It’s early June and Washington D.C. is gripped by a heat wave with temperatures touching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A walk down National Mall, which takes you from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial via a series of pit stops, is an exercise in patience when you have two children in tow. The wife and I need recuperation and our hotel concierge has guided us to U Street, which is a tightly-packed array of bars and restaurants running around eight blocks between 17th Street and 9th Street.
“Drinks as cold as your ex,” says the poster outside Dukem, an Ethiopian bar and restaurant. With the memory of Abdul’s conspiracy theory fresh in our ears, we decide to try them. Abdul was our taxi driver who shuttled us back and forth from Buffalo, N.Y., to Niagara, Ontario, and on our return hop, we began discussing the Rio Olympics and the legendary Ethiopian runners Haile Gebrselassie and Abebe Bikila. Abdul told us it was the then Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, who had Bikila killed as he couldn’t take the fame that the marathoner enjoyed, especially after his back-to-back marathon golds in the 1960 and 1964 summer Olympics (winning the former barefoot!). He apparently had him handicapped in an automobile accident, from which he never recovered. Quite a story, considering Bikila was once a member of the Emperor’s personal guard. (And you’re reading this paper on Marathon Sunday of the Rio Olympics.) We then decide to duck into Dukem, where I have a St. George Amber beer and my wife has a Grand margarita (Grand Marnier, sour mix and tequila), with the cocktail as cold as promised.
Dukem fills us up, so a planned stop at the famed Ben’s Chili Bowl, home of the Chili Dog, is rendered redundant. We head on to a live music venue, the 9:30 Club. We’ve never heard of Matt Corby, from Oz, who’s on tonight, and we’ve missed the opening act, but we figure we’re chasing the atmosphere, not the music, so let’s pay the 50 bucks entry charge and go on in. It’s just a few days after the Orlando nightclub massacre, so security is especially tight. 9:30 Club is a room built more for function than form. It’s a large open space, divided into two levels, both with a plethora of bars.
Corby is playing, a soulful Aussie, who has a great voice, and can also rock. The acoustics at 9:30 Club are great, and it’s easy enough to sway to the beat, especially with a glass of Old Rasputin Imperial Stout inside me and a vodka tonic for my wife. An hour into Corby’s act, we decide to savour some more of D.C.’s pleasures. This takes us first to Vinoteca, whose patio offers a well-stocked bar with some great cocktails. The fifth game of the NBA finals is on and the Cleveland Cavaliers are resurgent against the Golden State Warriors. To celebrate with LeBron, I order a U Street Mule, a variation of the Moscow Mule, which combines wondrously vodka with Domaine de Canton, a ginger liqueur from France, and fresh grapefruit juice, all topped with Blenheim’s hot ginger ale.
Cocktails in the U.S., as we discover on our trip, are characterised by the use of brands such as Domaine de Canton, which we are extremely unlikely to find in India, owing to our labelling laws, which make it unviable for niche brands to rejig their lines to cater to India’s cocktail bars. And also by an amazing range of carbonated drinks, like the aforementioned ginger ale.
‘The #1 Misconception in the US’ is an intriguingly named drink that confronts us on the menu. We ask the waitress what the misconception might be, and she says it is for us to figure out. With a potent mix of Old Tom Gin, Aperol, tequila, celery bitters and orange flower water, guesswork is made doubly hard. We’re at Gibson, a reputed speakeasy on U Street. For a speakeasy, a genre of bars which are comparatively more difficult to find or enter, this was pretty easy to get to (and in). While my wife has the ‘misconception’, I decide to try ‘A letter from the ABM to the GOP’ (ABM = angry black man, GOP = Republican party), with Cognac, bourbon, Campari and house made bitters. A tip to bar owners in India: “house made” and “home made” are sure winners as descriptors on your next cocktail menu.
The next night sees us at the historic Army and Navy Club. Seven Army, Navy and Marine Corps veterans of the Mexican War and Civil War got together in 1885 to form the United Service Club, which was reincorporated as the Army and Navy Club in 1891. Seven years later, in the Cuban town of Daiquiri, a mining engineer called Jennings Cox made up for the lack of gin by substituting it with white rum in a potent mix with lime and sugar to create a cocktail he called the Daiquiri. Eleven years later, when Lucius Johnson, a medical officer in the U.S. Navy, docked in Cuba, visits Daiquiri, he has a chance to taste and be intoxicated by this new drink. On his return to the the Army and Navy Club in D.C., Johnson introduces the cocktail to the menu, making it the birthplace of the Daiquiri in the U.S. You’ll find this legend on the walls of the Daiquiri lounge at the Army and Navy. The next day, we have a 10-hour flight to Anchorage and we need all the fortification we can get. We decide to order another round of Daiquiris and raise a toast to Johnson.
Vikram Achanta is co-founder and CEO of tulleeho.com and Tulleeho, an alcohol consulting firm.
