New Cocktails: The Paramount; Shot Across the Bow

The Paramount

1 oz GTD Angelica

1 oz Green Chartreuse

1 oz Carpano Antica

1 dash Angostura

Stir.  Strain to coupe.  Flamed orange twist.

A Brief History of the Bijou:

In the cocktail renaissance of the last decade, many classics have been exhumed, polished, and updated for modern palates. Some have taken hold and are now as common on bar menus across the country as the gin-and-tonic. The Bijou is not one of them.

Which is a shame—the drink has a bright sweetness up front that soon gives way to a velvety mouthfeel and wonderfully complex bold herbal and bitter notes on the back end. The original 19th-Century recipe for the Bijou—which calls for equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and green chartreuse (a sweet, herbal, and pungent liquor with a high alcohol content that has been produced for centuries by French monks), a dash of orange bitters, a twist of a lemon peel over the glass before discarding it, and a cherry—embodied a new direction for cocktails. "Beginning in the early 1880s, American bartenders, seeking to cater to a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan clientele, turned to vermouth and other European aperitifs, digestifs, and cordials to broaden the range of colors on their palettes," says David Wondrich, cocktail author, historian, and longtime Esquire contributor. "These proved to be the keystone that capped the structure of the classic mixologist's craft."

The Bijou had a decades-long run of popularity. But while its famous contemporaries, the Manhattan and the martini, continued to thrive post Prohibition, the Bijou—perhaps because it was never updated to reflect evolving tastes—faded into obscurity with only weathered cocktail-recipe books serving as proof it ever existed

What’s in a Name?: Broadway’s original Bijou Theater opened in 1880 on the site of what had been a bar run by Jerry Thomas, the creator of the Bijou cocktail!  The original Bijou used the layout of the bar within the design of the theater.  The Paramount Theater in Downtown Crossing is one of the oldest in the city, recently restored to it’s art deco prime when purchased by Emerson College.  Bijou Cocktail → Bijou Theater → Bijou Cocktail variation → The Paramount Cocktail.

Shots Across the Bow

1.5 oz Cynar

.5 oz Ancho Reyes

.5 oz lime

Dry shake all ingredients.  Strain to iced collins glass and top with lager.  Garnish with an orange swath.

What the Heck is That?:

We’re playing with beer and making it into a cocktail!  Most of these citrus/herbal/beer concoctions are lumped together under the category of shandies.  From Saveur magazine:

Beer is arguably America's national drink, and we tend to like ours just as it comes out of the bottle or the tap.  The English, however, whose beer-drinking history goes back considerably farther, have a long tradition of mixing beer with other drinks or other types of beer: consider the snakebite (beer and hard cider), the dog's nose (beer and gin), the half-and-half (half porter, half beer), or the black-and-tan (half stout, half lager). For my money, the finest of these British hybrids is the shandygaff, often called a shandy: equal parts beer, usually an ale, and ginger beer. The origins of the drink are murky. Some accounts attribute the invention to Henry VIII, who purportedly came up with the concoction as a tonic during his matrimonial difficulties; others trace it to the 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy. (The "gaff" in the name is thought by some to be a contraction of ginger and half-and-half.) In a 1918 compendium of essays collected, appropriately enough, under the title Shandygaff, the American novelist and poet Christopher Morley wrote, "[It's] a very refreshing drink…commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, and by…newspaper men, journalists, sailors, and prizefighters."

We’re getting that herbal, spicy backbone associated with gingerbeer from the combination of Cynar and Ancho Reyes.  The cocktail is spicy, sweet, dry, and refreshing.  Grab me a pitcher and a straw!  The name comes from an 1800’s naval reference: when sending a warning from one ship to another to cease and desist, a shot was fired across their bow instead of directly at the opposing ship.  This cocktail is a Shot Across the Bow because it tastes super light and refreshing, but there’s danger in those waters!