I recently moved back home to Hawai’i after living in Boston, where I worked as bartender at Clio Restaurant, a French/Asian fine dining restaurant owned by James Beard Award-winning Chef Ken Oringer. The bar program there had recently been revamped by bar manager Todd Maul. Todd took me under his wing and became a wonderful mentor and a great friend. Over the next year, I assisted him in developing a bar program there that is now heralded by many magazines, critics, and Bostonians as the city’s best. Todd’s program at Clio was huge, both in terms of sheer list size (we had 75 individual drinks on the menu when I started and nearly 150 when I left) and depth of knowledge/preparation. There was no spirit category left untouched. Not only did we carry rare spirits like Cape Verdean grogue & ponche; we also created American Arracka™, our recipe for Swedish Punsch, based on a bottle brought in by a Swedish regular.
Aside from the variety of bases, Todd’s program had a definite molecular edge to it, which I was enamored by, and had to work hard to stay on top of. We spent most of our prep time in the kitchen, working with a refrigerated centrifuge nicknamed Sally, a vacuum compressor, the dehydrator oven, and using everything from glucose to Ultratex 8 to liquid nitrogen to manipulate the ingredients of our cocktails. We built an ice program devoid of Kold-Draft machines, focusing on ice as a garnish rather than as a cooling element. And we used traditional cooking methods as well: fat washing, clarification, smoking, etc., all in service of creating a true “craft” cocktail. In October 2011, I traveled with Todd and the Clio team to StarChefs 6 in NYC, where I assisted Todd with a workshop on Citrus Contortions — more or less demonstrating our various techniques in the context of working with limes and lemons. I have to say, it was pretty cool. We closed out the workshop with a tasting of my Tahitian Milk Punch. It was one of my proudest moments!
Prior to meeting Todd, I had studied “classic” Prohibition-era cocktails and done a lot of research on tiki drinks, which were actually my entry point into the cocktail world, thanks to friends like Brother Cleve, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, Martin Cate, Scott Marshall, John Gertsen, and Sam Treadway. I was also fortunate to do some stages at No. 9 Park, Menton, and Craigie On Main.
My personal convictions, though, have always been about translating the Hawaii Regional palette to craft cocktails and their preparation.