Considering cocktails from a culinary perspective

Jim Meehan made his name as a bartender (and in one case, an owner) at a trio of pioneering New York City watering holes — Gramercy Tavern, the Pegu Club, and PDT. Along the way, he helped usher in the modern craft cocktail industry like it was no big deal. He now lives in Portland, Oregon where he's still mixing it up. His latest book is The Bartender's Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar, which he co-wrote with Bart Sasso and  journalist Emma Janzen. In it he surveys "some of the best bartenders on the planet" for their favorite cocktail recipes.

Evan Kleiman: Unlike your previous two books, you write, "I am the narrator rather than the subject of this story." What do you mean by that?

Jim Meehan: I think with this book, I recognized that post-cocktail Renaissance, it's kind of funny to think that a movement that I was a part of was over. But as I look back at the work that occurred in the last 20 years, the story of cocktails has primarily been told through the lens of the lounge and the speakeasy or the cocktail bar and not as much through the restaurant and the more culinary side. Part of the goal when I pitched this, before the pandemic, was to shine a light on the operators and folks who were thinking about cocktails from a more culinary perspective.

In the intro, you say that you consider this a handbook not an encyclopedia despite the fact that it's divided into 14 sections. It feels pretty encyclopedic. Describe how you organized the book, why you chose to do it that way, and how you went about choosing the recipes.

I think the book that was probably most influential in thinking about how to organize this was Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. For me, that is the encyclopedia for people who cook or care about cooking and food. I think Harold approaches that book from more of a scientific perspective and I am not a scientist. I became a bartender because of my inability to grasp organic chemistry and become a medical doctor. I think my interest in food is more cultural, more anthropological. A lot of my books previously were more historical but I was getting more and more interested in the politics of this, as well. 

Organizationally, I think this will probably be a source of consternation for many readers who love a cocktail book organized, especially by spirit, but I decided that instead of writing a book oriented around the spirits, I would orient it around the different categories of ingredients that find their way into drinks. There's a section on spices and teas and coffee and dairy, on sodas and ferments and sweeteners. The idea was to get people to start thinking about our ingredients and drinks similarly to the way we would think about food in a cookbook.

Just to prime us, if you will, for the rest of the conversation, let's start with one of your own recipes, the Bloody Marion. Why Aquavit instead of vodka?

The book started when I was on a book tour for my previous book. I was sitting at a bar in Philadelphia and I saw a bottle of pasteurized lime juice on the back bar. My first thought as an ornery craft cocktail bartender was, "Why is there pasteurized lime juice thawing on the back bar here?" I thought about it a lot and was like, "Maybe these people didn't listen to Dale de Groff like I did 20 years ago, who was going around preaching the gospel of fresh-squeezed juice and premium spirits." I wanted to write a book that reexamined the fresh juice paradigm and updated it in a world roiling with climate change and other sociopolitical and economic issues. So I did that, and I examined all of my biases and examined the ways in which I've been conditioned to think about food and our ingredients. I spoke to a lot of experts along the way, and I came to some interesting conclusions.

With the Bloody Marion, the farm-to-table, Portland-living mixologist in me, the inclination of someone of my interests would be, "Oh, instead of getting canned tomato juice, I should use heirloom tomatoes and make an heirloom tomato water. And, of course, I can make my own hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce." The reality that I think you will quickly find is when you make a housemade, craft, farmers market version of all the ingredients in a Bloody Mary, you come up with something akin to vodka soup that is maybe delicious but has very little resemblance to a Bloody Mary. 

What I identified in the Bloody Mary years ago, when I partnered with Lior Lev Sercarz to create a line of Bloody Mary spices, was that the one place that someone who's inclined in the ways that I am about ingredients that the Bloody Mary could be improved is the spices. So I worked with Lior to create four different spices that go with a vodka Bloody Mary, a gin Bloody Mary, a tequila Bloody Mary, and an Aquavit Bloody Mary, which I think is the most creative and fun. That's where we landed on the Bloody Marion, which ends up in the book. Lior graciously shared his proprietary recipe for the spice blend that goes particularly well with an Aquavit Bloody Mary.

Gin is my favorite, and it seems that bartenders are really plumbing the depths of gin and tonics. Can you recommend a gin cocktail recipe that might go beyond the gin and tonic but isn't too complicated or, my biggest complaint, too sweet?

One of the drinks that I was pleased to publish and share was Audrey Saunders' Earl Gray Martini, which is a drink that she taught me to make when I was a bartender at the Pegu Club, and that remained on the menu the entire time I was a bartender there. It's basically a Silver Gin Sour that is made with a Tanqueray that's been infused with Earl Gray. Audrey uses a long infusion with the goal not of just absorbing the tea and Bergamot flavor but of really getting a deep infusion that infuses a lot of the tannins into the spirit. That makes an incredibly complex, aromatic, and grippy, almost like a Cabernet or Casalinga, tannic drink that I think is brilliant. 

My quip at the beginning of the tea chapter was that an argument could be made that the most famous tea cocktail of the 20th century was the Long Island Iced Tea, which includes no tea. I feel like the Earl Gray Tea Martini was one of the first tea cocktails that actually had tea in it in the 21st century, that really set the stage for the brilliant tea drinks that we see now.

Over much of the country this year, and certainly here in LA, we can expect a very, very hot summer. What is a good light summer cocktail for us?

A drink that I am surprised isn't becoming more and more popular given our preference for drinks like the Ranch Water (tequila and soda), is the Japanese Whiskey Highball. It's a drink that was originally conceived in Japan for Japanese salary men who like drinking light lagers. It's really low ABV, a little bit of malt whiskey, and a lot of sparkling mineral water. It's refreshing, it's complex, it's bone dry, and it's hydrating. I would say, as it gets hot and you get thirsty, the Japanese Whiskey Highball is great.

What drink recipe, in all of this research, surprised you the most? Maybe because of its complexity or lack of complexity. Or maybe there was an unexpected pairing or a flavor profile that just knocked you back

I was thinking a lot about this. There are some long recipes with many illustrations, and they'll look really complex. I think the recipe that speaks to the genius of the people that I was working with was Chad Solomon, who I used to work with at Pegu Club, who went on to do a great bar program in Dallas at Midnight Rambler, when he sent me his Paloma recipe, he was not only adding salt to the rim of the Paloma, he was using what bartenders call "saline," which is basically a salt water solution that they add to drinks like bitters to add a little bit of salt. 

We all know what salt does with our food. Chad took it a step further and was adding mineral water. He was in Texas and was able to source a mineral water called Crazy Water, which comes in multiple formulas that have different mineral contents. The coffee and tea world are much further ahead in examining how water chemistry affects the taste and texture of tea and coffee. I was really pleased and excited to see that Chad had found a high mineral content water to add to his saline solution and was finding that by using mineral water instead of distilled or plain tap water, he was getting different results with his drinks. So a simple recipe, water and salt, but when you pay close attention to the salt and water you're using, you find surprising things.

Portland-based bartender Jim Meehan spent years in bars, developing new libations and helping usher in the modern cocktail scene. Photo by AJ Meeker.

"The Bartender's Pantry" surveys some of the best bartenders on the planet about spirits, accompaniments, and innovations in the industry. Photo courtesy of Ten Speed Press.