Not all art survives.
Take the Vieux Carre, a cocktail revived by Black Rock Golf Course bartender John Phelps. With its haunting herbal perfume and shades of light and shadow that reveal themselves on the palate, the glass is likely to be empty before happy hour is well under way.
Although he admits the New Orleans classic turns few heads on the chalkboard menu, Phelps notes that those who sample the cocktail are quickly lost to reverie.
“It’s a taste that is like no other,” Phelps observed. “It almost tastes layered to me.”
The composition involves Rye whiskey, Cognac, sweet vermouth and Benedictine D.O.M. — the latter a liqueur that endured for centuries before nudged aside by the careless mixed drinks revolution.
Benedictine is gentility wielding a crowbar, striding with bad intentions. But in the right application it drops the 40 proof attitude and offers a meadow of floral and herbal character.
Finished with a few dashes of bitters — both Angostura and Peychaud’s — the Vieux Carre belongs to weathered yet always grand squares of old world cities, solid and almost formal containing a swift carnival of activity.
A lacey drizzle of bittersweet honey introduces the cocktail. As this retreats, a garland of herbs drifts across the palate yielding to bits of tamarind and clove and sharp juniper, framed within the husky savor of rye. Botanicals snap, allowing a swell of bitterness to drape the other notes. Soon, however, that honeyed sweetness reemerges.
It is a beautifully balanced cocktail, dipped here and there with unexpected color — dark chocolate, for instance, and a sharp edge of perfume.
The Vieux Carre was created by a bartender in New Orleans’ Monteleone Hotel a few years after the end of Prohibition. Sipping one at Black Rock brings to mind the mottled haze of a damp evening, the walkways glistening, the color of stone and brick muted, the lowering sky casting an oyster shell hue over the scene as people move to the promise of warmth and light — Frederick Childe Hassam’s 1885 masterpiece “Rainy Day, Boston” in a glass.
Yeah, yeah — wrong city. But the Vieux Carre evokes the composed beauty of boulevards and dated buildings at the moment they are both most haunting and hopeful. You want to pause for a moment and reflect on the scene, find the reason it engages you.
And then the drink is gone. So you must draw it up again.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
