The Spirits #2: The Brown Derby

~ Eat in the Hat - Pink Grapefruits ~ Dogs of L.A. ~ 'Bitterol' ~ Brazilian Breakfast ~

~ BROWN DERBY ~

45ml bourbon
30ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml maple syrup (or honey, loosened with a little hot water)

Place all the ingredients in a shaker. (NB: If you’re using honey, you’ll want to loosen it with about 5-10ml hot water from the kettle first - a good way of rescuing honey that’s crystallised in the jar). Fill about halfway with ice and shake until your fingers go numb. Fine-strain (i.e. through a tea-strainer or similar) into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a strip of grapefruit zest that you removed with a vegetable peeler. You can cut it into a parallelogram, as above, if you’re feeling swank. And why not?

Some music. Oh yeah and if you have a nickel for the phone booth, the dial code for tonight’s destination is 90027.

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The Brown Derby restaurant opened at 3247 Wilshere Blvd, Los Angeles, in 1926.

It was called the Brown Derby because it was in the shape of a Derby hat and it was brown. It is an example of mimetic architecture, i.e. architecture that is designed to mimic something else. Like this massive duck on Long Island. Or this jumbo toilet in South Korea. The sort of building that makes children go: “Look!” And (so the idea went) passing motorists go: “Hey! Let’s stop there and get a Cobb salad!” (The Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby).

The gimmick worked. The Brown Derby soon established itself in Hollywood iconography, a place to see and be seen. If you have Disney+, and have made peace with the finitude of existence, you can look up the sequence in ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ (1947) in which Willie the Giant jumps down from his beanstalk fortifications, chases the eponymous rodent around L.A., spies the Brown Derby and puts it on his head.

Three more branches followed. The most famous was the one on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where the walls were filled with caricatures of the clientele. Marlene Dietrich once caused a scene by turning up in slacks. Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard (pictured below). Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (the inspiration for Paige Sinclair in Bojack Horseman, aka my secret TV crush) held court in the booths. There was another branch in Beverly Hills, too, and a fourth one followed in Los Feliz, owned by Cecil B. DeMille. That one had a Drive-In “Car Cafe” that looked like this:

As for the Brown Derby cocktail? I had hoped to find you a suitably Hollywtf picture of, e.g., Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Theodor Adorno and Toto from the Wizard of Oz, all sipping them in situ. Sadly, no such picture exists. It turns out that the Brown Derby drink was actually invented at a rival establishment, the Vendôme Cafe, which occupied the unimprovable address 6666 Sunset Blvd. Which seems a bit like Burger King serving a burger called the McDonalds? Still, the Brown Derby did serve a famous Grapefruit Cake - so perhaps that has something to do with the recipe, which is sort of a honey sour made with grapefruit.

Anyway: the cocktail is delicious, surprisingly so, considering it’s not that well known. It’s simple to make - three ingredients, only one of them alcohol - but surprisingly complex to drink. A lot of that has to do with the bitterness of the grapefruit, which deepens all the other flavours. And a lot has to do with not-using-sugar as the sweetening element. The Vendôme recipe called for honey syrup. I’m not sure who subbed in maple syrup, but it’s a great choice and has a particular affinity w/ bourbon.

Another good thing about the Brown Derby cocktail? It’s damn near unmessuppable. You can up the bourbon content significantly and it still tastes obligingly sweet. It also works well as a non-alcoholic drink template. Either sub the bourbon for cold black tea and shake it up; or else make a long honey-grapefruit soda, topping up w/ fizzy water.

🍸

Sadly, the Brown Derby chain is no more (unless you count the replica Brown Derbies at Disneyland). The original dome is interred in a shopping mall on Wilshere Blvd. The Los Feliz one is a bank. The Hollywood facade was demolished in 1994. There’s a Trader Joe’s supermarket there now. I bought grapefruits there a few times when I was living in L.A. But the once iconic Hollywood and Vine intersection is now sort of busy, tacky, generic, full of tourists going: “Is this it?” L.A. is like that: lax / arcane / corruptible planning laws mean you get a lot of meh architecture. But occasionally you get a hat.

And were Willie rampaging around contemporary L.A., he would still have a few props to choose from. There’s a Frank Gehry-designed building on Venice Blvd. where the entrance-way is a pair of binoculars - perfect for giant-scale snooping. That building is now the Google HQ.

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OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of The Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout. There’s a good deal on Eagle Rare bourbon at the moment.

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PLAYLIST

Baby remember, I'm not drinking wine
But that Cherry Coke you serve is fine
And our love's sweet enough on the vine
Bartender, bartender

Yeah, we’re in Hollywood this week. (Or at least, the wider L.A. County area…) Link here if the embed doesn’t work.

(CW: Kanye.)

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ASK RICHARD

Journalist and ocean child Elle Hunt writes:

“Hey Richard, what do you make of the budget spirits stocked by Lidl? We have a few in our flat – Finton's gin, Bitterol etc – and as a lazy, indiscriminate person I don't find them too bad!"

Glad you asked! It’s surprising (but maybe not that surprising given the amount of marketing ca$h thrown at this) how many people think of cocktails as an expensive, high-falutin’ pursuit. Truth is? Most spirits are OK in 2020. It’s not like it’s London 1780 or L.A. 1925 or Siberia 1995 when drinking the wrong stuff could kill you. Lidl and (especially) Aldi actually have decent reputations for spirits and often outclass their more upmarket rivals in blind tastings. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that their copycat gins, ersatz-Aperols, etc, were distilled in the precise same stills as some of your more boutique-y stuff.

Anyhow, the whole point of cocktails is to make cheap stuff taste better. Use what you have. If it tastes good to you, it is good.

Got a Q? Send it over and I might just give you an A.

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SOUR CHALLENGE

I was impressed - humbled even - at the diligence and creativity with which the Sour challenge was taken up last week: Brandy Sours, Bourbon Sours, eau de myrtille sours w/ lavender syrup, are you serious? But particularly pleasing was this creation made by Kevin Goodall: cachaça, lemon, marmalade, egg white, garnished w/ a strip of orange from the marmalade (which apparently sank 😔 ). Sort of a Brazilian Breakfast Martini? I too have had a bottle of cachaça lurking at the back of a cupboard for some time and will be trying this forthwith (😄).

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WHAT I’M READING

• Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, a bit Secret History, a bit Borges. (Your local bookshop).

• No idea who Mike Francesca is, no real opinions on Kazuo Ishiguro, but this (from 2017!) made me hoot like an injured owl (Slate).

• John Gray on the crime writer Lawrence Osborne (New Statesman).

• Kirsty Major on Scouse stew and the unhappy fate of British regional cooking (Vittles - scroll past the italics to get to the actual piece).

• The chilling complicity of Mike Pence (NYT).

Couple of my pieces from this week:

• I went to the Newt, the huge Somerset garden museum that weirdly reminded me of Jurassic Park for the Notting Hill set (Observer).

• On the new fish sustainability guidelines (The Times).

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SHOPPING LIST

French vermouth, gin, lemons, green olives. 🍸