Something we don’t talk about much here is the pleasure of sitting in a good bar and having a few good drinks. That’s what I did last night when my wife and I met our friend Nilo at the Shady Lady. This place has atmosphere, good bartenders, and above all, great cocktails. They follow in the footsteps of bars like the Pegu Club in New York and Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco where cocktails developed at the turn of the last century by Jerry Thomas and his ilk have been resurrected. They’ll happily serve you a dry martini but they’ll more happily serve you a martini the way it was originally made (which is not dry at all).
We arrived at a few minutes after 6:00 to find Nilo already into a Manhattan. First up for me was a Sazerac. This is a New Orleans drink made with rye whiskey, sugar, Peychaud’s bitters, and touch of absinthe. It’s a combination that could go horribly wrong, but it didn’t. Instead, it was a delicious example of how a few disparate and harsh ingredients can come together to make a complex and harmonious drink. It’s palate education in a glass.
When asked for my next choice, I deferred to the bartender. He remarked that I’d want something lighter and more “hydrating” after the intensity of the Sazerac and mixed me up a Horse’s Neck. This is basically whiskey and ginger ale, but at the Lady, they use rye, housemade ginger syrup, and soda. It was a refreshing palate cleanser that was a great follow-up to the Sazerac.
At this point, our orders of duck tots and fried green tomatoes came out. The duck tots were homemade tater tots with duck confit blended in. They were quite tasty, as any well-made tater tot will be. The duck flavor seemed to be missing, though, and that was a bit of a disappointment. The tomatoes were great. I’ve only had them once before (at a different place) and those were thin slices of limp, barely breaded tomato that left me wondering why people ate them. The Shady Lady’s version involved thick tomato slices with a hefty cornmeal coating. They were crunchy and a little spicy on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside. Excellent bar food.
Then came a Bronx Cocktail. That one’s gin, sweet and dry vermouth, and a little orange juice. Again, a delicious exercise in the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts.
As I was finishing my Bronx, the bartender began putting together a drink I hadn’t seen before. He lined up bottles of Laphroaig Scotch, yellow Chartreuse, green Chartreuse, lemon juice, and simple syrup. This was not good as I had fully intended to end the night with the Bronx, but I became very tempted to see how this other drink would taste. Laphroaig is a wildly peaty single malt, and I couldn’t imagine how it would play with the two Chartreuses, the citrus, and the sugar. All three of us were watching closely as he measured it all into a shaker, gave it a good shake, and strained it into a glass full of ice. He did a quick “straw taste” (where he dropped a cocktail straw into the drink, plugged the end with his finger, pulled it out and tasted it) to make sure he had it right. Then he set it in front of the three of us and said, “For you guys. It’s called a Laphroaig Project, originally from Bourbon and Branch.” It turned out to be a fascinating drink. The peat-smoke flavor provided a firm bottom-end to the drink, with the Chartreuse filling the middle and the lemon providing top-notes. I love the flavor of Laphroaig but can only handle it in small doses; this put it into a completely different context and it made for a hell of a good drink.
We finished our shared Laphroaig Project and headed out the door. We’d spent close to three hours there, sipping our drinks, eating, and talking. What really made it great, though, was the atmosphere. The place was full but not overly packed, and everyone was having a good time. There are definitely bad things that can go along with sitting around in bars. (Heck, if you’ve listened to just about any country music, you’ve heard most of them.) But there is also much joy to be had in the conviviality of a good bar. Last night, we got that in spades.