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Cocktail Preview: Starlight Room in San Francisco

The other day I got a preview of Joel Teitelbaum's new menu at the Starlight Room atop the Sir Francis Drake hotel in San Francisco. The bar opens on Tuesday, September 6th. The full menu (preview version) is here.

I think the room looks pretty much the same as it did, although the furniture is all new, the dancefloor has been updated, and the bar has been expanded. It's a lot of red booths and now more gold accents.

The menu is divied into historical eras - Punch (1600s), the Jerry Thomas Years (1860s), Prohibition (1920-33), Martini Heydey (1950s), Dark Times (1980s), Beginning of the Revival (1990s), and Present Day. There are also a few "Starlight Room Classics" with Tony Abou-Ganim's Cable Car, Marco Dionysos' Chartreuse Swizzle, Jacques Bezuidenhout's La Perla, Thomas Waugh's La Dolce Vita, a Negroni, and Teitelbaum's own Smokey Local.

Though the drinks are grouped into time categories, they aren't terribly faithful to their eras. There is raspberry chamomile liqueur in a punch, red lychee tea in a crusta, and jalapeno-infused Chartreuse in the Prohibition section. No matter. The drinks are good. Let's go through them.

The Right Turn (Wild Turkey Rye whiskey, Amontillado Sherry, Benedictine, orange, raspberry) is full of chunks of oranges and raspberries, and tastes very sherry-forward but with a booze kick in it from the bourbon.

The Pisco Crusta (Encanto Pisco, red lychee tea, lime) is really bright and delicious - you could drink the whole thing in a few gulps. I suppose it's lucky it takes so long to peel the lemon spirals for each one, as that will slow you down a bit waiting for the next one.

The Dutch Vice (Bols Genever, Le Compte Calvados, Mathilde Pear liqueur, lemon, egg white) looks like a fizz but Teitelbaum says it's more of a sour. He also says that genever and calvados make a great combination, and boy is he ever right about that.  The drink is on.

The Dimes Alliance (Matusalem White Rum, Smith & Cross, Batavia Arrack, lime, orange, pineapple and three bitters) is a ten-ingredient tiki-style drink; a play off the Montego Bay from Heaven's Dog, which is a play off a Charles Baker drink. It is, as expected, super boozy.

The Jalisco Cobbler (Herradura Reposado, strawberry, black pepper, lime, bitters) is going to be a huge seller if people have any sense. It has the unbeatable combination of tequila, strawberries, and black pepper.

The Humos Locos (Vida Mezcal, Jalapeno Infused Green Chartreuse, lime, agave nectar) looks like it's going to kick your effing ays, and it smells like it will too, but after a sip it's really not all that mouth-blowing. A pleasant surprise. 

The Savoy Bounce (Bulleit Bourbon, St Germain Elderflower liqueur, Prosecco and lemon) is sure to be another crowd pleaser, tart and sweet and has that St. Germain-sparkling wine mix that always works.

The High Flyer (Kubler Absinthe, Hibiscus Cordial, lemon, Bundaberg Peach Soda) uses a full ounce of absinthe in the drink, yet manages to taste amazing. Absinthe and hibiscus cordial work really well together (as do I think absinthe and any heavy red flavor like raspberry), and the peach soda gives it another juicy spin. This would probably be my last drink of the night on future visits.

From my perspective, Teitelbaum has done a great job taking ingredients that look exotic and possibly daunting for some drinkers and making very accessible, delicious cocktails with them. It's the opposite strategy of bars where the menu lists a few innocuous-sounding ingredients and you get a huge amount of smoke or funk in the drink- sneak attack!

The drink menu at Starlight Room looks like a good combination of sophistication and drinkability. Now we'll just see how the crowd shapes up.

Ice Experimentation in Australia

I recently received an email from Gordon Ryan of the forthcoming bar ReviveR in Gosford, Australia, who has been experimenting with some of the ice concepts posted here on Alcademics. He agreed to let me share his trials with y'all. 

He says: 

I’m going to be opening a new bar about an hour north of sydney in a few months time and one of my key things is to get ice that compliments the drinks we’ll be serving. I recently went to Tales and saw both the ice sessions, so picked up some great tips there, but your post on using the cooler to make the ice inspired me to see what I could come up with, so I thought I would share my efforts. Please excuse the roughness of the build as it was something that I threw together as a proof of concept.

His first experiment is with a homemade and extra-large version of the Polar Ice Tray that I wrote about here. (It might be best to check that post out if you're not familiar with it.) Gordon writes:

I started by buying a largish plastic crate and then a bunch of 2.5 Litre tubs (2.5 Quart?).  I also bought some expanding foam filler, set two of the smaller tubs into the foam and then waited for it all to dry.

I then took one of the tubs and drilled a series of holes in the bottom. (This is to imitate the Polar Ice Tray.)

(He then placed the perforated tray into a solid tray and placed that into the insulated cooler. The next picture is the result.)

In this method, the cloudy part forms at the bottom of the insulated container, and ther perforated bucket should make it easy to separate the clear part (inside the inner bucket) from the cloudy part (outside the inner bucket but still inside the outer bucket).

He says, "And so this was the result.  Not perfect, but still pretty good I think."  Agreed!

For the next experiment, he created an insulated ice cube tray, sort of a version of the Igloo cooler method that fits ice cube trays. In his words:

I also grabbed some of the Styrofoam boxes today and made a new tray specifically for the Tovolos.

I started with a box that was used to ship broccoli, then cut it down so I had sheets of foam.  I then traced out the trays, then cut out the holes.  Once that was done, I used spray adhesive and glued it to one of the uncut sheets.

Then he added the ice cube trays back in as pictured above, and froze them. And here is a nice cube they produced. 

He says "I think the key is to take the ice out of the freezer while there is still water in the base as you can see you can get some great results at the top of the cubes and then it gets cloudy at the bottom."

Agreed. It's the same with large ice in the Igloo cooler. The cooler method (controlled-direction method, pond method, whatever we're calling it) does not reduce the amount of trapped air or impurities in ice. It only controls where in ice they form - in the last part to freeze. 

Thanks for sharing Gordon!

A Monk Walks Into a Coconut Grove

Hey, here's another drink recipe. This one comes from Chicago's Charles Joly and it inspired me to finally crack open a bottle of coconut flavored rum; an accomplishment on its own. 

It contains DonQ coconut rum, Benedictine, lemon and orange juices and ginger beer. 

As I say over at the post on FineCooking.com, watch the sweetness on this one and use a spicy ginger beer if you can find it. 

Cocktail Menu: The New Starlight Room in San Francisco

On Tuesday, September 6th, the Starlight Room in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco will reopen after a renovation and a cocktail menu makeover.

This top-floor bar is quite significant in SF's bartending history: Bartenders including Tony Abou-Ganim, Marco Dionysos, and Jacques Bezuidenhout have worked behind the bar there.

The next in the line of bartenders behind the stick there is Joel Teitelbaum, recently of Zero Zero. He's taking over the program.

I'll have a drink preview soon, but for now here is the menu. Note that this is not quite the final menu, so forgive any misspellings and note that it's subject to change.

Menu is below the jump.

Primitive Sugar Production

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, and its previous nefarious association with forced labor. (Go here for the project index.)

In today's post we'll look at how sugarcane was processed in the olden days to make cyrstallized sugar. Most of this information comes from the sources cited here.

Sugarcane is first harvested. This was (and still is in many parts of the world) done by hand. First the cane fields are burned to remove excess vegetation and to kill off things like rodents and snakes, then it is cut. I believe that when using modern machines to harvest cane they don't need to burn the fields first. 

Then the watery juice must be extracted from the cane. A while back I purchased a stick of cane and tried to get the juice out myself. It was a pretty massive failure. 

Sugar cane is chopped, pressed, pounded, or soaked to remove the liquid from it. I don't know how the soaking method might work though - anybody have an idea? I am guessing the fibers are shredded and it is washed with lots of water to get the sugar to separate from the fibers. Tequila (post-baking) is shredded and washed to release its sugars so perhaps that's what my book meant by 'soaking.'

Anyway, then the sugary liquid is heated. This removes water and concentrates the sucrose that eventually becomes supersaturated in the solution. (This is the opposite of adding sugar to water. At first the crystals dissappear into solution until it can't hold any more, then crystals will no longer go into solution. In sugar production, they take an un-saturated sugar/water liquid and remove the water until it becomes saturated.) Crystals then begin to appear in the liquid and then must be separated out.

The hot crystal-containing liquid was then poured into conical containers with a hole at the pointy part on the bottom. As it cooled, the solid sugar would stick to the sides and the liquid molasses would drip out the bottom.  What was left was a solid cone of sugar. 

White sugar was preferred to (and more expensive than) the brown stuff that forms naturally. One method to create a whiter product was to put wet clay on top of the cone. Water would drip from the clay through the cone and wash it. This was called "clayed" sugar and was one of many categories used to describe the quality of the sugar, along with muscovado, refined, and double-refined. Sugars from different regions were considered superior to others: Brazilian sugar was once considered inferior to sugar from Jamaica and Barbados, for example. 

The liquid that remains at the end of the process is molasses. It still contains sucrose but not enough to crystalize. But as we know, it can still be fermented and distilled into rum...  

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.