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Drinks that lift your spirits

BY BECKY AIKMAN | STAFF WRITER

May 30, 2005

First there was the $29 burger. Now there's the $125 cocktail. That would be the prickly pear margarita served at the Dos Caminos restaurants in the Flatiron district and Soho.

It's made with Triple Sec, hand-squeezed lime, a dash of fresh cactus-pear puree and a premium aged tequila called 1800 Collecion.

"It's not listed on the bar menu, but we sell a surprising number of them," said Eben Klemm, director of cocktail development for Dos Caminos.

Few cocktails command such head-spinning prices.

In fact, the restaurant offers the same margarita with less expensive tequila for $12. Still, for a mixed drink these days, $10 to $15 is no longer considered all that high.

Cocktails have been reaching other heights lately, too: in their bright, inventive flavors, their use of fresh, top-quality ingredients and their importance to restaurants and bars as a lure to a new generation that gets a kick out of cocktails.

Rhubarb-infused vodka with lime and sparkling wine, anyone? Try the Persa at Blue Water Grill on Union Square. How about a Lychee and Lemongrass Fizz, made with gin and a touch of citrus? It's at Flatiron Lounge on 19th Street.

From Manhattan to the East End of Long Island, if one restaurant or lounge doesn't offer the latest specialty cocktail, another one down the street surely will.

In fact, the art of mixing a quality drink is now considered so crucial to some venues' success that the more talented practitioners have cast off the title of bartender in favor of mixologist, cocktail consultant or even bar chef.

Following the lead of celebrity food chefs, these masters of fun yet sophisticated cocktails have built their own followings by taking old-fashioned drinks and giving them a good shake.

"Bartenders are now going into the kitchens to see what ingredients they can work with," said Audrey Saunders, bartender at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel. "All of a sudden you started hearing that this bar is using tamarind and that one using mango."

After investors offered to back her, Saunders is working to open her own lounge this summer in SoHo, The Pegu Club. She is considered one of the leading purveyors of the truly adult cocktail in Manhattan, but she has many competitors.

"Everybody and their mom has a cocktail menu now," she said.

Saunders' mentor, Dale DeGroff, formerly the bartender at the Rainbow Room, gets credit for setting off the current thirst for innovation. He started using all fresh ingredients and abandoned such longtime bartender crutches as canned and bottled juices.

He's also considered the inventor of the now-ubiquitous cosmopolitan, the "it" drink of the late 1990s and still popular in flavor permutations ranging from pomegranate to passionfruit. Cocktail culture has been building ever since, as new signature drinks pop up in ever more restaurants and bars.

A new happy hour

For the liquor industry, the cocktail craze has been one extended happy hour.

From 2001 to 2004, distilled spirits increased their market share by 1.1 percent, the equivalent of $1.5 billion at retail, while the share for beer declined by 2.1 percent, according to the Distilled Spirits Council. That marks the most successful two-year period for spirits since the 1970s.

Restaurants and clubs everywhere are saying cheers to that. Two out of three restaurants reported that they were selling more distilled spirits in the past two years, in a survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association.

And cocktails stir up profits for them, too. A $10 drink usually uses $1.50 to $2 in ingredients, while a $10 food order involves ingredients worth $3.50 and a lot more labor.