A purple lemon-drop inspired drink garnished with fresh lavender may not be exactly what you’d expect at a traditional Irish pub. But Mason Frakes, bar manager at Rooney’s Irish Pub in Orcutt who created the vodka-heavy concoction, thinks it’s right at home next to a long list of Irish beers and whiskeys.
“I like playing with classic drinks,” he explained. “Customers expect something elevated and new, and that’s what we try to give them.”
Whether it’s a twist on an old fashioned garnished with a slice of crispy bacon or a patriotic play on a Moscow mule, mixologists (or those who still prefer to be called bartenders) are carving out their reputations alongside some of the best chefs on the Central Coast. Using the same farm-to-table fundamentals as their culinary peers, mixologists find inspiration in local and seasonal ingredients while finding new ways to serve up stiff drinks.
Frakes has been with Rooney’s in Orcutt for almost seven years, working his way up from a barback to the management position he now holds.
“I always had an interest in classic cocktails,” he said. “I fell in love with higher-end cocktails and spirits in general.”
Rooney’s, like so many other venues with successful, highly sought-after mixologists, gave Frakes the freedom to play around with drink ideas, tinkering with classic recipes to incorporate his own concepts. Now, Frakes is an award-winning mixologist with a reputation as friendly neighborhood bartender with the mind of a mad scientist.
But for him, inspiration still resides in the old-school bar traditions.
“I really like classic cocktails,” he explained. “With something like the old fashioned, they’re an iconic drink that is still good. So I’ll do a riff on something like that.”
Frakes’ riff resulted in an award-winning and popular drink, the maple bacon old fashioned. The drink won People’s Choice at last year’s Bacon and Barrels, a bacon-themed food festival featuring demonstrations and competitions.
“We infuse the bourbon with bacon,” he said. “We put maple syrup with bourbon into our red oak smoker. … Then we garnish with black pepper and brown sugar, bacon, and orange bitters.”
The result is a smoky, smooth drink with a hint of sweetness, cut with the richness of the bourbon.
Another favorite of Frakes’ is the Caribbean Night, a play on a traditional dark and stormy, which is made with dark rum and ginger beer.
“We use some red oak smoked pineapple, mint, and vanilla bean infused in house,” he said.
The drink is muddled and generously topped with ginger beer.
In addition to playing off classics, Frakes said drinks on their menu also come from whims of the imagination, sparked by seasonal ingredients or random ideas.
The growth in demand for creative and elaborate cocktails has been spurred by the rising quality of the Central Coast’s food scene, Frakes explained, resulting in an ever-increasing demand for innovation.
“I think the Central Coast is renowned for good wine and good food,” he said. “Everything is on an elevated level. People expect a little bit more. Nobody wants the same old thing. You want to treat the customer to an experience, giving them something they couldn’t make at home.”
Callback to Prohibition
Bottlest restaurant in Buellton opened in April with a forward-thinking menu focused on dishes meant to elicit big “oohs” and “aahs” from customers. To go along with that, the restaurant also devised an eye-catching cocktail menu to build their reputation as a go-to nightlife spot.
Bottlest’s sommelier is Vlad Stojanov, who previously ran the beverage program at Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara. In addition to curating and nurturing the restaurant’s signature wines, Stojanov is also behind Bottlest’s innovative and quirky cocktail menu.
“For the most part, we didn’t focus on pairing cocktails to the dinner menu,” he said. “We were more geared to the bar scene, but there are a few pairings. The sidecar is absolutely phenomenal—it goes exceptionally well with the pork belly and short rib.
The short rib is compact and fatty and the sidecar has those beautiful apricot flavors,” he added. “It cuts through fantastically.”
Drinks on the Bottlest cocktail menu have a distinctly old world vibe, kicked up by nouveau techniques and idiosyncratic ingredients. Almost everything is a bar standard—a gimlet, a mule, a gin and tonic, a margarita, etc.—and yet every single drink feels inspired and utterly original.
“The idea is we didn’t want to go too far or get too crazy,” Stojanov said. “We didn’t want to make anything too weird. We wanted the menu to be classic and recognizable with a certain twist and a higher quality.”
Take for example Bottlest’s spin on a classic margarita. Made with Sauza Blue Reposado Tequila and orange liqueur, the drink is served with a pinot noir salt rim that serves as a callback to their winery.
“With something like a margarita, what we think about is how to balance in terms of overall flavor,” Stojanov said. “We played around with different kinds of liqueurs. By adding our own wine salts, it gives it that beautiful deep red color.”
To make the unusual salt rim garnish, mixologists start with two bottles of wine, reducing the liquid and adding the salt or using a dehydrator. The wine used is hyper local as well.
“We first used a compilation pinot noir from Santa Rita Hills, to keep it local,” Stojanov said. “We’re going to switch to the syrah for an aromatic touch.”
One of the most unusual and popular drinks on the menu is Bottlest’s bathtub martini. It’s a cheeky play on words that echoes back to Prohibition-era drinks, complete with a rubber ducky floating in a “bathtub” of Andrew John’s Premium Gin and lemon bubbles.
Like many establishments, Bottlest thinks and acts seasonally with regards to everything—including their drink menu—coming up with new ideas or replacements for drinks when key ingredients are out of season. Additionally, they source some ingredients, including spirits, locally. And as always, they have fun with their creations.
“We wanted to highlight some of the local stuff,” Stojanov said. “We incorporate Ascendant Spirits’ Semper Fi corn whiskey in our moonshine mule. … The Semper Fi is made with white, red, and blue corn, so we got little American flags to go with it.”
On Memorial Day, they gave the drinks away for free to veterans and active duty military, as a “small way of saying thank you,” according to a post on Bottlest’s Facebook page.
Shrubs at Mad & Vin
Stephany Reyes is the bar supervisor at Mad & Vin, inside The Landsby in Solvang. Reyes not only thinks about seasonality and creativity, she also considers menu pairings when creating new cocktails.
One of the big 2017 bar trends Mad & Vin has embraced is the inclusion of syrups known as shrubs. Shrubs were popular in colonial times as a means of preserving fruit.
“Before refrigeration, they would take fruit going bad, macerate it, and add vinegar,” Reyes explained. “That could hold for about a year, although it doesn’t last that long for us.”
The vinegary syrup is then mixed into cocktails, giving them a distinct flavor, halfway between tart and sweet. At Mad & Vin, they make an array of shrubs based on seasonal fruit including blackberry, passionfruit, grapefruit, and banana during summertime, and apricots, apples, and stonefruit in the winter months.
Shrubs are used in about six different cocktails on the Mad & Vin menu, including The Countess, made with New Amsterdam vodka, rhubarb bitters, Fever Tree ginger beer, and a blood orange shrub.
One of their signature cocktails is Gabriel’s horn, made with Dos Alamas Tequila Plata, lime, chipotle, root beer, and orgeat. Orgeat (pronounced awr-zha) is a type of liquid marzipan, made from almonds, sugar, and orange flower extracts.
“If you’ve ever had Mexican candy, it’s very reminiscent of that,” Reyes said. “There are these tamarind candies with chile on top. The chipotle we add to the drink adds a punch of spice, like the candy. We don’t want it to be overpowering; it’s balanced. Not one facet overpowers any other. The root beer gives a little sweetness.”
Ideas for new drinks at Mad & Vin start with the daily cocktail specials, where they do a soft test of sorts for curious customers. If they’re successful, drinks may be added permanently.
Reyes said the venue strives to push inventiveness to cater to customers who are on a constant hunt for something new and different.
“The trend used to be huge cocktails covered up in a lot of flavors,” Reyes said. “A lot of chains do things like that. Now there’s more of a demand for something different, with fresher ingredients.”
Social media has also made a huge impact on mixology, as people document every part of their lives in pictures.
“People like to show the world they’ve found something unusual,” Reyes said.
Santa Ynez star
It’s hard to properly define Alberto Battaglini’s star power and impact on the restaurant scene along the Central Coast. Whispers of his proficiency and talents reach all the way up the Cuesta Grade in Paso Robles and beyond, as customers seek out SY Kitchen not just for its impressive culinary menu, but also for Battaglini’s stunning and innovative concoctions.
Battaglini, resident mixologist at SY Kitchen in Santa Ynez, hails from Verona, Italy, where he grew up dreaming of becoming a chef. He attended culinary school, but after a year, he knew something wasn’t right.
“I started to work for a year,” he explained. “Then I realized that wasn’t my career. What I didn’t like about being a chef is you are restricted into four walls. It’s pretty small and you’re sharing a little kitchen. You have to keep making the same thing over and over. Your imagination is not as open and free like that.”
He turned to mixology and quickly fell in love, moving to London and working with mentor Ian Slater. Stints in Spain and Mexico eventually led him to Los Angeles, where he happened to run into an old schoolmate of his, Luca Crestanelli, at Bar Toscana. Crestanelli got Battaglini to join him at SY Kitchen, where he serves as owner/partner and executive chef.
The rest is history. Battaglini found the freedom he longed for to create unique drinks and play with ingredients and new recipes straight out of his imagination. But while the drinks may sound and look elaborate, Battaglini said the key to their success is restraint.
“We believe in something called simplicity,” he said. “There are not too many ingredients in a drink. There is no weird name. The simpler the better.”
One of the keys to that simplicity is locally sourced ingredients. SY Kitchen follows seasonality, and when Battaglini catches wind of a new ingredient in season, his mind begins to whir.
“For example, peaches are coming in season,” he said. “I love peaches, they are so phenomenal. Now you can have peach martini, peach mojitos, peach margaritas—whatever you like.”
To sip Battaglini’s creations is to taste not just the freshest ingredients from the Central Coast, but also the essence of places he’s lived and traveled in his life. It’s a personal experience reminiscent of flipping through a scrapbook of souvenirs from one man’s eclectic life.
“They come out of memories that I had in the past or from ideas I get when tasting ingredients,” he said. “I’m eating watermelon and I’m thinking how to blend it with different flavors: thyme, watermelon, tequila. A margarita. There is a method to the madness.”
The Sol Y Arena (which translates to “sun and sand”) features mezcal, pineapple, parsley, smoked agave, and lime-roasted pineapple bitters.
“That drink, it brings to me memories of when I was living in Mexico,” Battaglini said. “We were swimming and I was tasting the salt in my mouth. I was hungry. What I had in the fridge at the time was pineapples. So I was eating them, the sweetness combining with the salt of the ocean. It made me realize this is a good combination.”
Battaglini also incorporates basil into some of his creations, inspired by another important sense memory, from the time he moved from Los Angeles to Santa Ynez.
“I like to garden and grow my own herbs,” he said. “So at the time I had basil from the garden inside the jeep as I was driving. The smell, the nighttime air, all around the car, it was intense. I was surrounded by the aroma of basil during that two-hour trip. After that, I started to make drinks with basil.”
For all his drink-making mastery, Battaglini doesn’t necessarily embrace the term “mixologist.”
“Mixologist is a fancy word for bartender,” he said. “At the end of the day, we take care of the bar. A lot of people think they are mixologists, but they don’t think about the customer. That leads to people being snobs. To me, that’s not really what this is really about.”
Like most area mixologists and bartenders, in the end, what truly drives Battaglini is his passion for giving people a joyful experience.
“I really enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “We try to provide people with the best customer service, making the best food and drinks. We focus on getting people happy.”
Arts and Lifestyle writer Rebecca Rose can be reached at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 8-15, 2017.