Japanese Cocktail

It’s almost summer, and I’ve been dreaming of traveling again. Before the pandemic, one of my favorite hobbies consisted of searching for cheap airfare to exotic destinations. Whenever a cheap flight was announced on Twitter, I would imagine what it would be like to have so few responsibilities and such unlimited funding that I could jump on each and every crazy deal. But the real fun began whenever my husband and I finally got our schedules aligned and took a whole week off for vacation. For weeks after getting our vacation days approved, I scoured the Internet looking for the best deals to any place we’d never been. I’ve snagged a few great trips over the years using my favorite travel tools and apps. But these days, with international travel still a faraway dream, the crazy deals that pop up on @escapeHouston are more like torture than fun.

A few weeks ago, an amazing deal was posted for a round-trip flight from Houston to Tokyo for under $300. Tokyo is high on my bucket list, so I definitely allowed myself a few moments to picture myself strolling beneath the famous cherry blossoms. But it didn’t take too long for reality to set in and for me to realize that until a vaccine is approved for children and it’s safe to travel internationally again, I’ll have to content myself with random Internet searches and my imagination.

The other day, while looking for a cocktail recipe I stumbled across the Japanese Cocktail. I’d never heard of it, so it sparked my interest. It turns out the cocktail has very little to do with Japan itself. According to Difford’s Guide, it was created by Jerry Thomas of the Bartender’s Guide fame, and is believed to commemorate the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States in 1860 to ratify the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the two countries. I tested out the recipe and, while it didn’t exactly transport me to Tokyo, it was a nice, refreshing drink.

If you’d like to try it, pour 2 oz of cognac, ½ oz of fresh lime juice, ½ oz of orgeat syrup, and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters or some other aromatic bitters into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake to chill and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a lime peel and enjoy.

Champs Élysées Cocktail

I’ve been to Paris twice in my life. The first time, I was a college student, traveling by Chunnel train under the English Channel over a long weekend during my study-abroad semester in London. I stayed in a $15 a night hostel with no hot water and only a French baguette with butter and jam for breakfast. I was determined to enjoy a flavor of Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s Paris, so I wandered the streets and back alleys for hours, imagining I was following in their footsteps. It was an amazing adventure for someone who didn’t speak the language, and who didn’t know a soul in the city. I ate fresh strawberries from a street market, enjoyed a Nutella crêpe from one of the city’s famous stands, and felt my pulse quicken at my first glimpse of the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay. I tried to soak up as much of the experience as possible, not sure when I would ever make it back.

My second trip was about a decade ago with my husband. We had nicer accommodations, but still covered much of the same ground as during my earlier trip. It was lovely exploring the city together, covering well-trodden ground and sites further afield, such as the graves of King Louis XIV, the namesake of my husband’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and Marie-Antoinette of “Let them eat cake” fame, in the Basilica Cathedral of Saint Denis. I have two favorite memories from that trip. The first was a bike ride through the Paris streets at dusk. The second was a stop for a cocktail and macarons at a café on the Champs-Élysées, looking out on the bustling street with the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Though we were in the heart of tourist country, there was still something magical about seeing the sunset through the chestnut trees, and later, walking along the avenue at night. Though there is so much of the world I still want to see, someday, I hope to make it back to Paris and the Champs-Élysées.

In the meantime, until it is safe to travel again, the Champs-Élysées cocktail with its French cognac and green chartreuse is a nice reminder. It’s smooth and herbal, and the name does bring Paris to mind, at least for the few moments while I’m making it. According to the Difford’s Guide, the drink is a riff on the Sidecar, which uses orange liqueur rather than chartreuse. The cocktail first appeared in 1925 in a recipe book entitled Drinks-Long and Short. If you’d like to try it, pour 1.5 oz. of cognac, ¾ oz fresh lemon juice, ½ oz simple syrup, ¼ oz green chartreuse and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake to chill and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a lemon twist and enjoy.

The Last Word

Throughout my late 20s, my go-to drink at any bar was a rum and diet coke with lime. There’s nothing wrong with that drink—it’s refreshing, it has a little bit of tartness courtesy of the lime, and you pretty much know what you’re going to get each and every time you order it. But after a while – a decade!—it starts to get a little old. My problem was that I never knew what else to order. All of that changed in 2009 when a new bar called Anvil opened up down the street from our rental house in Montrose.

The glories of Anvil are familiar to most Houstonian cocktail enthusiasts, and have been written up repeatedly, so I don’t need to rehash them here. But what I do want to mention is their list of 100 classic cocktails to try. Who doesn’t love a good list? (Spoiler alert – I do!) It’s a fabulous list of drinks, divided up into seven descriptive categories including: “sour & short,” “herbal & spirituous,” “boozy & alluring,” “light & long,” “bitter and bold,” tropical & tiki” and “odds & ends.” It was a virtual roadmap of what to order, depending upon your mood, and provided a launching point for me and my husband to begin experimenting with cocktails at home.

I couldn’t tell you what my first drink from that list was – my memory is not that good. But I’ll leave you with a recipe for one of my favorites, the Last Word. It’s a sweet and tart drink with a natural green tint due to the inclusion of green Chartreuse (an herbal liqueur developed by Carthusian monks). Created by a bartender at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1915, just before prohibition began, the Last Word fell out of favor after World War II, before it was revived by a Seattle bartender in the early 2000s. If you want to give it a try, combine equal parts (3/4 ounce) gin, green Chartreuse, fresh lime juice, and maraschino liqueur in a shaker filled with ice, shake, and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a brandied cherry, and enjoy.