Mouthing Off

The traditional harbingers of spring have finally arrived—asparagus at the farmers’ markets, cherry blossoms bursting all over the city—but one that might not be on your radar, and should be, is spring sake, or nama. Roughly the sake equivalent of Beaujolais Nouveau, spring sake is made from the previous fall’s rice harvest and is bottled without going through pasteurization or the traditional aging process.

“The beauty of spring sake is its freshness and liveliness,” says Yoshi Sako, of the small but fantastic Corkage Sake & Wine Shop in San Francisco, which carries more than 200 different sakes. “It’s a good introduction to sake, because even though the alcohol can be high, there is a richness and fruitiness to it.” (Other shops that carry selections of nama sakes include New York's Sakaya and Wally's in LA.)

Yoshi, who passed Japan’s sake-sommelier exam last year, pairs these sakes with lighter foods like summer rolls, soba salads and seafood. Two namas he recommends seeking out are Otokoyama Yukishibare ($30), on the drier side with pear and grape aromas, and Harushika Shiboribana ($30), which has a fruity nose and long finish. Just drink them sooner rather than later—the freshness fades the longer the sake is in the bottle. —Kelly Snowden

I stopped in the other night at the Macao Trading Co., which occupies a desolate block of the Tribeca landscape (or at least it seems desolate at 11 PM when there's sleet blowing in your face). It's a neat trick, then, to walk in and abruptly find oneself transported back to some fanciful version of colonial days in Macao; Somerset Maugham may have spent more time at the long bar at Raffles in Singapore, but I still wouldn't have been surprised to find him lurking in a linen suit somewhere in a back booth.

The restaurant brings together the disparate talents of David Waltuck, Chanterelle's longtime chef-owner, and Dushan Zaric & Jason Kosmas of the West Village cocktailian watering hole Employees Only. Waltuck handles the food end, which splits somewhat oddly between Portuguese-influenced and Chinese-influenced dishes (a nod to Macao's colonial history, but—like that history—a somewhat conflicted relationship). For my part, the winning dishes were mostly on the Chinese side of the menu, like an appealingly earthy-briny bowl of Manila clams with black beans and chilies, and a whole sea bass with a ginger-scallion sauce that was fun to pick at and expertly cooked.

But the real reason to head here is the cocktails. In the interests of scientific inquiry, I felt it incumbent on me to try all nine or ten of the house cocktails. They were uniformly excellent both in concept and execution, the sort of cocktail experience that's becoming oddly easy to come across in NYC these days (think Clover Club, Tailor, Pegu Club, PDT, and six or seven other places) and that tends to make one think we're living in a kind of cocktail golden age—an excellent thing, since every other aspect of our age seems rapidly to be turning into some base metal, say lead, or brass.

Anyway, here are two of my faves, recipes courtesy of Mssrs Zaric & Kosmas:

Esmeralda
3 cubes of fresh honeydew melon
1 heaping demitasse spoon of cubed ginger
2 demitasse spoons of sugar
3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
1/4 oz. Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
1 1/4 oz. Esmeralda Cachaça
 
Directions: Muddle the melon, ginger and sugar in the bottom of the mixing glass. Add the rest of the ingredients and ice. Shake and pour unstrained back into a rocks glass. Garnish with a honeydew cut as a "sharks fin."
 
Kaffir Jimlet
3 oz. Kaffir leaf infused Plymouth gin
1 oz. fresh lime Juice
1/2 oz. agave nectar
Green Chartreuse
Kaffir leaf
 
Directions: Wash the inside of a cocktail glass with Green Chartreuse. Pour Gin, lime juice and agave nectar into a mixing glass. Add ice and shake vigorously for 7-8 seconds. Strain into the prepared cocktail glass. Garnish with a Kaffir leaf.

I'll add as a final note: go for the Esmeralda, if you can find it; it's a great aged cachaça, and has more depth than run-of-the-mill white cachaças (for more on artisan cachaças, see my F&W article here). And if you don't feel like infusing your own gin with kaffir leaves, Hangar One makes a kaffir-lime vodka that would probably work as a good substitute.

I'll be on the Today show tomorrow (that'd be Tuesday, the 6th), talking about and making some warming cocktails with the fourth-hour hosts, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotbe. Hot Buttered Rum, Apple Brandy Hot Toddies, Hot Spiced Wine...and a couple of non-alcoholic options, too. Should be fun. If you're at all interested in the subject, tune in or check out our slideshow here.

That ol' holiday entertaining season is upon us (perhaps you noticed?) which means that the season of morning shows running segments about holiday entertaining is, too. Which is why I'm hopping in a cab when it's still dark outside tomorrow morning and heading over to the Saturday Early Show on CBS to do a 7:45 segment on holiday punches. On the docket are Fish House Punch—a Philadelphia classic that my charming wife's grandfather used to debilitate people with—and a brandy-red wine punch; I'll probably have a few other tasty-looking punches sitting around on the set as well, like this Limoncello Collins, and a Citrus-Cinnamon non-alcoholic punch that's ideal for kids, teetotalers, hamsters, and other non-likker-drinkin' folk.

Here's the video of the segment, too. 

© photo by Maura McEvoy
watermelon coolers

Several people wrote in wondering what the other two drinks that we had on Today were—the ones sitting up front that we ran out of time before we could get to. Both are terrific. One's a simple watermelon cooler (recipe here) created by Susan Mason, a caterer in Savannah, GA. The other is a bit more complicated, but a very cool drink—the Thai Boxer (recipe here), from Scott Beatty at Cyrus in Healdsburg, CA.

I was on Today this morning, mixing up some Labor Day cocktails with Hoda Kotbe and Kathie Lee Gifford. It was, as is usual for the fourth hour of the show, a rather, um, freewheeling segment. We didn't exactly make it through both drinks, though I did get kissed on the lips by KLG, much to my surprise (this was cut from the video on the Today site, but a number of friends emailed right after it happened with comments like "OMG!", so evidently it did air). ANYWAY.

The cocktails we actually demo'd were a very pretty one from our 2008 Food & Wine Cocktails book (buy it here) called the Belle de Jour, which was invented at Eastern Standard in Boston. It's a Champagne cocktail—a touch of Benedictine (I subbed B&B at home last night practicing it, to no ill effect), Cognac, grenadine and lemon juice, then top with Champagne. Then we did a white wine and sparkling cider sangria from Steven Raichlen, which is great for parties; it's floating around in our summer drink slideshow. Both are tasty, and if you increase the proportions on the Belle de Jour, you can actually whip out quite a few of them quickly, a key requirement for Labor Day cookouts and whatnot.

Well, as part of my ongoing attempt to achieve world media domination, I did another TV spot yesterday for local channel CW11, recommending a range of organic, green and etc. spirits and wines. It was much lower-key than the Today show gig, and it got me a chance to recommend Appellation Wine & Spirits, here in NYC, a cool store run by the equally cool Scott Pactor that focuses almost entirely on organic & biodynamic wines and spirits. It also gives me a chance to link over to some recent recommendations I made for organic & biodynamic wines that were an adjunct to my August article on wineries' green strategies (recycling, sustainable energy, using gerbils to power crusher-stemmers, that sort of thing), which I'm keen to do since the recommendations are a little lost on our site.

See? World media domination, but in a responsible way. I do my best to be a conscientious fellow.