The Sipping News

An argument in favor of bartender copywriting cocktails and techniques as intellectual property, which may be one of the most unenforceable ideas I've ever heard of. Thankfully, legally, this is impossible. I've always thought the cocktail world's willingness to share recipes and idea was always one of its most likable and noble aspect. [The Atlantic]

There seem to have been a rash of high profile bartender departures in recent months. The latest include Owen Westman, who will leave the San Francisco bar Rickhouse to open his own place all the way over in Melbourne. Westman, who was born in Melbourne,  couldn't say where the bar is or what its name will be (details are still being finalized). But the cocktail list will draw on his experience at Bourbon & Branch, Rickhouse and other bars he's visited throughout the world. (Rickhouse recently lost Erick Castro to Pernod.) He calls Melbourne "by far the most cocktail and food forward city in Australia." Meanwhile,  Nico de Soto is leaving Dram in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to go to London to work at a London branch of Paris' Experimental Cocktail Club.

Toward a lighter, and greener, Champagne bottle. [NY Times]

A lengthy piece on the legendary Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale. [Wine Enthusiast]

"Alcohol is not a flavor," says John Ragan, sommelier at Eleven Madison Park. Agreed! [Grub Street]

Painkiller Offering Zombie Bowls

Feeling reckless?

Painkiller, the new tiki bar on the Lower East Side, is now serving "Zombie Bowls," which, as co-owner Richard Boccato described it, is basically a punch bowl-size Zombie cocktail.

The menu addition is notable in that Painkiller is known for denying customers more than one Zombie, as the legendary rum cocktail is lethally alcoholic. The Zombie Bowl—cost: $80—is obviously intended for a group of people. And Bocatto still reserves the right to deny service. He said recently that he had served only two of the bowls so far. Others who ordered the specialty were politely turned away, as already being one or two sheets to the wind.

More About Painkiller

Richard Boccato and Giuseppe ("Joe") Gonzalez' new tiki bar Painkiller opens officially tonight. I visited the place on Monday, and talked to Boccato about the debut menu shortly after. Here are my findings, published yesterday, in the New York Times' Diner's Journal.

Zombies Descend for Drinks on the Lower East Side

By ROBERT SIMONSON

If the patrons at the new Lower East Side tikiden Painkiller want to order a Zombie — as many will — they’ll have a choice.

“We have to pay respect to Donn Beach,” said Richard Boccato, one of the owners of Painkiller, which officially opens on Friday. Beach, who founded the legendary Don the Beachcomber bar in Hollywood in 1934, is one of tiki’s founding fathers. But one of his signature drinks, the lethally alcoholic Zombie, is also one of the most debated cocktails in tiki history, with several differing published recipes.

“His 1934 Zombie is a masterpiece,” Mr. Boccato continued. “But there’s also the 1942 recipe and the 1956. We’re going to be serving various interpretations of the Zombie.”

Choose your Zombie preference carefully. Each customer can only have one.

Made with four ounces of rum (tall thin bottles on the bar contain the pre-mixed “Zombie rum batch”), the cocktail is powerful, but slides down like lemonade. “These drinks go down very fast,” Mr. Boccato warned.

Painkiller’s debut drink menu leaves the customer, and the bartender, a lot of leeway, and not just in the Zombie department. Presented in the form of a colorful tacky placemat [pdf], it divides the world of tiki beverages into 10 categories. Some drinks, like the Mai Tai, the Painkiller itself, and the Cradle of Life (which involves an inverted lime wedge filled with flaming Chartreuse), stand on their own. Others entries, like “Frozens,” “Daiquiris” and “Swizzles,” embrace whole categories of cocktail, without getting more particular.

“Because the spectrum of these drinks is so broad, rather than nail down, for instance, a specific, set frozen drink, like a frozen daiquiri, we’re trying to encourage people to experiment with several different varieties,” explained Mr. Boccato, who runs the bar with Giuseppe Gonzalez. Drinkers can specify a particular brand of rum if they wish.

“It’s like the Bartender’s Choice option that you get at Dutch Kills,” said Mr. Boccato, naming the Long Island City bar where he and Mr. Gonzalez used to work. “The menu-placemat is a kind of template that we can use forever. It makes life easier for everyone involved. It gives you more choices.” (Single drinks run $12 to $16.)

Another less-familiar stratum of drink on the menu are the Bastards. These are variations on a gin-ginger beer-lime juice mixture, and were created by a globetrotting, mid-20th-century bartender named Joe Scialom. They include the Suffering Bastard, Dying Bastard and Dead Bastard.

Mr. Boccato is working on a new version called a Glorious Bastard. The menu also offers a tiki flight, a series of miniature drinks decided upon each night and served in small, clear-glass skulls.

“There’s so much to play with,” he said. “Our bartenders are going to be able to experiment a lot.”

The machine that will supply drinkers with the steady stream of complimentary hot dogs will arrive next week, Mr. Boccato said. It will turn out 50 to 60 dogs at a time.

“We hope that people will take advantage of the fact that they will be free,” he said, “because you do need something in your stomach if you’re going to be drinking Zombies.”

Painkiller, 49 Essex Street (Grand Street), Lower East Side. 212-777-TIKI (or 8454)

How to Tag a Tiki Bar

Last night, May 3, the new Lower East Side tiki bar Painkiller has a soft opening for "family and friends." Preparations were so up to the brink that the storefront was still getting spray-painting up until the doors opened at 9 PM, and even afterwards. The artists, we were told, are graffiti taggers of some renown. Inside, there were Painkillers, Zombies, Mai Tais and about 587 people.

Portland Bartender Makes Tiki-Drink-Making Less Painful

I would make more tiki drinks at home than I do if they weren't so damn labor intensive. Not only do many of the cocktail have six or seven (or 12) ingredients; not only are many of the ingredients not the sort of thing you already have in your liquor cabinet, or which can be easily found in your local liquor store; but many of the ingredients are syrups that you have to assemble separately before you can even start to make the drink.

Among these are cinnamon syrup, passion fruit syrup, coffee syrup and a host of others, plus secret syrups created long ago by Donn Beach of Don the Beachcomber fame and mixologists of his ilk. We can thank author and tiki historian Jeff Berry for cracking the code on may of these potions. But we still have to make them if we want to sample, say, a Doniga Punch.

A Portland, OR, bartender and consultant named Blair Reynolds has now come to tiki-lovers' aid.



Last December, he released a line of four syrups frequently needed when mixing tiki libations: Cinnamon Syrup, Orgeat (essential for a Mai Tai), vanilla syrup and—most exciting—Don's Mix. That's Beach's blend of grapefruit and cinnamon syrup. Reynolds got permission from Berry to market the latter, as well as his endorsement.

Reynolds will soon expand the line to include Hibiscus Grenadine and Don's Spices #2 (equal parts vanilla syrup and the allspice-flavored pimento liqueur). The syrups are made in small batches (less than a hundred gallons) in Portland, OR at an FDA Inspected facility. Reynolds use all-natural ingredients, real sugar, real flavors (cinnamon from cinnamon sticks, vanilla from vanilla beans, etc.), and where extracts are used, he gets steam-distilled or alcohol-based extracts from local sources. The recipes are all his.

The syrups are sold online www.tradertiki.com, and at selected stores in New York (Kalustyan's), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Washington D.C. They go for about $9-$12 a bottle.

A Painless Painkiller

Here's an update on the upcoming New York tiki bar Painkiller, written for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog a few days ago.

An Island Cocktail Lounge, Manhattan Island

By ROBERT SIMONSON

If you like piña coladas, free hot dogs and a live-and-let-live approach to life, Painkiller, a tiki bar due to open on the Lower East Side this spring, may be your cup of rum.

Richard Boccato, the veteran bartender and bar owner who will run Painkiller with his Dutch Kills colleague Giuseppe Gonzalez, said he hoped to kick off a new era in tiki culture with the bar.

“We’re not trying to do a classic tiki bar,” Mr. Boccato said. “We’re not going to build our father’s or grandfather’s tiki bar. We want to foster the inception of a New York tiki culture. We’re not taking you off the island of Manhattan onto the island of Oahu. We’re staying right here.”

Patrons should expect some “thatch and some bamboo,” as they would at any tiki bar, he said. “But you should also expect some graffiti and some subway tiles and things that are more reminiscent of the Bowery circa 1978. We’re trying to do an amalgamation of that.”

In preparation, Mr. Boccato and Mr. Gonzalez went on a multinational research trip, visiting acmes of tiki culture in California; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Puerto Rico; and London. Among the more than 20 bars they inspected on the whirlwind 10-day tour were Martin Cate’s Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco and Mark Peel and Jay Perrin’s Tar Pit in Los Angeles, where, until recently, Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club was a partner. Along their travels, they hit upon some themes that may prove novel in New York’s sometimes doctrinaire cocktail world. Standing at the bar — anathema at some of the more exclusive Manhattan cocktail bars — will be allowed. There will be free hot dogs, a la Rudy’s, the celebrated Eighth Avenue dive. And there will be a place on the menu for the piña colada, a drink that has never been celebrated by the cocktail elite.

“We took a look at the different piña colada situations that are going on” in Puerto Rico, Mr. Boccato said. “We thought about things in a different way. We pretty much do what we do behind the bar with our shakers and ingredients. But there’s really something to be said about the machine thatblends it all together and keeps it cold. It was eye-opening.”

The opening menu will feature 15 to 20 drinks, including some classics by tiki trailblazers like Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s, as well as some original creations, and a “Scorpion Bowl” menu. There will a half dozen booths and an equal amount of stools, but nobody need feel pressured to sit.

“We’re not going to restrict standing,” Mr. Boccato said. “We don’t want to have anything less than a convivial, festive environment. If there are people standing, so be it. If there are people cursing, so be it. This is not Tiki Chic. This is not Sleepy Tiki. This is New York City Tiki.”

Above all, Mr. Boccato wants Painkiller to be a painless experience for the customer. “This is almost a natural progression into something that’s no less historically valid but a little bit more lighthearted, more relaxed,” Mr. Boccato told me recently. He said that what the rum expert Jeff Berry “and other tiki-philes will tell you is that to them the essence of tiki is really an escape, it’s almost a retreat, coming into a bar and feeling you’re somewhat removed from your life. That’s the reason people go to dive bars. So why not have a beautiful Polynesian setting to help you along the way?”

Mr. Boccato expects Painkiller to be open “between the Ides of March and April Fool’s Day.”

Some Planter's Punches

Recently, I spoke to Stephen Remsberg, the courtly New Orleans lawyer and rum collector. And whenever I think of Remsberg, I think of Planter's Punch, which he has called his favorite drink. I remember well a witty, and self-deprecating demonstration he once gave on how simple it was to built a glass of this tasty punch.

Over the past few evenings, I've tried a few version of the drink, which has as many interpretations as there are days in the year. I began with a recipe attributed to Dale DeGroff, then moved on to the Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide, publishing in 1972. Vic offered four different formulas, including two attributed to himself. Lastly I gave a whirl a version published by David Embury in 1948, republished in Wayne Curtis' book "A Bottle of Rum." Here are the recipes, and what I found.

DALE DEGROFF'S PLANTER'S PUNCH

1 oz. dark rum
1 oz. light rum
1/2 oz. curacao
2 oz. orange juice
2 oz. pineapple juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup
1/4 lime juice
1 dash grenadine
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake all ingredients well with ice and strain into iced Collins glass. Top with small amount of soda. Garnish with orange slice and cherry.

TRADER VIC'S PLANTER'S PUNCH—1

1/2 lime
1 dash rock candy syrup
1 dash grenadine
1 oz. lemon juice
2 oz. dark Jamaica rum
2 oz. soda

Squeeze lime juice over ice cubes in a planter's punch glass; save lime shell. Add remaining ingredients. Stir. Decorate with lime shell, fresh mint, and a fruit stick.

TRADER VIC'S PLANTER'S PUNCH—2

3 oz. dark Jamaica rum
1/2 oz. grenadine
Juice of one lime
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon bar sugar
Soda

Stir all ingredients except soda thoroughly with ice cubes. Strain into a 12-ounce glass filled with shaved ice. Fill glass with soda. Stir gently.

DAVID EMBURY'S PLANTER'S PUNCH

3 oz. Jamaica rum
1 oz. sugar syrup
2 oz. lemon juice
2-3 dashes Angostura bitter
Soda

Shake the ingredients vigorously with crush ice and pour, without straining, into a tall glass. Pack the glass to the top with more crushed ice, fill to within one-half inch with soda water, then churn with a bar spoon until the glass starts to frost. Decorate with fruit.

DeGroff's punch is probably the outright tastiest. Irresistible, really. No surprise there, since, to Dale, a top priority is always that a drink should taste good. The addition of pineapple juice and curacao do the trick in spades.

Trader Vic's version No. 1 I found the most disappointing. An outright failure, actually. Much too much lemon juice, and too little sweetener, make this cocktail too acidic, while the meager measure of rum and too ample contribution of soda water down its impact.

Vic's version No. 2 is much better. More rum, more sweetener, less lemon juice—it's all to the good. And the additional grenadine give the drink a pleasing ruby hue.

Embury's I would call a classicist's Planter's Punch—nice and simple. The large dose of dark rum and 1 ounce of syrup easily take on the 2 ounces of lemon juice, and the hearty spurt of Angostura lends a nice edge. I'd put it up with DeGroff's in palatableness, though the taste profile is quite different. It also gets points for being terribly easy to make at home. But, really, all except Vic's No. 1 are worth a try.

Memories of the Leilani

Growing up in Milwaukee, my sole exposure to the Tiki Drink universe was an exotic club along Blue Mound Road in the suburb of Brookfield, called The Leilani Motel. By the time I remember passing it by while in the back seat of my parents' station wagon, in the early 70s, the place was horribly old-fashioned. Even to my young sensibilities, I knew it belonged to the past.

When it opened, however, it was supremely hip and romantic. I was told that Frank Sinatra would entertain there.

Jeff "Beachbum" Berry forwarded me the following article, which appeared in the Waukesha Freeman (Waukesha is a small city to the west of Milwaukee) in 1961. I feel an extra twinge in my heart reading it, because the Freeman was my first professional gig as a journalist.

Tiki' Taking Shape in Front of Motels; They're Made of Lava

By Tom Barber
Freeman Staff

BROOKFIELD - A German sculptor carved South Sea island stone idols for a Polynesian restaurant in Brookfield today.

It all happened at The Leilani motel, 18615 W. Blue Mound Road, whose owners are in the midst of a $750,000 expansion program.

The motel is being doubled in size. But of more interest to most passers-by is a steep roofed supper club under construction just east of the motel.

Sculptor Gerhard E. Kroll, Milwaukee, is at work on the lawn in front of the restaurant fashioning large Hawaiian "tiki"– stone images of a religious significance in primitive South Pacific cultures.

The tiki will be used to decorate five dining rooms and two cocktail lounges in the restaurant. A large one will be placed outdoors.

Kroll has resided in Milwaukee for about two years. He studied art at the University of Wisconsin there.

The lightweight rock he is using actually is lava. Its porosity makes it easy to work. Saws, axes and knives replace the traditional hammer and chisel. Kroll expects to work a large pile of the stones into figures in about two weeks.

Along with Krolls sculpture the restaurant will be docorated with fireproof thatch ceilings, tabletops of monkey pod wood, monkey pod and coconut carvings, Hawaiian lighting fixtures and tropical plants.

Outside there will be live palm trees (to be stored indoors during the winter), fountains, and a sign illuminated with jets of fire.

Owner Paul Fecher said waitresses in the restaurant and the Malahini and Homaka cocktail lounges will wear sarongs. He hopes to hire a Hawaiian-born chef and a group of Tahitian dancers and singers to perform at the restaurant's opening about Sept. 1.

The menu will be "about 60 percent Polynesian food and 40 percent American," Fechner predicted. Dining rooms will seat 275. Banquet rooms below will be large enough for 500 to 600 persons. An automobile manufacturer will have a display downstairs.

The sharply gabled roof over the new restaurant carries out the style of the nearby motel. Both were designed by Milwaukeean Alan Wiederman. The motel addition is a two story wing attached to the south of the existing building.

Fechner has elaborate plans for future additions at "Leilani Village." East of the restaurant, on land formerly occupied by a competing motel which the Leilani bought, a heliport will be built.

Nine acres of land south of the motel have been purchased for a nine hole pitch-and-put golf course. A pond on the tract will be enlarged. The purchase of 12 to 14 more acres, where an Olympic sized pool and cabana club will be constructed.

The golf course and pool are on the agenda for next year. Sometime later, Fechner said, he hopes to build several town houses along the south edge of the golf course. They would be rented for longer periods of time than the motel units.

The Leilani was torn down in 1996. The horror of its destruction is depicted below. Wonder what ever happened to those Tikis sculpted out of lava. Returned to the volcano?