You guys!! This is really cool. It’s the beautiful custom-made infuser they use at Aviary, the revolutionary Chicago cocktail bar, and if enough people support it on Kickstarter it’ll be produced for the masses. You can use it to create infused cocktails, spirits, tea, dressings, the sky’s the limit. In January, we had a delicious cinnamon, verjus, and apple brandy cocktail infused in one at our table.
For M.’s last birthday, inspired by siphoned dashi, oolong brandy, and coffee we had in Chicago, I gave him the siphon they use at Alinea and the Aviary….
I think I know what baby’s getting for Christmas.
(Via Brit.)
Grant Achatz ‘Aggressively Pursuing’ NYC Location for Second Aviary
For those who dreamed of an Aviary-like experience in NYC — can’t get better than the real thing.
angrygirlfrienddiaries asked: What an amazing experience at Aviary! Even with a hangover today, I'm drooling over your descriptions. Any recommendations on where to have an Aviary-type experience here in NYC?
New York is woefully lacking for an Aviary-like experience. I asked M. and he said the closest you can get is the bar at WD-50. Mention that you’d love to try something unusual, something in the Aviary vein, and they’ll whip out their “back pocket” cocktails. Momofuku recently opened Booker and Dax, a bar that boasts a lot of the crazy equipment Aviary has. Worth keeping an eye on.
Not to toot my baby’s horn, but M. is one of the few bartenders in the city who understands (and is absolutely obsessed with) the modernist approach to cocktails. (He’s even working on a book about it.) We are planning to revive our cocktail supper club, Evoe, this year — and one of the events high on our agenda is an homage to Aviary. Please sign up for updates. We’d love to have you there!
I’m winding down (although if you can believe it, I haven’t covered every cocktail — you can find them on Flickr if you’re so inclined).
Before I go, four last sips:
Huckleberry & Cranberry.
Hot Chocolate.
and a Dreamsicle of rum.
Dreamsicle is right. What. A. Night!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to the beautiful ice shards that fill every water glass at Aviary, an echo of the Alinea centerpiece. (If there’s one thing us upper-Midwesterners know, it’s ice.)
Horchata & Two Turtle Doves. The first is a traditional Spanish and Latin American drink of milk and cinnamon — this one had tequila and rum, too, and was slummin’ it in a take-out cup — the second a duo of decadent rum cocktails that the Aviary team created for the holiday season, one with white chocolate, the other with orange and macadamia. I loved the juxtaposition between high and low.
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.
Putting the cider in Oolong & Cider: cinnamon, verjus, and apple brandy with aromatics in a beautiful, custom-designed glass infuser. The cider deepened in color and flavor from a sunny peach to the dusky orange you see above.
Basically, my tried-and-true Irish cold remedy — at a whole new level.
Oolong & Cider. Siphon was the theme of the trip — we had siphoned coffee at Intelligentsia, siphoned dashi at Alinea, and siphoned oolong at Aviary. Pistachio, brown sugar, herbs, and lemon also lent their flavor to the pear brandy in the chamber below.
If this was how they taught chemistry, maybe I would have paid more attention.
Manhattan & Bitter: playing with scent. A rum Old-Fashioned in a sealed bag filled with the aroma of Kaffir lime, black tea, and cinnamon. I was invited to snip it open with a little pair of scissors, letting the scent wash over us (you’ve got to love a cocktail joint that keeps scissors on hand as serving ware).
On the other side of the table, a glass filled with the scent of a (literally) smoking barrel awaiting a Manhattan of amari and apple brandy. Like snuggling up in the big old leather chair of the cigar-smoking grandpa I never had.
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