"raising the bar" news and stories

In 1934, a former bootlegger opened a 27 seat bar on McFadden place in Hollywood, California. This tiny little bar launched the career of one of the world's greatest bartenders and set in motion an unprecedented 30 year fad that influenced music, fashion, restaurant and hotel design and, of course, drinking.

That bartender was Ernest Raymond Gantt, or as he was better known, Donn Beach. That bar, Don the Beachcomber's, ushered in the Tiki era and provided the template for every Tiki bar to follow.

Walking into a Tiki bar at the height of its craze had to have been a surreal experience, as you moved straight from the Eisenhower era stylings of conservative suburbia into a darkened place draped in fisherman's nets, Polynesian masks, exotic music and most importantly, some of the craziest drinks ever invented.

If there is a more evocative spirit available behind the bar than that of rum, I'm not aware of it. Pour me a glass of rum and within the vapors rises a raucous and even romantic history of joy, tragedy and debauchery: tippling houses in Barbados in the early 1600's, where British settlers supped the earliest permutation of rum, which they referred to as "kill-devil"; jug wielding pirates careening through the streets of Port Royal in Jamaica, wildly spending their pieces of eight plundered from the Spanish and British empires; independence-minded American revolutionaries huddled in taverns drinking rum Flips and plotting their resistance against the heavy taxes imposed upon them by the British; Americans fleeing Prohibition downing Daiquiris and Swizzles in the jammed bars of Havana; opulent tiki palaces serving Mai Tais, flaming Scorpion bowls, Hurricanes and Fog Cutters to lei-festooned business-men and June Cleaveresque housewives. I think of Piña Coladas at the pool, mojitos in a sweaty nightclub, an authentic Daiquiri while laying on a Caribbean beach with the tropical sun dipping into the sea at the horizon line.

Rum is making a comeback, as it has throughout it's history. Whether it's taxation by the British, temperance loonies railing against "demon rum", the long national nightmare of prohibition or weird shifts in tastes toward vodka and synthetic flavoring, rum has always bounced back, and today traditional mixers are left behind. More and more behind the bar, connoisseurs are treating the premium rums with the same regard usually given to high-grade scotchs, bourbons, cognacs and tequilas.

After the jump, in alphabetical order, are a few of those premium rums we're sipping neat these days. It is a wonderful, intoxicating world of flavors I hope you can enjoy as much as I do:

Long before there was a Kevin Bauch circumnavigating the globe to cure his thirst, there was the inimitable Charles H. Baker, author of my current favorite cocktail book The Gentleman's Companion - Being an Exotic Drinking Book or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask.

Charles H. Baker Jr. (December 25, 1895 - November 11, 1987) was a true bon vivant who spent most of his adult life traveling the globe, collecting food and drink recipes, the most famous of which being his chronicles on cocktails. Many of those recipes found in this book are seeing new light today at some of the best bars in the world.

If the book only contained recipes, it'd still be an important work in the field of bar manuals. What sets it apart is his prose, at once exotic, irreverent, funny and deadly serious about accuracy. Baker's wonderfully evocative introductions to his drinks alone make it impossible for me not to reach for my cocktail shaker.

Here is his introduction to a drink now finding it's way onto classic cocktail bar menus:

REMEMBER the MAINE, a Hazy Memory of a Night in Havana during the Unpleasantness of 1933, when Each Swallow Was Punctuated with Bombs Going off on the Prado, or the Sound of 3" Shells Being Fired at the Hotel NACIONAL, then Haven for Certain Anti-Revolutionary Officers.

There is an ingredient listed on the cocktail menu at Union which receives more quizzical looks, more gasps of surprise when sampled and generates more chatter than anything else we do in the bar. The complexities of it's aroma and flavors are hard to pin down, though everyone tries. This witches brew of cocktail goodness is popping up in scratch cocktail bars all over the nation, and in the well-stocked homes of cocktail aficionados all over the globe.

I'm talking about falernum, the nectar of the tiki gods.

What falernum used to be and what it has become are totally different. Since the beginning of the tiki boom in the 1930's, falernum has been used as a sweetener used primarily in tropical and Caribbean cocktails. Produced commercially rather sporadically in Bermuda, Barbados and the U.S., it had been, until recently, hard to get consistently. Keeping in line with the notion that you crave the most what you can't get, frustrated bartenders and cocktail historians began tinkering with recipes to produce their own.

In August of last year, I became the luckiest guy in the world when Christine Nylin accepted my proposal for marriage. Being the dork I am, I set out to make up a cocktail symbolizing the event. I named it The Union, which not only highlights the joining of two into one, but also happens to be the name of the restaurant where I tend bar.

That cocktail has gotten a lot of play recently, the recipe popping up on different web sites, magazines and recipe collections. And now, it has another moment in the sun, for on a spectacularly beautiful August 3rd in Seattle, I became even luckier the luckiest guy in the world when Christine became my wife.

In that spirit, I offer up our recipe to share with you. Check it out after the jump.