The Spirits #157: The Naked & Famous
Everyone wants to be naked and famous
~ THE NAKED & FAMOUS ~
30ml mezcal
20ml Aperol
20ml yellow Chartreuse/Strega
20ml lime juice
Place a coupe in the freezer. Remove your clothes. Set up a livestream. Now: carefully measure out all of the above and pour into a shaker. Half fill with ice - one large lump and one tiny lump is optimal - and shake that thing. Fine strain, i.e. through a mesh sieve, into the cold coupe. Reap.
Some N&F notes:
1) Happy Valentine’s Day, darling. ❤️🔥
2) Is this a romantic drink? I’m not sure. But it’s a sexy one. It’s also a wonderful example of the importance of giving a drink a good name. It was invented by Joaquin Simó of Death & Co, circa 2011, and is fairly typical of the drinks that emerged from that excellent bar - a faintly Last Wordish combination of bartender favourite ingredients, i.e. not to everyone’s taste. And yet it’s consistenly popular. People love ordering them. And I can only assume it’s because lots of them love saying: “Oh and I’ll have a Naked & Famous.” A drinking person’s Porn Star Martini, perhaps.
3) I mean it helps that it’s also delicious. Mezcal and Yellow Chartreuse go wonderfully together. Aperol is excellent in the sweetening role. And the smoke cuts through the sweetness. My only slight tweak is to up the mezcal just a touch, as is my custom with Last Word-type drinks. I always want more base!
✨There’s FREE POSTAGE on all items at the SPIRITS STORE for the month of February. Just in case you were running low! Oh and you will not believe the competition I have coming up.✨
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🖊️I am Richard Godwin, journalist by trade…
📚… cocktail writer when I’m skirting deadlines.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
📃My full A-Z recipe archive is here.
⚗️The bottles I think you should get in first? Here.
🍾The bottles you should get in next? Here.
🛒A great place to get these bottles is the SPIRITS STORE.
➡️Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥And here is a list of trusted charities helping people in Gaza.
🍒Here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
📱And if you like The Spirits, please forward this to your friends.
FIVE MORE COCKTAILS FOR LOVERS
PLAYLIST
A fresh playlist. It being Valentine’s Day. Here are some of favourite love songs.
THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of past playlists.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
I wrote a profile of Andrew Garfield, one of my favourite actors and a person I came close to playing racketball with in LA once. (YOU)
And I really loved interviewing a bunch of older fathers - including a 79-year-old single father! - for this piece for the Guardian Weekend magazine. I did shudder a bit at this quote from single father Tom, who’s about to turn 80: “As someone who was born in the US at the end of the second world war, I’ve just gone through nearly 80 years of the easiest living it is possible to have had for the average non-aristocratic person,” he says. “You can’t find a period in the history of humankind as good. I don’t think the next 80 years are going to be like that for my daughter. I can see war. Civil war. Enormous disruption. Beyond anything we’ve experienced.” (Guardian)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
I thoroughly enjoyed Kate Lindsay calling bullshit on AI in this rousing edition of her essential newsletter, Embedded. Caling bullshit on this stuff being one of my own favourite pasttimes.
“Remember the Metaverse? The company that renamed itself Meta in 2021 quietly rolled back this supposedly world-changing technology because it had failed to consider that maybe we don’t want to do our meetings in a poorly-animated online universe in which we may or may not have legs. And so far, we have rejected the use of AI to create films, music, fiction, and journalism. Yes, boomers on Facebook love Shrimp Jesus. But the rest of us? We don’t like AI slop. We’re not consuming it. And we’re not surrendering our culture to it.”
(Embedded)
I caught up with this slightly depressing read on the ANTI-SOCIAL CENTURY. (Atlantic)
Here’s everyone’s favourite leather-clad Greek Marxist Leonard Cohen lookalike Yanis Varoufakis on what Donald Trump’s economic strategy actually consists of… which I found refreshing for its critical analysis and lack of handwringing. (UnHerd)
James Marriott is a beacon among British newspaper columnists. He has a Substack now. I loved his essay on Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection - an absolutely amazing novel that made me howl with laughter before staring bleakly into the middle distance for a couple of days. (Cultural Capital)
But let me leave you with David Coggins’s bittersweet paean to the bar… WHY BARS MATTER. I think what we are all circling towards is the paramount importance of being with one another in physical spaces.
You love a bar like you love a band, like you love a phase of your life. You get older and your favorite bars close just like your favorite bands become dis-banded. That’s sad, of course, but natural, and probably necessary. So we move on, a little wiser, still looking for a brief escape from a world that moves too fast.
SHOPPING LIST: OK this time I asked you to get out all of your most expensive ingredients. Next time it’s going to be really simple. Gin, lemon, orange, honey.
🐝
Famously named after a Tricky song, written by Martina Topley-Bird. Heady times.
You’re recommending James Marriott? Give me a fucking large one …