The Spirits #28: The Green Park

~ Basil!!! ~ Vaguely Bondish ~ London Is the Place for Me ~ The Pleasure of a Concise Cocktail List ~ What Is a Brain?

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~ THE GREEN PARK ~

A few fresh basil leaves
50ml gin
25ml lemon juice
15ml golden sugar syrup
15ml egg white
Dash celery bitters (optional)

Pre-chill your glassware. Place five or six basil leaves in the bottom of the shaker with the gin and muddle. Then add everything else plus lots of ice and shake hard until extremely cold. Fine-strain into a spare vessel, empty the shaker, and shake once more with no ice - this is to froth up the egg white. Now pour into your chilled glass. Garnish with another basil leaf.

Some Green Park pointers:

1) You will notice that cocktail in the illustration is served ‘down’ over ice. This is a completely acceptable way to serve sours! You might want to top up with a little fizzy water. But you can also serve them up if that’s your jam.

2) You will also notice that it is a fetching pond-like colour. You too can acheive this improbable hue by muddling the basil with the gin first. If you omit this step, the cocktail will come out a pale yellow.

3) The method above is known as a ‘reverse double shake’: one shake to cool, another to froth up the egg. Many bartenders prefer the ‘double shake’: shake first with no ice to froth, then with ice to cool. Quicker an less washing up, but slightly less froth. Or you could just shake once. See if I care.

AWRIGHT? LOVELY DAY INNIT! I JUST ACTUALLY HAD AN AFTERNOON NAP IN THE SUNSHINE! Please enjoy this MUSIC… And you are more than welcome to dance.

You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Please share with anyone you think might like - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter!

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ONE of my favourite things to do, when I was a cub London reporter about town, was to find some excuse or other to go and spend an afternoon at the Savoy’s American Bar. Not easy. Sometimes liable to turn messy. But occasionally possible. My friend Paddy was, for a while, employed by the hotel as a sort of flâneur-in-residence and when he wasn’t showing the brattish children and bored mistresses of visiting billionaires the sites of London, he would often be perched up at the bar, chatting with Erik Lorincz, the one-time headbartender. So I associate the place with unhurried afternoons with these two, the idlest of chatter, maybe a 1960s gin or two.

Erik (above) originally hails from Slovakia and is one of the indefatigable East European bartenders who arrived in London with very little and worked up to the pinnacle of the high-end drinking scene. There’s a nice profile of him here. He is one of the most elegant of all bartenders: neat, precise, vaguely Bondish, with a vaguely perilous method of chopping up ice with a pick in his hand and a unique accelerating shake technique. You can now find him tending his own bar at Kwãnt in Mayfair, where I will surely head as soon as I can. And you can meanwhile see him make his Green Park here:

The Green Park! It’s just a fabulous drink, so fresh and full of summery optimism. I used to make it all the time when friends came round and when I presented it to Johanna just now she said: “Ah! That takes me back.” Erik’s original recipe, I feel duty bound to point out (since he is a far more exacting about these things than me) contains slightly different proportions to the ones I have come to use. Also, he made it with Hayman’s Old Tom gin, “Old Tom” being a Victorian style of gin that’s slightly sweeter than your London Dry with a slight anise/licorice note. (The merest tear of absinthe/pastis might tip the drink in that direction). It also contained a dash of the Celery Bitters made by the German company the Bitter Truth (which forms part of their extremely useful cocktail traveller’s set). But it still works if you simply rest on the combination of citrus, basil and juniper.

As it happens, there were a couple of other cocktails that emerged at more or less the same time and worked on similar principles: the Gin Basil Smash, which was created by Jörg Meyer at the Bar Lion de Paris in Hamburg in 2008; and the Basil Gimlet, created by Greg Lindgren at Rye in San Francisco in 2006. There’s an exhaustive article about the drink here. But Erik’s gin-basil cocktail is, to my mind, superior - and as a journalist, I have always been more interested in doing stories best rather than doing them first. Lemon, I feel, is a more luscious foil than lime and, as is usual with sours, the addition of egg white gives it a superior texture and a little extra dilution.

It’s also a London drink - named after one of our great parks. I always used to enjoy the fact that I could walk from my old office in Kensington almost all of the way to the Savoy - or at least as far as Trafalgar Square - pretty much without leaving parkland. Ah, I’ve missed London. Not long now, though, eh.

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PLAYLIST

In case you couldn’t tell, all of the above made me feel quite nostalgic for London, a city I lived in for most of my life and visited at least every week or two before ALL THIS. And so: here are some songs about London; or songs that say London to me, at least. By no means exhaustive. The British, it has been hard not to notice while compiling these playlists, are not such avid documenters of their cities as Americans. Few of the great London songs are entirely celebratory too. Most of them contain at least a few quavers of grumble and usually, a good many breves of melancholy. But here are a handful that will bring a ginny, grimy tear to the era.

CW: Garage

Please note: if you follow this playlist it will automatically refresh each week - so make the most of this week’s selection while you can! You can find a masterlist of all songs featured so far this year here.

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THE PLEASURE OF A CONCISE COCKTAIL LIST

Somehow, in an extremely rare feat of organisation and luck, I managed to book a table at Little French here in Bristol on the very first night that eating out was legal again. What a thrill. Even sitting outside in the freezing April evening, with the baby asleep in the pushchair by our side (occasionally poking an alien-like limb up from under the sheet), barely able to remember how to talk in a civilised grown up way, it was a balm for the soul. One of the things that gave me great pleasure was quite simply the sight of a cocktail list. Here:

I like a list like this one: a brief, to-the-point summary of the drinks of any given moment, priced judiciously, and written with the confidence that the customer is going to know what most of them are (and ask if not). What did I order? Champagne actually.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

What is a brain?! (LRB)

I always enjoy the coolness and mischief in Lauren Collins’s writing; here she is on streetfood vs the Parisian culinary establishment. (New Yorker).

Musa Okwonga on his old school, Eton, and the people who emerge from it (Guardian).

What was the restaurant? (n+1)

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SHOPPING LIST

OK: I’m going to offer a three-speed shopping list here: dark rum (and if you’ve already got a bottle, get yourself another?), orange liqueur, lime and ORGEAT. Orgeat?! It’s a kind of French almond-flavoured syrup. You can either buy this online (Monin is basic but fine… not tried this one but it’s made in Bristol!). Or purchase almonds and sugar (and maybe rosewater and almond extract if you’re feeling really pro) and I’ll show you how to make your own superior version next time. (If you happen to see this kind of almond milk (which is madewith just almonds and water, no chemicals/stablisiers etc, sometimes available in health shops) that’s perfect .

🍹 🍊 🌰🌴