Results tagged “alberttrummer”

...and plenty of other cocktail tricks! Probably because everyone needs a drink of some kind (even Akon, who apparently favors Shirley Temples at the 40/40 club), the New York bartending scene has weirdly and suddenly graduated from flaming orange zests to intense, Jacob the Jeweler-style beveling: Having collected a gaggle of recipes from the current shortlist of beer cocktails around town, industry-centered StarChefs comes through with two instructional videos. One is a full-on, almost pornlike 10 minutes and 27 seconds of cocktail shaking from Tailor's Eben Freeman and Albert Trummer of Apothéke; you can select each bartender's clip separately from a menu underneath the video. It's weirdly fascinating (in a Discovery Channel way) to see how cocktail shaking styles vary depending on who's behind the bar. The crown jewel of bartending tricks, however, can be found in another video entirely: In a matter of minutes, Takaaki Hashimoto of B Flat transforms a solid block of ice into some kind of immense ice cube, cocktail-cooling dodecahedron using nothing more than a sharp sushi knife. This one's bound to take some practice; we wonder if cocktail enthusiast Rachel Maddow will be giving it a shot.

In September, the bar Apothéke opened in an unmarked space on Doyers Street, a tiny alley in Chinatown that sort of plays hangnail to Worth Street's cuticle. Apothéke is one of those semi-private venues, a bar you can't get into; that it's close to a secret tunnel makes it all the more baroque. You half expect to find a minotaur preening in the bathroom mirror with a bottle of Binaca and a comb. The name Apothéke refers to the pharmaceutical-themed nature of its mixed drink menu. The idea is that the place raises the bar for bars, and that head chef (or lead apothéker, as it were) Albert Trummer is half-and-half supertaster and chef, and one part sage. His specially concocted, spiced-tinctures-botanical-elixirs might cure your woes, homesick blues, lovelorn heart, or gnostic turpitude, if you're into that kind of thing.