The Spirits #137: The Infante
Plus: A tale of two cocktail menus
~ THE INFANTE ~
60ml tequila
20ml orgeat
20ml lime juice
Dash rosewater
Nutmeg
Add the liquids to your shaker, half-fill it with ice and give it a good shake. Now strain the cocktail into the cold glass filled with ice. Grate nutmeg. And then I garnished mine with a dehydrated lime wheel - though hydrated limes are fine, too.
Some Infante Notes:
The Infante is a Margarita variant created in 2009 by Giuseppe Gonzalez at Dutch Kills, Long Island City. His version including orange blossom water (which is often present in orgeat anyway) but I rather like the inclusion of rosewater. It makes for a slightly nutty, floral Margarita.
So you’re wondering if it’s worth making a batch of orgeat? I’m here to tell you that it is. Not only is it muy bien with lime, fizzy water and Angostura on a hot day. You can also follow up your Infantes w/ Mai Tais, Army & Navies and (if you’re feeling brave) Trinidad Sours.
Gonzalez named the drink after the Mexican screen icon Pedro Infante (above) as opposed Velzaquez’s Infante Marguerite (below).
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
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I went down to London last week to interview Jeremy King, the restaurateur who created Le Caprice, the Ivy, the Wolseley, the Delauney, Zedel, etc, and has made the city appreciably better in doing so. His newest place is called The Park and it’s a sort of grand diner on Hyde Park, serving modern Californian by way of Italian food. It’s a lovely place, perfect for the location, a touch of J.D. Salinger and Don Draper and Margot Tenenbaum. One would like to pitch up for shrimp cocktails after a game of tennis with a friend; or for a three-Martini lunch with an old colleague; or equally for a teenager’s birthday (there is chocolate mud pie and ice cream sandwiches). It’s not the first time I’ve interviewed King and I enjoyed this encounter too. He even told me about the time he went go-karting with Princess Diana. It will be up on the Independent any time soon, all well.
But in the meantime I’d like to tell you about one of the many things that struck me as just right about The Park. Namely the cocktail menu, which sits on the table and is, therefore, the first thing most guests will engage with. I mean, look:
As it happened - and I hope you won’t think any less of me - I wasn’t drinking that day. But still, I wanted to. What an outstanding menu! It’s entirely in keeping with the New World diner-by-way-of-Italy theme of the food: note how the Spritzes and mini-Negroni list brush up against pisco, tequila and mezcal. It’s delicately balanced between shorter drinks and longer drinks, lighter and heavier serves (take a bow, Oaxaca Old Fashioned). it is grounded in cocktail classicism - but there are the intriguing little twists all over. Yes, I will take some green chilli in my Paloma. Ooh, tarragon and olive in a Negroni? Don’t mind if I do. (Little side note: I have started adding pear eau-de-vie to my Pisco Sours too. It’s a thing, clearly).
Overall, it says: we know what we are doing. Also did you notice the Rose Gray, too? It’s the only drink on there that isn’t a classic and it stands out as a result. Rose Gray was of course the co-founder of the River Café and the drink is appropriately Italian accented in her honour. A classy touch, I feel, to pay tribute to another restaurateur.
Oh but that is not all oh no that is not all. There’s another page:
Note how equal care is taken over the zero proof cocktails - the Caliente offers a compensatory kick, clearly. But it’s the Sharpeners section that I particularly like. The Intro to Aperol is an underrated Audrey Saunders classic (recipe in my Aperol post). The Chrysanthemum is a real rarity these days - unless of course you’re a Spirits subscriber. The Turf Club Martini immediately goes into my secret Google doc as a future Spirits entry and then there’s the Black Manhattan, an amaro-tinted take on the quintessential NYC cocktail and is that walnut in there too? Oh my. And it’s £7!
For the keen pricing catches the eye too. These are inflationary times. The hospitality business is hard. I have noticed £20+ Martinis becoming near-standard in London’s higher-end establishments. But here, it’s £10-£15 for a “proper” cocktail, with non-alcoholic options non-piss-takingly priced at £8 and then a highly accessible £7 for a little capsule collection of demi-cocktails. That’s cocktail menu perfection in my book. It also signals that if one were to order off menu - “Actually… could you do an Aviation?” The answer would be: “Naturally. With violette?”
By extreme contrast, here is the rather peculiar menu that was presented to me the week before at The Store, a newish hotel cocktail bar right in the middle of Oxford on the upper floor of the old Boswells department store. The rooftop setting was delightful. The sun was just beginning its slow descent as I sat down. And this is what was presented to me:
The list is online if you can’t read at that resolution; there was a preceding page too. But essentially the list is composed of eight classics, the Cosmopolitan, Old Fashioned and Negroni on the first page and the Martini, Mojito, Mule, Margarita and Daiquiri here. Each starts at £16 for the plain version (already £1 more expensive than the most expensive drink at The Park) and some run to as much as £145. Worth noting in passing that a double G&T (the only G&T worth having) would be £14.
Now I hate to burnish my reputation as some sort of aesthete and I have no wish to shame anyone - but still, the Mojito, the Cosmo, the Mule, these drinks immediately cry: “1990s!” to me (just as the prices cry: “Let’s see if we can get away with THAT!”) I don’t get the impression that whoever designed this menu has kept abreast of what’s fresh in drinking in 2024. And really, none of these prices makes much sense. Why is the “blackberry, lemon thyme, anise and bay” in the Cambridge Martini suddenly £100?! Are these notes of the gin - or are they celestial distillates composed of the very platonic essence of these fruits and herbs and infused into the drink? I learn subsequently that there is a Cambridge Distillery and some of their gins are extremely expensive. But that is far from clear from the list that this is indeed what makes the drink so much. And actually there is nothing particularly special or interesting about these particular liquids. They’re just expensive. Would I trust this bar to make me a £100 Mule? I would not trust any bar to make me a £100 Mule and certainly not one that MISSPELLS THE NAME OF THE POINTLESSLY EXPENSIVE VODKA THEREIN.
There were four “Terrace Originals” too (listed here), each of them novelties (“a move in chess which has never been played before in a recorded game. The term can have pejorative sense and refer to a mere innovation.”) Again, note how The Park’s only original pays tribute to a rival restaurateur! The really confident bartenders are not desperate to thrust their own creations at you but would rather give credit where credit is due. I have no idea if the combination of Glenmorangie, grapefruit, jalapeno-infused honey and Ardbeg is good or not and I’m not sure I want to find out.
And again, there’s nothing wrong with offering extremely expensive cocktails. According to the hospitality manager, people really do order them - high-rolling tourists, I expect - and that’s great. Nevertheless, I sort of knew the moment I ordered my Store Martini that it wouldn’t be very good and what do you know? It wasn’t. Not the end of the world. But a little discernment goes a long way.
Jeremy King’s mantra, by contrast, is to give people the “opportunity to spend” but not to shove it down their throats. There’s a reason his restaurants are always tinkling with people having a lovely time. “In a restaurant,” he told me, “often, the most interesting people are the least affluent. You have to create restaurants where people can be equal within the place and aren’t looked down upon because they’re not spending.”
SHOPPING LIST: Assuming this weather holds out, a very ripe banana, some light rum, sugar and lime - and if you have some Green Chartreuse, it won’t amiss but if not, that’s fine too. Oh and ice and a blender.