Ethnic cuisine provides a unique identity for some restaurants, and many operators are finding that a fuller ethnic dining experience — as well as a more fulfilling one — can be enhanced by the addition of mixed drinks.
Sunitha Ramaiah, founder and president of Bombay Talkie in New York, wanted to create a modern take on Indian roadside cafes, which usually were sparsely decorated with movie posters. Ramaiah wanted the restaurant to be an entire experience and commissioned canvasses of classic Indian movies as well as music that plays at the location.
"I wanted everything about Bombay Talkie to be unique — the sound and the design," Ramaiah said. "I wanted everything to be an experience."
Ramaiah wanted to develop a cocktail menu despite the fact that dining inIndiadoesn't usually include having a cocktail with one's meal.
"We come from a culture where specialty cocktails aren't a big part of our dining experiences." Ramaiah explained. "We usually drink juice or water along with our meals and occasionally a beer or something."
However, the popularity of Bombay Talkie's cocktails are so great now that cocktails account for 60 percent of beverage sales.
Many of the restaurant's cocktails share names with the art that hangs on the walls of the restaurant to enhance the total experience of dining at Bombay Talkie. Nayadur, a champagne cocktailmade with lychee syrup and a shot of brandy, translates into "a new phase of life," which is also the name of one of the paintings.
According to Ramaiah, "It was a way to create a connection between the patrons and the canvasses. Not just to provide beautiful scenery, but also to create some sort of feeling."
Cocktails also play a full part of the experience at Andina, aPortland,Ore., restaurant specializing in novoandina cuisine, a gastronomy involvingPeruand the surrounding Andean region. Novoandina cuisine is a mix of traditional and new techniques and ingredients.
Andina's bar provides live music and live Latin music, and Greg Hoistma, head bartender at Andina, said, "People do not seem to think the cocktails are in any way foreign to what the restaurant is, and it helps fill out the circle of experience."
Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar, located inAtlantic City,N.J., andPhiladelphia, provides an extensive list of available rums in addition to the Cuban menu created by concept chef Guillermo Pernot.
"I truly believe in Philly it's more of a rum crowd and inAtlantic Cityit's more of a vodka crowd, so it's a challenge sometimes," said Peter van Thiel, corporate mixologist for Libre management, about the differing crowds in for the two Cuba Libres. Cocktails help to bridge differences in taste by providing an alternate alcoholic beverage option for those who might not want to be limited to rum but also do not want only wine or beer.
"The beverage menus try to reflect what the chef is doing. I go into the walk-in to see what chefs are using." said Rob Larcom, corporate mixologist for Myriad Restaurant Group. Myriad manages concepts such as the Japanese restaurant Nobu and the Mexican regional Centrico, and the company most recently opened the Vietnamese Mai House.
Mai House's Tiger Tail is made with pepper-flavored vodka, triple sec, passion fruit puree and Thai chile. The flavor combination creates a sweet sour and hot flavor reminiscent in the food served at Mai House.
"It's not about inserting tab A into tab B. You want to balance it out," Larcom explained. "It's more about trying to find a synergy of flavors you want to hit."
Centrico has a wide variety of tequilas and mescal available, along with wine and beers. There are also premium margaritas available, starting from the $6 Margarita Jello Shot to the $27 Big Papi. Such drinks, even with a twist, are readily associated with Mexican cuisine. Yet one of the more popular drinks is the Jala-Pina, $11, made with silver tequila infused with pineapple and jalapeno.
Larcom said cocktails are more flexible than other beverage options to pair with food from different backgrounds.
"I can create cocktails that are sweet or sour. I can make cocktails that mimic or contrast with the flavors of the dishes. In theory, you can do it with wine as well, but your palate profile is limited. With cocktails I've got all the flavor profiles in the world," Larcom said.
So even with cuisine such as Vietnamese, which isn't known necessarily for culturally iconic cocktails, Larcom is able to create drinks by exploring innovations that can dress up classic cocktails such as the Mai House 'jito, $11, which inserts Vietnamese flavors into the traditional combination with rum, lemongrass, kaffir lime and curry leaves. On the other hand, entirely new cocktails also are created, like the Buddah's Eye, $12, featuring gin, honeydew water and Thai basil.
Recently Bombay Talkie introduced an additional cocktail menu created by Junior Merino. Merino, founder and master mixologist for the beverage consulting company The Liquid Chef Inc., previously worked as bartender and mixologist for Restaurants like the Modern in New York and has created beverages for ANA Hotel Tokyo and Cafe Frida in New York. Merino met the challenge of creating "Indian" cocktails by also relying on the flavor profile of the foods served.
"I just used liquors from anywhere else but used the ingredients and flavors related toIndia," Merino said. "I get together with the chef when I create cocktails, and a lot of times the chefs are from foreign countries, so I see ingredients that I've never seen before that I use."
In the case of Bombay Talkie, Merino was able to borrow flavors from Central and South America because a lot of the spices and ingredients used in the cuisine of the region came from India through Spain. Merino also utilized floral and fruit notes to mimic the ingredients used in Indian cooking.
As a result, The Dark Pod is made from tamarind concentrate, lemon, ginger beer and cachaca, a Brazilian brandy, as well as a Colombian anise-flavored liqueur called aguardiente. Brown cardamom and tamarind salt rims the glass for additional Indian flavor.
"The consumer always goes out to find a new experience," Merino said of the restaurant market. With more restaurants offering different foods, cocktails can be part of the equation in keeping things fresh for the customers no matter what the cuisine is.
While certain cultures benefit from having iconic drinks and spirits, familiarity breeds the need to make sure the drink is created according to a certain degree of quality. And rather than resting on laurels, some restaurants also create distinctive concoctions to further build the personality of their concepts.
"We do have fun, and we come up with different things," van Thiel said about Cuba Libre, which serves the famous Cuban mojito as well as other varieties of the drink. "You work from your base, which is the mojito, and you come up with different flavor profiles."
Cuba Libre's "libations" menu also includes drinks made with pisco, a Peruvian grape brandy, and Brazilian caipirinha.
According to van Thiel, many customers either come from Central andSouth Americaor have traveled to those regions, which means they're more sophisticated and thus are searching for innovative Latin American cocktails.
Cuba Libre also differentiates the quality of its mojitos by using hierba buena, a Cuban herb similar to mint and guarapo, or pressed sugar cane juice that Cuba Libre presses on premise.
Andina's chefs use native ingredients as well as cooking influences from immigrant groups. In the same way, the cocktail list also uses classical Latin ingredients and cocktails but incorporates modern techniques of bartending.
Among the "Latin American" classics is the Peruvian classic Pisco Sour, made with pisco, lime juice, cane sugar and whipped egg whites and topped with angostura bitters and a squeeze of key lime juice. The Novoandino cocktail list features drinks like the Sacsayhuman, made with habanero pepper-infused vodka shaken with passion fruit puree and cane sugar, served in a glass rimmed with sugar and a cilantro leaf garnish.
Ingredients such as passion fruit, guava, mangoes and tamarind make a drink feel authentic, according to Hoitsma. "So if there's innovation to the cocktail, the innovation does not feel forced. ... Like with Latin jazz music, sometimes it sounds like a jazz musician with some Latin touches, but we want it to be like a Latin musician playing jazz."