The Tonic Water Wars (or "What the fuck is quinine?")

I often say that everything in this business is a fight, and this week has been no exception. It is the little things about building a restaurant from scratch that you never think about nor understand until you do it yourself. You wouldn't believe how much money we had to budget for light bulbs...

When trying to do something very original, recipes are a daunting and frustrating process. The problem truly arrives when you are a basket case for perfection like I am; the words "good enough" have never made sense to me in my professional life. This comes to the great surprise of anyone who has ever seen what my home looks like without someone cleaning up after me. Thinking out loud, I once asked why it is that my bar is entirely immaculate when I work yet my room is a disaster that would make Hurricane Katrina blush, to which my friend and talented bartender Patrick quipped, "You don't get paid to clean your room." I laughed and realized that perhaps I need to be given an allowance again as proper motivation.

I decided that for Darna Restaurant I would be featuring my own tonic water, hand made and force carbonated. This was all well and good until I looked up recipes. Every bartender and most drinkers know that the magic ingredient to tonic water is quinine, which I mistakingly thought was a mineral. (Fun fact: take any drink with tonic water and put it under a black light, and it will glow bright blue. Great for when you mix up a vodka soda and a gin an tonic and need to quickly identify which is which.) After reading the first recipe, I asked myself out loud, "What the fuck is quinine?" My brother, in the other room, called out "It's the stuff in tonic water, dummy." After an exasperated sigh, I began to google. Turns out that quinine is from with the bark of the Cinchona tree, and will turn a real tonic water brown.

First of all, finding cinchona is no simple task. Sure there are suppliers on the internet, but something about buying things to consume on the web felt wrong, so off I went. After six days and a dozen stops at various restaurant supply stores, tea stores, Chinese markets (try explaining quinine over two languages...), I found a supplier at an herbal shop in Northern DC.

After finding a few recipes online, I chose one that called for a quarter cup of cinchona. Following the recipe perfectly I let it simmer, cooled it, and with great anticipation, tasted.

"Holy shit," Jin, my manager, sputtered. "That's so bitter I think my tongue is dead," I sulked. We had put in too much.

Here I sit, eight trial batches later, not able to find a balance for the raw, real Cinchona. I later discovered that the already powdered version is far less potent than the real stuff I had, so I balanced and tried and failed and failed some more. Now with the last batch cooling, I prepare myself to run the quinine gauntlet once more. I'll let you know the results, but if you see a hole in the wall with the shape of a cooking pot, you'll know that this round didn't work either.

Stay thirsty,
Eric

Foams

A Saint Germain foam mixed by hand and force carbonated to top your favorite zesty cocktail. Also great with lemon drop shots.

Episode II: A New Beginning

Sometimes, life just falls into place. After the creation of a new menu and two years at Tabaq Bistro on 14th and U St., I was offered a job to do what I always wanted: to run a restaurant. Darna Lounge and Restaurant, in Arlington, VA, approached me with the opportunity of a lifetime, and after careful consideration, I decided that my work at Tabaq was done. After four days pulling ten hour shifts in the kitchen working on syrups, foams, sugars and more, I realized that I hadn't let anyone know that I had gone. So let's talk.

Darna Lounge is a beautifully decorated loft tucked away in Arlington. As you walk through the door to the lounge, you ascend a dark, sketchy staircase. At the top, you turn the corner to a beautifully decorated room, dotted with plush beds and welcoming chairs. The smell of hookah gently permeates throughout the floor as the luminescent bar changes from yellow to green to red. Darna, as some of my Arab readers may know, means "Home," and that's exactly what you feel. Amjad, who is affectionately called Frank, (which is lucky for me because a blue collar white guy has trouble with Arabic names) is bouncing from table to table, greeting guests. Not only is he the matre-d of the Lounge, but he is also the self-taught mastermind of the Hookah program, which after tasting it for myself, I am confident is the best in the DMV area, and possibly the universe. 

After tweaking the upstairs cocktail menu, one of the owners, Mo, told me that the true work begins. Creating a cocktail menu for the downstairs restaurant had a huge challenge staring me in the face. Unlike DC, Virginia still has the archaic and ridiculous law prohibiting the infusion of alcohol. After much thought, I realized that I was stuck with the flavors of alcohol that I had, and would be flavoring all of the non-alcoholic components, such as syrups, foams, sugars, sodas, and lasis. This is when the lab began. Over the next few days I will be posting previews of some of the creations just to give you an idea what it will look like when the restaurant opens. Don't worry though, I have some surprises in store that will blow your mind.

New Menu Rollout!

Bar Toys.

Roasting a marshmallow for the Fletcher, a house made sweet potato vodka with cinnamon bitters and a toasted marshmallow.

Honey oatmeal scotch

Getting another infusion prepared for Thursdays big event.

Election Day

In every city, it is common knowledge that different areas cater to a different kind of clientèle. Here in Washington DC, the same is very true. H Street corridor, where I live and drink, is a very neighborhood oriented place, populated mostly by the people that live in the geographic area. You see a lot of young people decorated with tattoos and the bars seem to follow suit. U Street, where I work at Tabaq, is next door to Howard University, populated by young professionals. Downtown, where I work at SAX, is very different. There I am frequented by the K Street crowd; I see a lot of tailored suits and Rolex's in SAX, which matches the beautiful gold covered ornaments and live Burlesque shows. One is not better than the other, but they are very different. I was never sure how to explain this difference until election night.

I went to work at SAX and began my shift with the two televisions on CNN, watching political pundits make predictions of the election that was all wrong. Few of my co-workers know that I used to have a career in politics, but I decided to open up a bit. My door man, whom I affectionately call Captain America, or Captain for short, (due to his G.I. Joe like good looks) was wringing his hands over the pundits saying how close the race would be. I began to explain that I enjoy betting on the Presidential election with some political friends, and stood to win 300 dollars if Obama won by 7 points, and that I was very confident that he was going to win this election. They would later be amazed that I was right about the latter, but that isn't what the story was about. 

We had only a handful of bar customers that night. A few Politico's were there even though they thought I didn't know who they were. We closed the bar at around 11 pm, and as I left, the streets in swanky downtown DC were silent. I got a text from the owner of Tabaq asking me to get up there because they were slammed and could use the back up. It took me 20 minutes to get a cab because they all seemed to be full and heading uptown.

I arrived on U Street to find the corridor absolutely electric and buzzing with excitement. I could hear raucus cheers as I walked past packed bars as CNN announced that Obama had taken Ohio and was on pace to take Florida and Iowa. I ran up to Touchdown, one of our sister bars, and prepared to open the second floor because the first was packed. 

As I busily gathered ice and set up my bar, I heard screams downstairs as CNN called the election for Obama. Moments later it was eerily quiet, so I poked my head downstairs. Half of the bar had left. I looked onto the street and this is what I saw:

Three blocks of U Street were filled with young people, celebrating together at their victory. I stared in amazement and remembered the empty streets of downtown that I had left only an hour or two earlier, and the difference was amazing. 

Its funny to see how drastic a difference can be in the same city in the same day. The bars that populate the area understand this or perish, I suppose. In the end, no matter if your a Republican or a Democrat, everyone gets thirsty. 

Production Night

In anticipation for the upcoming new menu roll out event at Tabaq Bistro of my fall menu, I was busy making new product. Pumpkin whiskey, sweet potato vodka and raspberry tequila on the way.

Welcome.

What is it that makes a bar?

The obvious answer is a collection of glasses, booze, tables, chairs and a bar top. Although suggesting that these are what make a bar is about as accurate as saying that organs are what make a person. Yes, we need them to exist but it is not who we are.

As insane as it sounds, bars have all of the characteristics of a living person. They are young or old, popular or not, dirty or clean. They can lie, they can steal, they can die and they can procreate. The can get sick and need help to get back on their feet. Though most importantly, they grow and change. As much as anyone wants their favorite haunt no to never change, be it a dark dive like the places I like to drink or shiny clubs like the places I choose to work, change they will and change they must.

Keeping a bar successful and healthy is a fight against many elements that your average guest of a bar would never really understand. There is the obvious stuff like keeping it clean and orderly, having the right product, and hiring quality employees. For a bar there are many more complex problems like targeting the quality consumer, keeping your current guests interested, and the inevitable problems of a high turnover industry.

What you are reading is the first entry in a recollection of what it is that I do behind the bar. Let's set down a few ground rules so we know we're getting into. First of all, please don't ever call me a mixologist.  Every person I have ever met that calls themselves a "mixologist" either drastically overestimates their ability or is fresh out of bartending school. I am a bartender. I pour alcohol out of a bottle for a living, and sometimes take it a few steps further. I dabble in home-brewing, I'm good at making cocktails and I'm more than good at infusing. I'm starting to explore stilling.

I'll be using this blog as a platform to tell people what I'm doing in the various bars that I work at, to describe my ambitions and further projects, inform you on upcoming events and to give you a bit of insight about what happens on the side of the bar you most likely have never stood on.

Welcome to The Bar Fight.