journey towards more savoury drinks?
It seems fanciful, but then I see that the
new Firebird restaurant in Soho has some-
thing called the horiatiki martini on its list
— “a Greek salad-inspired dirty dry marti-
ni with feta and oregano-infused gin, cu-
cumber bitters and red pepper-infused
vermouth”. Greek salad in a glass, anyone?Beetroot negroni
— one of your
five-a-day?
The avocado
martini is
like liquid
guacamole —
and the tomatini
like alcoholic
gazpacho
Scarlet Ganzoni, bar manager at Isabel in MayfairIngredients
500g purple carrots, sliced into discs
100g sugar
200g white wine vinegar
Spice mix: 1 tsp pink peppercorns,
1 star anise, 1 stick cinnamon,
dried chillies, 1 tbsp cardamom pods,
1 tbsp coriander seeds
60ml vodka
10ml dry vermouthMethod
1 Place the carrots into a jar. Put the
sugar, vinegar and 200ml water into
a pan and bring to a low boil. Stir to
dissolve the sugar then add spices.
2 Pour into the jar of carrots to cover,
then refrigerate for at least 24 hours.
It will last for a month in the fridge.
3 Add the vodka, vermouth and
20ml of the pickle brine to a mixing
glass and stir for 20 seconds.
4 Serve in a chilled martini glass,
garnished with pickled carrot.
Recipe from Soma, somasoho.comPurple carrot
cocktail