Bourbon-inspired twist on a New Orleans classic
SFGate - Gary Regan - Sunday, October 4, 2009
Nate Selsor works at Monarch, a joint in St. Louis that's garnered more than a few awards for its wine list, and the food there has been acclaimed too. The bartenders at Monarch tend toward some very serious cocktails - drinks that are usually right up my alley.
Ted Kilgore, a guy whom I've met on quite a few occasions, used to work at Monarch, and I believe that he's the guy who set the standards when it came to the lack of froufrou ingredients - I'm thinking lemon juice, lest you're wondering - in many of the drinks served at Monarch. These days Ted's holding forth from behind the stick at Taste by Niche in St. Louis. A recent missive from my Missourian friend served to inform me that he's currently experimenting with drinks made with duck-fat-infused spirits. He's quite a case, is Ted Kilgore.
Nate Selsor's Delta cocktail is based on a drink called Cocktail À la Louisiane, a New Orleans potion that hails from a restaurant, La Louisiane, that traces its roots to 1881. A visit to this place in the early 1900s prompted Isabel Anderson, a noted travel writer of her time, to remark, "In New Orleans the mixing of drinks is no common thing. The barkeeper, an artist in his profession, tells by the sound when the drink has been sufficiently shaken."
The old New Orleans drink calls for straight rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, Benedictine, absinthe and Peychaud's bitters. That makes it, to steal the words of Paul Clarke, one of my colleagues here at The Chronicle, a kissing cousin to the Sazerac.
It's the addition of sweet vermouth and Benedictine that sets this drink apart from the Sazerac, and oh, what a difference they make, too. Both bring layer upon layer of herbal complexity to the drink, and the hint of honey brought into play by the Benedictine is arguably the genius factor in the Cocktail À la Louisiane.
Selsor's drink calls for a specific bourbon as a base - Jim Beam Distiller's Series, to be precise. This is a widely hailed 7-year-old whiskey that's worth the price of admission at around 40 bucks, but it can be hard to find, so if you have trouble, I recommend either Baker's or Maker's Mark in this cocktail - they're very different from each another, but both work very well indeed.
The Delta cocktail also calls for dry, rather than sweet, vermouth, and Selsor mandates different ratios of ingredients than the Cocktail À la Louisiane. The man has done a fine job of balancing this baby, so you might want to think about taking it out for a stroll sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile, I plan to start listening closely to my cocktail shaker
in order to try to figure out if Isabel Anderson's statement makes any
sense or - and I'm betting that this is the case - some cheeky
bartender in New Orleans was pulling her literary leg.