Bar stars: here comes the next generation of cocktail wizards

Cheers, March, 2005 by Cynthia Nims

ENGINEERING CHANGE

You could call Dushan Zaric a "cocktail engineer" if for no other reason than that he holds a masters degree in mechanical engineering; today, he's a co-owner of the new Employees Only restaurant and bar in New York City's West Village. Like many top bartenders, he artfully bridges the past with the present, creating drinks that have foundations in tradition but with a new creative touch.

"When was the golden age [of the cocktail]?" he asks, rhetorically. "From the late 1800s up to Prohibition, there was no vodka then, very few off-the-shelf mixers." He takes a tip from that do-it-yourself era and plays around with creating signature bar ingredients such as herbes de Provence dry vermouth and chai-infused sweet vermouth. The latter is used in his Mata Hari cocktail, blended with fresh pomegranate juice, brandy, simple syrup and a touch of lemon juice, garnished with a dry rose bud.

A significant new development for Zaric and his partners is the imminent opening of the American Bartending Institute, due later this spring. It will offer an intimate setting (10 students maximum) in which to gain a solid education in the art of the bar, not only the cocktail-making craft but also the requisite interpersonal skills to help equip bartenders with skills for the human side of the job.

Michael Vezzoni, bartender at the elegant Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, has a handle on contemporary cocktails, but Vezzoni looks back in time for inspiration as well. He recreated cocktail history with an interesting twist recently. The hotel kicked off celebration of its 80th year in December, which included an "Eight Decades of Cocktails" list created by Vezzoni, with the Harvey Wallbanger in honor of the 1960s, the Singapore Sling for the 1920s and the ubiquitous Cosmopolitan for this decade.

Count back 80 years and you find yourself in the early years of prohibition. In honor of the hotel's day-of anniversary celebration in early December, Vezzoni went so far as to put together a big batch of bathtub gin--with more than a dozen botanicals (including juniper, coriander, orange zest, cassia bark and caraway)--for the night's Martinis. Sounds something like the infusions of today; history does love to repeat itself.

All mixologists are artists in their own right, but who better to understand the art of what's possible in a cocktail glass than an artist. Ektoras Binikos has been mixing things up at Aureole in New York for six years, after other New York stints that include Chez Es Saada. His approach to creating cocktails takes into account a multi-sensory experience that satisfies first the eyes, then the nose and finally the palate, a crescendo as he calls it, up to that first sip.

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THE ART OF BEVERAGES

When not bartending, Binikos is a mixed media artist, so it's little wonder his cocktail creations also blend some unlikely cohorts. "I see making cocktails to be the same thing as art, the same creative process." And he uses an experimental, hands-on process to come up with his distinct concoctions for Aureole customers.