Food - Atlanta’s cocktail culture

Well-mixed drinks are what’s for dinner at Atlanta’s restaurants

“Can I get a Grey Goose and cranberry?” asks the pretty young woman in a tasteful dress.

“We don’t carry Grey Goose – or many vodkas, for that matter,” replies the bartender in a weary voice, gesturing at the rows of well-lit bottles behind him.

There, in the middle shelf, sits a high-end Polish potato vodka and two domestic brands made from organic Midwestern grains. The woman is visibly confused.

“Oh, well, I’ll just take something fruity...” she says, clearly looking for guidance.

But she’s not getting off that easy. Pausing a second, the bartender looks her square in the eye and says, through a clenched smile: “Ma’am, I’ll make anything you want.”

All right, so impatient snobbery isn’t the most admirable quality in a service-industry worker. But I confess that, as a borderline cocktail geek, I very much enjoy watching the above scene play out next to me (at a bar that shall remain nameless) as I nurse a rum-based variation on the traditional Knickerbocker.

Dammit, doesn’t the woman know this city is in the throes of a cocktail revolution?

Not all that long ago, an adventurous drinker in Atlanta had to content himself with a Cosmopolitan or sour apple martini. Even upscale bars advertised selections of chilled shooters, and a request for an Old Fashioned usually rewarded you with a blank stare.

It may have taken awhile for the craft cocktail movement to trickle down from the Big Apple and other points north, but it’s currently hitting the Atlanta dining scene harder than a Jägerbomb on an empty stomach.

From Buckhead to Decatur to the Westside, classic cocktails and in-house originals are prominently featured on the menus of the city’s most food-forward restaurants. And, just as killer draft beer selections have served to put a number of local pubs on the map, savvy eateries – from locavore upstarts to fine-dining vets – are using inventive cocktail lists and creative mixologists to attract new customers.

According to Greg Best, a partner in Holeman & Finch who’s credited with helping jump-start Atlanta’s cocktail renaissance, “Restaurateurs in Atlanta have realized you can’t have a great restaurant without a cocktail program.”

Best isn’t talking about a flashy, Tom Cruise-type flipping bottles over his shoulder, although subtle showmanship can certainly play a role in mixing a good drink. Rather, he means having well-trained bartenders with a solid grounding in old-school classics – that is, knowing how a proper Sazerac or Rob Roy should taste – matched by an appreciation for the flavors coming out of the kitchen.

The current cocktail boom, Best notes, “can be traced to a handful of bartenders fighting the good fight in New York City,” in such oases as the Rainbow Room, Pegu Club and Milk & Honey. The crusade began in the ’90s with a focus on re-creating popular libations from the pre-Prohibition era, but has since seen the rise of the “bar chef” who experiments with fresh, seasonal fruits, homemade infusions, and savory ingredients, including herbs and spices once found only in the kitchen.

When Best arrived in Atlanta seven years ago to tend bar at a chain restaurant named for a certain over-exposed New Orleans chef, he found a city ripe for alcoholic innovation.

“Southerners are used to drinking sweet tea, so it makes sense that when they went to bars, they ordered whatever’s sweet, goes down easy and packs a punch, like Long Island iced tea or fuzzy navel,” he says. “It still amazes me that there was actually a drink named the Russian Quaalude.”

Just as amazing, and far more thrilling, has been the recent spread of cocktail culture across Atlanta.

A little over a year ago, Miles Macquarrie was pulling draft at Brick Store Pub on the Decatur Square when his bosses asked him to apprentice at Holeman & Finch for a few weeks to prep him for taking over the bar at their new gastropub, Leon’s Full Service.

Macquarrie caught the cocktail bug almost immediately.

“I’ve become really passionate,” he says. “I’m always looking for old recipe books and bar tools on eBay.”

That passion has made Leon’s a destination for Atlanta’s burgeoning cocktail crowd, with liquor often outselling beer on busy nights. Dressed like a speakeasy barkeep in a white shirt and dark vest, the 28-year-old Macquarrie is constantly in motion as he climbs a ladder to reach bottles or sprays seltzer into a glass. His hands become a blur as he transforms an egg white into a fizz.

Leon’s offers a standing catalog of classic potions year-round, but Macquarrie also comes up with a menu of originals for each season.

“I saw a recipe for a vanilla fizz in a 1940s Mr. Boston guide and wanted to do a variation that was less candylike,” he says. The result is his Grown Man Fizz, which contrasts adult spirits like rye whiskey and Spanish absinthe with the childhood taste of root beer. Last fall, Macquarrie beat out 74 other local bartenders to win a custom cocktail competition hosted by Taste of Atlanta.

On the opposite side of town, Westside Atlanta’s new Miller Union has made nearly as big a splash for mixologist’s Cara Laudino’s drinks as it has for chef Steven Satterfield’s food. Currently, the bar list includes her own Evergreen, a gin drink flavored with an herbal pine liqueur and scented with rosemary, as well as a pisco sour infused with chamomile.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a cocktail nerd, which doesn’t quite sound as cool as ‘foodie,’” she says. “Maybe I should call myself a ‘boozie.’”

The latest wave in the cocktail movement has been a boom in the availability of exotic liqueurs, obscure bitters and small-batch spirits. At the new Prohibition in Buckhead, you won’t see Captain Morgan, the Beefeater guy or passion fruit anything. At least half the bottles behind the counter would be unrecognizable to the Red Bull-and-vodka crowd. Luckily, daring drinkers can refer to a cocktail menu roughly the size of a Hemingway novella.

But even if the classic-cocktail trend or the rye craze prove to be passing fancies, the cocktail renaissance isn’t going away, anymore than the public’s taste for Belgian microbrews, fine Scotch or a well-pulled espresso. Connoisseurship is a genie that never returns to the bottle, explains Tony Ridings, sales director for Quality Wines & Spirits, a local distributor that specializes in small-batch spirits.

“Once people get exposed to high-quality liquors and they learn to tell the difference, there’s no going back,” Ridings says. “The cocktail is a uniquely American contribution to world culture, so its rediscovery is part of historic Americana.”

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