On a steamy night in October, I visited the Savory Project, a small bar in Hong Kong with textured walls that resemble clay and make you feel like you’re in some kind of massive cave in an ancient land. The drinks, however, placed me firmly in some futuristic world.
One of the bar’s co-owners, Ajit Gurung, walked me through the menu where, true to the bar’s name, salty, spicy, umami-heavy drinks were the modus operandi. He led me through a tasting of the menu that put me in the mind of ambling through some outdoor market in Mumbai or Istanbul where the onslaught of smells are as unruly and intense as the frenzied sounds. Stops on the sensory tour included the Thai Beef Salad, a rum drink with peanut, chilli, coconut oil, kaffir lime, and a beef jerky garnish, and the Pepper + Corn, a mezcal-based creation involving a charred corn husk, pepper, cumin, tomato, and MSG. Move aside, aperitifs and digestifs. More and more these days, you can find cocktails that practically stand in for an entire meal.
I was in Hong Kong for the World’s 50 Best Bars awards ceremony, which took place at a cruise terminal on the Kowloon Peninsula. Those 50 bars span six continents. (Get with the programme, Antarctica!) The top slot went to Bar Leone, a casual spot modelled on a Roman trattoria, à la 1960. Its most popular drink is the Il Cicciatore, made with gin, dry vermouth, lemon, and a cherry-tomato concoction. It tastes like some intergalactic creature with the power to transform matter stormed into the kitchen at a neighbourhood tavern and zapped all the ingredients into liquid form. I ordered a second.
We’ve come a very long way since the Benton’s Old Fashioned. Made with bourbon fat-washed with bacon, the drink was a signature at PDT, the trend-setting, speakeasy-style bar that shook up the industry when it opened in the West Village in 2007. Nouveau speakeasies were a novelty. Logic-defying savoury drinks — a far cry from even the most eccentric Bloody Mary — were, too.
Word of mouth took hold and curiosity piqued. Crowds queued up, sometimes for hours, for a taste of that smoky whisky mixture in a dim, moody space. The era of fat-washing — the process of using an oil, butter, or another fat product to flavour a spirit — had arrived. Today, you can find cocktails featuring liquor that’s been fat-washed with any number of ingredients: butter, bacon fat, sesame oil. Drinks like Piña Coladas with coconut-oil-washed rum or a Gin Sour with brown-butter-and-sage-washed gin eventually lost their novelty.
Recently, though, things have taken a turn for the much, much weirder. At Tokyo Confidential, in Tokyo, I drank the hot-dog-leaning Glizztini, made with gin, shochu, onion brine, MSG and, sous-vide sausage. It comes in a ketchup bottle and it’s poured into a glass drizzled with red and yellow cacao butter designed to look like ketchup and mustard.
And lest you think this is a trend isolated to Asia, it’s not. In Manhattan’s Double Chicken Please, the cocktail list reads like a dinner menu. (The Waldorf Salad, for one, features Scotch, a slew of veggies, and walnut bitters).
Some will ask: Are these cocktails necessary? To which I’d reply: Is Miles Davis necessary? David Lynch? Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo? Man Ray? Dalí?
Yes. And to all those rolling their eyes at the notion of breaking with tradition, please know that I’m not lobbying for the abandonment of Manhattans and Martinis. I’m just saying that going off road, per se, is useful, not least because it staves off boredom. Also, when did silly and fun become something to scorn? Why is it so much more acceptable in the food world? Consider how multihyphenate hyper-flavours are, arguably, the norm.
One thing’s for sure: these drinks are only going to inspire others. Maybe it’s nostalgia — a drink designed to evoke a hot dog, after all, gives rise to all kinds of memories. Maybe it’s that we’re all living under the influence of Instagram and TikTok algorithms. Or maybe it’s just sheer craftsmanship of bartenders who think about something entirely new and then create it. And there’s no progress without creativity.
