As I mentioned, Aviary doesn’t have a bar — it has a restaurant-quality kitchen that is visible through a wall of slats. We had front-row seats at the two-person kitchen table, and we watched them breathlessly for hours.
Four chefs stood at their immaculate stations, creating about five cocktails each. Some peeled orange rinds and coiled them into siphons, some arranged garnishes with tweezers and surgeon-like precision, while others shook cocktails two at a time (they do still shake cocktails, you know). Nearby were the rarefied equipment of their craft: a sous vide bath, a blast chiller, and countless ISI siphons to make foams (the really crazy stuff — the infusions, the ice molds, the distilling, and lord knows what else — takes place in the kitchen downstairs, which M. got to visit the following day).
The expediter kept the operations running like clockwork: burning wooden planks with an industrial torch, artfully arranging boughs of pine in boxes. Y’know. Just your run of the mill bar stuff.
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The Great American Cooking Project
Notes from others: