At a current Saturday night time at Café Mars, a self-described “uncommon Italian restaurant” in Brooklyn, I had a drink that’s caught with me like an earworm: the Mad World. Devised by Jake Riley, the restaurant’s head bartender, it’s a nonalcoholic mixture of Ghia aperitif, carrot juice, lime juice, soda water and a syrup infused with a berbere spice mix. They have been impressed by a sausage and beans dish from the restaurant’s opening menu. “However the taste profile was coming from a kind of North African route,” says Riley, “impressed by how there’s Italian colonial affect in Eritrea and Ethiopia.”
Within the restaurant’s multihued neon lighting, the drink shines with a rusty glow. The primary sip reveals the sweetness of carrot towards the savory backdrop of the myriad spices that make up Café Mars’ berbere mix, together with coriander, cumin, cardamom, paprika, salt and ginger, which additionally tempers the bitterness introduced by Ghia’s botanical, gentian and rhubarb taste. The salt brings the drink’s components into a mild, but sure focus. “I’m at all times hoping to have a nonalcoholic cocktail past lemonade,” says Riley. So that they deployed the carrot and berbere spice to spherical it out with “a little bit of earthiness.”
Substances alone are sometimes sufficient to provide a memorable drink, however the Mad World has one other trick up its sleeve, a musical hook. Riley shares my feeling that the toughest a part of developing with a brand new cocktail is naming it. Sooner or later earlier than service, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” was enjoying, which reminded them of Donnie Darko, the 2001 movie that contains a stripped-down cowl of the music. They considered the “goth bunny” within the film, and linked all of it again to the carrot-infused drink. For an excellent week after my go to to Café Mars, the music bounced round in my head—identical to the drink.
Probably the most thrilling factor about our present wave of nonalcoholic creativity is that it represents an opportunity to reinvent what “cocktail” means. As a result of nonalcoholic cocktails lack the very apparent and irreplaceable presence of ethanol, we have to take a distinct path so as to obtain a memorable, scrumptious drink. The Mad World has components of a Bloody Mary, with maybe some touches of a Garibaldi thrown in. This drink feels as acquainted to me because it does novel.
