Saturday, July 9, 2005

YET ANOTHER ARTICLE...

It's the weekend and things are pretty cool on our end. Last night turned out to be another good night at the bar. Maybe people took the weekend off from the usual getaway to the Jersey Shore/Hamptons, or were turned off by the rain that we got all day Friday; In any case, 3rd Avenue was jumpin'! We had a steady stream of enthusiastic party animals all night long, and while they for the most part weren't worthy enough to make the blog, I did find myself chuckling from time to time throughout the night.

I got an interesting article from one of our regulars, GOLDIE; It illustrates how far bars/lounges have to go to lure customers to their establishments. Makes for some interesting reading. So if you have a couple of minutes to kill....enjoy!

Strange Brews
Two parts vodka, one part octopus? To boost sales, bars and liquor companies are pushing weird cocktails. Nancy Keates on the effort to keep spirits up -- and why your martini tastes like bubblegum.

By NANCY KEATES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 8, 2005; Page W1

Bogart's American Grill in Raleigh, N.C., is a joint much like you'd find across the U.S., with rib-eye steaks on the menu, Marilyn Monroe photos on the walls and a drink list of merlot, Miller beer and the kind of dry martinis Humphrey Bogart himself might have sipped. And then there's the newest house cocktail -- a shot of vodka soaked for days with hunks of Bubblicious bubble gum.

"It tastes just like the gum," says manager Mary Shipley, who created that drink and another made of vodka soaked with Jolly Rancher green-apple and watermelon candies. Bogart's sells more than three gallons of the new concoctions every week.

Now that Americans have been through Cosmopolitans, apple martinis and caipirinhas, what's next: ginger Cosmopolitans, cucumber-apple martinis and carrot caipirinhas? Actually, yes -- those combinations and even weirder ones are popping up on menus across the country. After two years of strong liquor-sales growth, the spirits industry want to keep the party going by making customers feel like they have to try the next new thing. Meanwhile, bars and restaurants, squeezed by higher wholesale food prices, are using attention-grabbing, pricey drinks to keep bar revenues high.

The bar at Ken Stewart's Grille in Akron, Ohio, serves a $10 martini with a pickled baby octopus draped over the side. In Kirkland, Wash., Jager Bar & Restaurant recently added a cocktail of cucumber, sake and vodka topped with lumps of wasabi and seared sushi tuna. The national chain Morton's is considering rolling out a new "Jameson and ginger" drink promoted by the whiskey's maker, the French conglomerate Pernod Ricard. And this season, Marriott sent out recipes to 320 hotels that included a new mojito that uses basil instead of mint.

With so many cocktails out there already, it's pretty tough to break new ground and come up with something that tastes good. Many bartenders lack the training to develop drinks with the proper balance between bitter and sweet, in part because most bartending schools -- unlike cooking academies -- can't encourage students to taste drinks as they make them. For reasons of liability and cost, these schools don't use actual liquor: Students make hundreds of drinks in a typical 40-hour course, so they often practice with colored water and dishwashing soap.

Meanwhile, bartenders are being asked by managers to follow constantly morphing directions. The Sweetwater Restaurant and Martini Bar in Naperville, Ill., has about 50 different kinds of martinis on its bar menu, and the list changes every three months. "It can absolutely be overwhelming," says bartender George Gellis. The martini menu at Lola's in Los Angeles carries this warning: "Martinis are not returnable! All ingredients are listed. Please order accordingly."

On a recent evening at Vault Martini Bar in Portland, Ore., customer Ann Samiee had to negotiate a cocktail menu with almost 100 choices that included a Badhattan, with bourbon and red wine, and a Pad Thai, a drink made of ginger-infused vodka, basil, lemongrass and lime juice. Ms. Samiee settled on a "Blue Basil," a mixture of vodka, vermouth and basil, plus olives stuffed with blue cheese that created an oil slick on top. "I felt like it should have had croutons," says the stay-at-home mom. Across the bar, flight attendant Jenni Tompkins ordered a "Cherry Cheesecake" with vodka, vanilla liqueur and cranberry juice. Her verdict: "It tastes like cough syrup." The manager, Kenny Stachovich, swapped it for a different drink but says the Cherry Cheesecake is very popular. "People get bored with rum and Cokes," he says.

The $49 billion U.S. spirits industry is banking on that. Spirits consumption has grown for the past seven years, and is forecast to jump another 4% this year, according to data from Adams Beverage Group. Much of the increase in sales has been fueled by new products. Spirits companies introduced 53 flavored vodkas and 26 flavored rums in the past two years, up from 17 and 12 respectively in 2002, according to the Distilled Spirits Council in Washington.

Sending Out a Team

To market all of these products, liquor companies need to think up new ways to get them onto bar menus. Four months ago, Pernod Ricard for the first time hired an outside mixologist -- the industry's name for someone who comes up with new cocktails -- to create five drink recipes for each of the company's top 10 brands. The consultant, David Commer, who worked for six years as director of beverage marketing at TGI Friday's, developed the "Jameson and ginger," which uses fresh ginger syrup instead of ginger ale, and an "Irish margarita" using Jameson instead of tequila, among others. Pernod Ricard sent out a team to bring the recipes to bars and restaurants. "We work to help them create drinks more people will buy," says Scott Moore, director of Pernod Ricard's U.S. accounts.

Exotic cocktails are also a way for smaller companies to get noticed. Triple 8 vodka, made by Cisco Brewers in Nantucket, Mass., pays for a three-day weekend on the island for bartenders and managers who sell a certain quota. Now, Triple 8 shows up on menus across the Northeast, in cocktails such as the $15 "The Man from Nantucket" at the Biltmore Room in New York, a Triple 8 martini with garlic-stuffed black olives, and the "Nantucket Bloody Mary" (garnished with roasted tomato-stuffed olives) at Spire restaurant in Boston.

For bars and restaurants, hodgepodge cocktails -- even if their ingredients cost more -- can bolster margins by attracting attention. The establishments also can charge more for the new drinks. Farnoush Deylamian, manager at Aziza in San Francisco, estimates that cocktails with fresh vegetables or fruit cost about $2 more and are priced accordingly. But the drinks -- such as the $9 "Balsamic Morocco Mary" and "Kumquat Blossom" -- have been featured in local media and lured more customers. Three years ago, the restaurant didn't have a separate cocktail menu and served mostly the basics.

Ludger Szmania, who owns the Jager restaurant in Washington, says he offsets the extra cost of the ingredients by using standard vodkas that cost less than premium brands. Faced with a lagging bar a year ago, Mr. Szmania paid a mixologist to create a new menu. When Mr. Szmania first tasted the "Hunter" (horseradish-infused vodka with Grand Marnier, garnished with a grilled beef tenderloin tip), he thought the idea was a little crazy. Now that the new drinks have brought in new customers and tripled bar revenues, he's asked his bartenders to arrive at 2 p.m. and do prep work so that by the time the bar opens they have a whole array of ingredients set up. "It gives people something to talk about," says Mr. Szmania.

Higher Margins

Bar margins have become more important to restaurants squeezed by rising food prices. Wholesale food prices rose about 5% per year in 2003 and 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but restaurant menu prices rose at about half that rate, according to the National Restaurant Association. Cocktails can be sold at a higher margin than food: The ingredients in a cocktail typically cost a restaurant 20% of the drink's final cost, while a typical food item costs 30% of the menu cost, according to Chicago food consulting company Technomic.

Cocktail consumption has fluctuated over the years. The first known printed reference to the term "cocktail," was in 1806 in The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, N.Y., according to the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans. (The newspaper's definition: "a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.") In the 1980s, spirits consumption fell off in part because of concerns raised by Mothers Against Drunk Driving; as a result, lower-alcohol substitutes such as beer and wine coolers took off, and it was hard to find a cocktail menu at any restaurant or bar.

Then, in the mid-'90s, Madonna was photographed at New York's Rainbow Room drinking a Cosmopolitan. Bartender Dale DeGroff was inundated with requests for the recipe. (Mr. DeGroff says he didn't invent the drink, but believes it was adapted from an old recipe called the Harpoon: cranberry juice, vodka, lime and simple syrup.) In 1997, Absolut began distributing recipes for Cosmopolitans that called for its Absolut Citron vodka. Mr. DeGroff became a consultant to Absolut and also designed drinks for the lead characters in the TV series "Sex in the City," which further propelled the drink to fame. Restaurants and liquor companies raced to come up with new star drinks. They borrowed the caipirinha from Brazil (made of sugarcane liquor, sugar and lime), and invented combinations like the apple martini, which many mixologists say originated at Lola's in Los Angeles. Food flavors led to actual food, and a few cutting-edge bars began putting oddball edibles in drinks.

Now that the trend has gone nationwide, it's creating a bit of a backlash among some purists. "I cringe when people call anything in a martini glass a martini," says Robert Hess, who along with some other stalwarts started the Museum of the American Cocktail. Its bar will soon serve only "authentic" drinks, made from 19th-century recipes. Audrey Saunders, a well-known mixologist, refuses to use recipes from liquor brands. When Ms. Saunders opens her new bar Pegu Club in New York this August, she'll be making the same gin-based drink served at the famed British officer's club in Rangoon in the 1900s.

Some cutting-edge bars and restaurants -- such as Bar Americain, a new Bobby Flay restaurant in Midtown Manhattan -- also are shunning the more-is-better take on drinks and paring menus down to include only classics like sazeracs. Employees Only, a bar in New York, is making its own vermouths, bitters and infusions from preprohibition recipes.

Lynn Fischer, an online marketing executive, was sitting at the bar of a Chinese restaurant in New York recently when the bartender asked if she'd like to try a vodka from Minnesota shaken with green-tea powder and a dash of sugar syrup, served in a martini glass and garnished with a wedge of cucumber. Ms. Fischer thought about it -- then ordered a margarita. "It seemed a little too strange," she says. "I just wanted a margarita."

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com

NUFF SAID