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
