Sean Muldoon - The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual: Secret Recipes and Barroom Tales from Two Belfast Boys Who Conquered the Cocktail World

This book is dedicated to the youth of North Belfast, with all the best hope for their future.

Copyright 2015 by The Best Bar in the World, LLC

Interior photography 2015 by Brent Herrig Photography

Additional photographs (page ) 2015 by Drinksology
2015 Sean Muldoon
2015 durstonphoto.com
2015 nick@syncimaging.com
2015 Filip Wolak Photography

all rights reserved.

Lighting technician: Bryan Tarnowski
Prop stylist: Rachel Hornaday

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGarry, Jack

The Dead Rabbit drinks manual: secret recipes and barroom tales from two Belfast boys who conquered the cocktail world / Jack McGarry, Sean Muldoon, Ben Schaffer; photography by Brent Herrig.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-544-37320-4 (hardcover); 978-0-544-37339-6 (ebook)

1. Cocktails. 2. Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog (New York, N.Y.) I. Muldoon, Sean. II. Schaffer, Ben. III. Title.

TX951.M154 2015 641.87'4dc23 2014043215

Book design by Steve Attardo/NINETYNORTH Design

v2.0816

Contents

Introduction

Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry launched and ran one of the best bars in the world. And then they did it again.

W hat follows is a celebration of two bars. We will learn about the Cocktail Bar at the Merchant Hotelelegant, first-class, an international destination, historically-focused, with an exacting standard of serviceand the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Groga neighborhood haunt, ragtime piano venue, pretensionless spot for a pie and a pint, which nonetheless manages to embody all the aforementioned virtues of the Merchant, too. The creative forces behind them were the same two men.

Sean Muldoon is a bar mentor, one of the first of his generation to see the opportunities in the cocktail revival. He takes his place as a taste bud traveler in time, an adventurer of absinthe and sailor on the high seas of sours and slings, an excavator of elixir erudition, a man who made his mark on moonshine.

Jack McGarry is the consummate barman in the flesh. It is he who tamed the tincture tiger and deciphered the lost language of the Ancient Cocktailians. Discovered after years of slumber in a block of hand-shaped ice in the basement of Jerry Thomass Exchange Saloon, he is said by some to be the only nineteenth-century barman alive today.

In both their establishments, the boys from Belfast have focused on historical drinks. At the Merchant, the emphasis was on the twentieth century heyday of British and European hotel bars, where travelers would encounter classics, perfectly made with meticulous detail. Once that was accomplished, they ratcheted up the challenge. At the Dead Rabbit, the drinks still come from history, but they are not the classics, they are the forgotten ones: Drinks that have long since fallen out of fashion but can still teach us much about flavor and texture, not just as it was understood in bygone eras, but in ways relevant to our own tongues and nostrils.

However, even as we begin to create myths, lets dispel one. While Jack and Sean are both meticulous barmen and bar historians, and their respect for their antecedents is at the core of everything they do, the drinks in their bars and in this book are not just instructions out of old books. They havent simply been selected and reprinted here. Everything in this book is an original recipe, though it was inspired by historical sources. As you will see, every drink listed in this volume includes the historical source material from which it was derived. But these recipes are all-new renditions, not only updated for modern ingredients and the modern palate, but enhanced, deepened, awoken through the inspiration of our authors.

The reverse is also true: unlike the many encyclopedic cocktail manuals on the market, we are only including original recipes that you wont find elsewhere. We will tell our own stories here. So pull up a stool, unclip the nutmeg grater from your belt, and lets start our tale.

How to Open the Best Bar in the World, Twice

The sky darkened, the planets paused in their headlong course, and mankind held its breath as Sean James Muldoon entered the ballroom of New Orleans Roosevelt Hotel. This Irish barman, representing his Belfast establishment, the Merchant Hotel, had been nominated for the most prestigious award in his industryWorlds Best Cocktail Barat Tales of the Cocktails 2010 Spirited Awards, the Oscars of the beverage world. Meanwhile, back in Belfast, his right-hand man and head bartender, Jack McGarry, was handling Saturday night service. Well, someone had to mind the shop.

In each of the three previous years that Tales highest award had been given, a New York City bar had been its recipient. New York was then capital of the cocktail world, and everyone knew it. In 2009, a new category had been introduced to the Spirited AwardsBest American Cocktail Barso the New Yorkers could win something and still give the rest of the world a chance for Worlds Best. Instead, New York bars swept both categories.

Several other categories had been added in 2009 to the fast-growing Spirited Awards, including Worlds Best Hotel Bar. That award, plus those for Worlds Best Drinks Selection and Worlds Best Cocktail Menu, went to a little-known outfit from a small town not usually found on hospitalitys international stage: Belfasts Merchant Hotel. Who were these characters?

When pub magnate Bill Wolsey opened the Merchant Hotel in 2006, it was only the second five-star establishment in Belfasts history. The elaborate mocha-colored Italianate pile on Waring Street in the redeveloping Cathedral Quarter, formerly the Victorian-era headquarters of Ulster Bank, was a symbol of the new Belfast, eager to benefit from the Good Friday Agreement and get on with the day-to-day of a city: its arts, commerce, and street life.