Scheduling was tight on this trip and so the only evening we were free to go out was Friday, which can be a little tricky. Arriving around 7:00pm, there was barely room in the bar but Ron somehow managed to finagle a table for the six of us in short order. The best table in the house, in fact, situated in a small alcove open to the outside. I only ordered our first round at the bar but this was no problem, as the table servers seemed just as knowledgeable as the bartenders about the cocktail menu, spirits, and ingredients.

Moons Over Miami

Sarai and I had three rounds each and sampled a good number of the others at the table. Over the course of the evening I had a Royal Bermuda, the Smokehouse, and a Whiskey Paddle. The Smokehouse was my favorite of the three. This combination of mezcal, chinato, and cynar gave this drink a really nice, complex, smoky, bitter flavor that really stood out above the other. Also noteworthy were the Morning Bracer — basically a Last Word with luli in place of the Chartreuse — and Moons over Miami, made with Amaro Nonino, limoncello, mamajuana, and rimmed with salt. This was my first time trying some of these ingredients and it really makes me want to go back on a slower night and sit at the bar so I can taste some of them on their own.

Sarai and I had dinner on our way out and so didn’t try any of the food at Tasting Kitchen, but everyone else at the table did and they all enjoyed it. Especially the bread — the fresh bread and honey looked really good.

Rumrunner

The space has an interesting history. Someone at the table commented that it looked almost like a residential loft converted into a restaurant, and it turns out that was exactly right. We corralled one of the staff and learned that the space was originally an underground reggae club in the ’60s and went through a few transitions from there before being converted into a living space, and then back to a restaurant. Tasting Kitchen took over the space a few months ago. The staff is interesting too: driving the Clyde Common comparison, Tasting Kitchen bartender Justin Pike used to tend bar at both Clyde Common and Clarklewis in Portland before moving south to LA, and a large number of the waitstaff hail from Portland as well.

I don’t get out to the west side of LA very often but I may need to rethink that, as Tasting Kitchen immediately shot to the top of my LA bar list. Some of the downtown places offer better ambiance but Tasting Kitchen has the cocktail menu nailed in a way that the others I’ve been to just don’t match.

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Tiberius Fizz

• 2 ounces Beefeater Summer Edition Gin
• 3/4 ounce hibiscus syrup
• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1 slice cucumber, 1/4 inch thick
• club soda

Muddle the cucumber slice, then add the gin, hibiscus syrup, and lemon juice and shake until cold. Strain into an ice-filled collins glass. Fill with club soda and garnish with a few thin cucumber slices.

To make hibiscus syrup, first brew 1 cup hibiscus tea. Continue heating tea on the stove while stirring in 1 cup sugar until it’s dissolved. Cool to room temperature, bottle, and refrigerate. I like to store things like this in bottles from Specialty Bottle, but mason jars (or any other kind of jar) do just fine. This will give you a sweet, fragrant simple syrup with a gorgeous red color. I wanted to post a picture of it here but my camera couldn’t do it justice.

The other noteworthy ingredient here is the Beefeater Summer Gin, which is a “limited edition” gin released just this month. It starts with your basic Beefeater London Dry and adds elderflower, black currant, and hibiscus, giving it a more floral profile than the standard Beefeater.

When sipping the two straight, the most noticeable difference is the lower alcohol content in the summer Beefeater — 80 proof versus the 94 proof regular formula — and the smoothness that accompanies it. It’s got the same herbal notes, but toned down a bit and lighter on the finish, with hints of the floral ingredients.

This recipe comes to us from Jacob Grier, by way of Imbibe Magazine, both hailing from right here in Portland. I made a batch of these the other night for guests and they went over extremely well.

Summertime is finally upon us here in Portland and that means it’s time to break out the Martin Denny and start mixing up some tropical cocktails again. I’ve found my supply of appropriate ingredients to be a bit lacking, but luckily there’s a great new line of products available this year to help solve this problem: Trader Tiki’s Exotic Syrups.

Trader Tiki is Blair Reynolds, a bartender and tiki aficionado here in Portland. He launched his hand-crafted syrup line with three flavors back in December 2009 and has been kicking ass ever since, bringing the line up to seven varieties in just seven months. Having considered dabbling in cocktail ingredient production myself, and also helping to run an unrelated small business, watching Blair crank this stuff out is amazing. I know exactly how difficult this is.

Blair will be active at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans coming up in a couple weeks, speaking on tiki bars and developing tiki drink programs, and will also be participating in a cocktail and food pairing event. While he’s temporarily on hiatus from bartending while he works on some other projects, you can normally find Blair at Thatch Tiki Bar Wednesday and Saturday evenings, and at the quarterly tiki night at Teardrop Lounge (next one happening in August).

Keep reading for an interview I did with Blair about his syrups and the other stuff he’s up to.

Hey Blair, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Let’s start with a little basic info about yourself: Who is Trader Tiki?

Trader Tiki is, well, me. Trader Tiki was a little domain name I registered around five years ago to begin selling, believe it or not, Moai-shaped Mai Tai scented candles. Well, I never got around to it (and was horrible at candle making) so it sat around, unused, until 2007 when I began blogging about cocktails. Having been a bartender, and a tropical drink enthusiast and inspired by the work of Rick Stutz and Paul Clarke, I thought I’d weigh in to the internet with my thoughts, share a few favorite recipes, and find like-minded others. Since then, I have done far, far more than that, bartending tiki nights, speaking at various shows, and releasing a product line. People do call me Trader Tiki, but “Blair” works just fine.

How did you first become interested in tiki culture?

You could say Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room stayed as a “tickle” in my brain since I was a wee one. From there, I met with folks more ingrained in the just beginning Tiki revival, centered around Tiki Central, an online bulletin board. The drinks were great, the times were good, who wouldn’t want to help both keep and spread good times?

A lot of people are making their own cocktail ingredients these days, from simple infusions to more complicated things like tonic and bitters. How did you get started making your own syrups?

I started making my own syrups because I had to! Back when I first started getting into this, no one was making cinnamon syrup, passion fruit syrup, and definitely no Don’s Mix or Don’s Spices #2! I had to mix, find, figure out, fail, and all sorts of fun stuff before getting to the damned drink, and who even knew if that was going to be good? Lots of effort, and the reward, well, could be spectacular, but it’s takes some level of madness to craft your own ingredients.

Your syrups seem to be doing very well, based on the number of retailers stocking them. Were they a product idea from the outset or had you been making them for personal use for a while before deciding to market them?

The syrups were definitely not planned from the get-go. In fact, it wasn’t until last year that I started to think this would even be a good idea. I was toying with the idea, but it didn’t really take flight until mid-last year, when I decided I’d heard enough of folks saying they love tropical drinks, but couldn’t make one ingredient, didn’t care to hunt for another… the obscurity of ingredients had the potential to lead to a limited if not completely kaput tiki revival in the cocktail scene. So I decided to make it easier for everyone and come out with a line of ingredients based on what was used “back in the day”, with the modern twist of all-natural and preservative-free syrups.

You’re fairly well known in cocktail and tiki circles, yet your primary occupation is completely unrelated. What made you decide to keep your day job rather than work in the spirits world full time? (Or are you working on making the transition?)

You ask as though I had a choice in maintaining a day job. I actually did make the transition to bartending full-time last year, but an opportunity arose I couldn’t pass up. With the syrups business growing exponentially, and other plans coming to fruition, I expect to be back to 100% in the bar scene in the next few years.

Creating recipes involves a lot of trial and error. Were any of your syrups particularly challenging to get right? Are there any flavors you just can’t nail?

A lot of the syrups came from recipes I’d developed in my kitchen and had been using where I was working and at home. Some things had to be changed for production and preservation, sugar levels, adding gum, etc, but I paired up with a pretty smart compatriot in the food production field so transitioning the recipes for the shelf wasn’t too difficult. The Passion Fruit, for all its simplicity, took about five retakes to get right. Batches one through three all had a bit too much separation, batch four was tart enough to make you pucker, but test batch five… perfection! If there’s any flavor I have yet to nail it’s ginger. I’ve used fresh ginger, ginger oleoresin, cold-pressed ginger oil… you name it, I’ve tried it. It always tastes amazing at first but goes flabby after a week or so, and I refuse to use cayenne to mask that. One of these days ginger, one of these days…

What’s next for Trader Tiki? Any new products you can talk about? Will you be branching out of syrups into other things?

The world is one big pu-pu platter and I’ve got a really big fork and spoon. I’m hoping to get Falernum and Honey Mix out before the fall, and am just finalizing recipes now. There are other things on the horizon but those will come in time. 2010 has been a big year with the release of the syrups and things are just getting better.

Finally, can you share a recipe with us? What’s your favorite cocktail using one of your syrups?

Brian over at Teardrop Lounge made up a wonderful drink called the Patent Pending, though it could just as easily been called “Blair Candy”, since it contains pretty much everything I like:

Patent Pending

• 1 1/2 ounces Smith and Cross Rum
• 3/4 ounce Batavia Arrack
• 1/2 ounce Aperol
• 1 tsp Don’s Mix
• 1 tsp Vanilla Syrup
• 2 dashes Amargo bitters

Stir all ingredients and strain over one large ice cube in an old-fashioned glass. Squeeze a grapefruit peel over the surface, discarding the peel.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Blair. This is the first of a series of articles I’ll be writing showcasing small, independent businesses in the cocktail world. Do you have a story to tell or know someone you’d like to see here? Get in touch!

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To be perfectly honest, I didn’t expect much. But as luck would have it, I stumbled across David Lansing, who seems to spend some time in that area when he’s not out traveling the world. We exchanged an email or two and the next thing I know, we were invited out to Sinatra Cocktail Hour as guests of the Riviera Resort and Spa. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure.

On his Palm Springs estate, Frank Sinatra had a flagpole situated between twin palms and when he wanted to summon the boys over for cocktail hour, he’d raise a flag with the Jack Daniel’s logo and then his friends would simply show up.

The Riviera is reviving this tradition with a 5:00pm ceremonial flag raising at the Bikini Bar, a poolside bar at the resort, free samples of the cocktail du jour, and food and drink specials until 6:00. Now “bikini bars” and all that you might associate with them are not really our style, but this is Palm Springs we’re talking about — on a 105° day, if you’re outside at all there’s probably a pool nearby. So what the hell, let’s go with it.

Mojito, Bluecumber

Sarai and I arrived at the Riviera a bit early and met with Kara W., who showed us around the poolside bar area and also Sidebar, an adjoining bar with both indoor and outdoor seating. The three of us took a seat on the patio overlooking the pool and chatted a bit over our first round of drinks. First up for me was a simple Gin & Tonic. Like I said, it was hot, and this sounded like just the thing to cool off with. The Riviera uses their own house-made tonic , and the drink had that wonderful cloudy color you get when you’re not using stuff out of a bottle (it was quite good too).

Gin & house-made Tonic

Inside and away from the pool area, the Riviera’s decor was that sort of over-the-top style that you normally only expect to find in Las Vegas, or possibly Disneyland. Shiny oversized furniture, mirror tile-covered walls, lots of stark black and white… sort of like a cross between a Tim Burton film and the Liberace museum. Also not our usual style but, like Las Vegas, it’s probably a great place to visit once in a while. Definitely a lot of fun.

We retired into the the cooler, darker Sidebar for our second round, which for both of us was the house specialty ginger margarita. A common mistake when using something like ginger syrup in a margarita is that, once you add the syrup to the Cointreau, your drink is much sweeter than it should be. You need to do a little balancing work rather than just dumping in the syrup and calling it done. The one at the Riviera was well done, with just the right amount of ginger and enough lime to counter the sweeter ingredients without going too far to the other side.

The interior of the sidebar matched the common areas of the hotel in its predominant use of black, white, and shiny. Unfortunately, the style in here was marred by the big-screen TV that was showing some sort of sporting event, one which had a nearby table full of people hooting and yelling. As sports bars are also not our style, we finished our drinks and moved on to explore more of the hotel.

Good cocktail bars are not easy to come by in cities like this, but if you find yourself in Palm Springs, you could do worse than to stop by the Riviera for a round or two. Just make sure there isn’t a game on at the time.

And by the way, if you’re into travel, food, and drinks (as I am), be sure to check out David’s blog for some great writing on all three.

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Head over to Flickr if you want to see the Riviera pictures that didn’t make it here.

Our second priority in LA is good Mexican food, which is hard to come by in Portland. For this we paid another visit to Lula Cocina Mexicana in Santa Monica, among other places.

This trip also brought us east through the desert to Palm Springs, an oasis of fantastic mid-century architecture and design. Here we had plans to check out Sinatra Cocktail Hour at the Riviera Resort and Spa (writeup forthcoming), the Parker hotel and bar, and whatever else the city threw our way.

Our first bar stop, however, was The Amigo Room at the Ace Hotel, where we were staying. The Amigo Room is a small, nondescript bar situated between the hotel diner and the pool area. The bar itself was nothing special, but it was a great place to sit and cool off on 105°+ days. While the cocktail menu isn’t quite up to the standards set by the types of places we usually frequent, there is some creativity and attention to quality going on here that elevates them a bit over what you might expect walking in. Freshly muddled fruit and herbs and a lack of bottled mixers are some of the ways they accomplish that.

The Ace also one-upped other hotel minibars by supplying us with 375ml bottles of their selected spirits:

Our visit to Mister Parker’s, the bar at the Parker hotel, was foiled by an early closing time of 10:00pm. Granted it was a weekday, and June is the off-season in Palm Springs, but this still caught us by surprise. Unfortunately, this was our last evening in town, so Mister Parker’s will have to wait until our next visit. Jonathan Adler’s interior design for the Parker hotel was amazing though, and we had a great time wandering around taking it all in.

See Flickr for more of our pictures of the Parker Palm Springs.

Back in the LA area, I made one last stop far into the depths of Orange County to meet Forrest at Hi-Time Wine Cellers in Costa Mesa. This is the kind of thing I miss since moving from San Francisco to Portland (apart from the aforementioned Mexican food) — the abundance of high-quality liquor stores that you just don’t get in liquor-controlled states like Oregon.

Hi-Time Wine Cellers, Costa Mesa, California

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Jasmine

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 1 ounce Cointreau
• 3/4 ounce Campari
• 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice

Combine ingredients in an ice-filled shaker and shake until cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon zest.

There aren’t enough really great drinks with Campari, and Sarai will tell you there aren’t enough really great pink cocktails. But with the Jasmine, we both win.

Robert “Drinkboy” Hess says that the presence of gin in this drink will turn a lot of people off, but I would think that the Campari would be a far bigger problem for those who aren’t used to it. Here I’m using Drinkboy’s own adaptation of this recipe, which increases the amount of both Cointreau and Campari, while reducing the lemon. I personally think this balances the drink a bit more nicely, while allowing the Campari to come through (it’s a bit muted in the original). The combination of the Campari and lemon in these proportions give the Jasmine an almost grapefruit-like flavor, despite there not being any grapefruit in the drink.

It was a Saturday, so we expected to see Blair behind the bar but we were surprised to find Nathan G. there instead. We hadn’t seen Nathan since he spoke at CocktailCamp PDX back in April so we took this opportunity to catch up a bit, learning that he had recently left his position at Alu and was that day working his first shift at Thatch, where he’ll be a couple nights a week now.

While we had only stopped in for one drink — a Mai Tai for me and a Nui Nui for Sarai — Heather, another bartender on duty, was in the mood to experiment so we benefited from this in the form of a couple samples we shared alongside our own drinks. One of which you see pictured above — a daiquiri made with Blair’s own hibiscus grenadine. I didn’t care much for the sugared rim but it was only on half the glass so I was able to enjoy the drink itself without overly sweetening it.

The decor at Thatch is good, with a pretty high TiPSY factor and a little weirdness thrown in here and there. I understand it was a little sparser a couple years back but I’m happy to report that they’re not lacking in this department now.

After living in San Francisco, it’s hard to not compare every tiki bar I visit to Forbidden Island. While Thatch doesn’t come close to matching the style and ambiance there (but really, who does?), it’s definitely up to par and a great place to spend those all-too-rare hot Portland evenings. The addition of Nathan to the roster was a good move and one that’s sure to result in even better things.

Thatch Tiki bar on Critiki

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Death & Co. has a reputation for being crowded but arriving when we did around 7:00pm on a Sunday evening, the four of us managed to get a table without too much trouble. The bar filled up while we were there, and then the crowd waned again as the evening wore on. The service was attentive — even during the busier periods and we were never hurting for water or another round of cocktails. This was my first time here (but not my last!) but I had an idea of what to expect, having met Jason and seen him work when he was guest bartending at Teardrop Lounge in Portland back in January. Death & Co. easily met my expectations.

Between the four of us, I don’t even remember everything we sampled, but suffice it to say we tried a good portion of the menu and everything was excellent. The one that really sticks out for me though was the Widow’s Laurel, a fantastic concoction created by Joaquin Simo and made with Calvados, Carpano Antica, Drambuie, allspice, and bitters. It was so good that I later had to pester Jason for the recipe, which I’ll be writing up here soon. (You’ll want to stay tuned for this one.)

The Death & Co. menu is laid out nicely, with pages dedicated to the major spirits — gin, rum, whiskey, tequila, brandy — and also a “multiple choice” list, featuring cocktails that will work with your choice of between four and six different bases. “We added the freedom to choose your preferred base spirit in the following drinks”, the menu states. It’s a neat idea; I love menus that contain creative touches like that.

I wrapped up the evening with a bartender’s choice Manhattan, as I often do, and was presented with what you see below: a standard-sized cocktail plus an equal amount in a sidecar alongside it. What service! Admittedly, it was a bit much, as I wasn’t expecting two more cocktails at that time, but luckily I have considerate friends who have no problem lending a hand when there’s extra booze around.

Oh, and that dinner I mentioned? Brick Lane Curry House right down the street for London-style Indian cuisine. Also highly recommended.

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El Diablo

• 1 1/2 ounce tequila
• 1/2 ounce crème de cassis
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1 1/2 ounce ginger beer

Combine the first three ingredients in an ice filled shake and shake until cold. Strain over ice into a rocks glass and top with ginger beer. Garnish with a lime wheel.

The El Diablo is yet another one from the Anvil Drinks List. While not an Anvil original, Bobby Heugel updated the Trader Vic recipe a bit by using a little extra tequila and substituting the more substantial ginger beer for the ginger ale in the original recipe. While Bobby’s recipe calls for 1 ounce of ginger beer, I upped the quantity a bit myself to 1 1/2.

Bobby calls this a margarita alternative, saying “Consider this option whenever ordering a margarita in the future”. While the El Diablo is a truly delicious cocktail, a simple Margarita is one of my favorite summertime drinks, one that won’t be replaced any time soon.

Last Word

• 3/4 ounce gin
• 3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 3/4 ounce green chartreuse
• 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

Combine all ingredients in an ice-filled shaker and shake until cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Warm spring weather is starting late here in Portland. Outside of a few days a couple weeks ago, yesterday was one of the first really nice days of the season, coming as it did in the midst of a week of rain. We celebrated by breaking out the gin and mixing up a couple Last Word cocktails. Maybe it’s the color, maybe it’s the botanicals, but this drink just says springtime to me (never mind that it’s actually nearly summer).

The Last Word was also particularly appropriate because yesterday afternoon I went skydiving for the first time (which was amazing, by the way). My Last Word might have been more fitting before jumping than after, but it was a bit early for that at the time. Come to think of it though, this would make a really nice brunch cocktail for an outdoor meal some summer morning.