Sample this cocktail: fresh jamuns muddled and shaken with ice and gin, lime juice and sugar syrup, served in a Martini glass with — if you like it — a half rim of chilli powder, and you have the Jamuntini. Or how about a paan martini, with some betel leaf and a hint of rose water?
A great cocktail is all about a unique combination of flavours. Bartenders in India have long been handicapped by the unavailability of a range of spirits, liqueurs and bitters, which their counterparts in New York or London take very much for granted. This has perhaps forced us to look deeper, in our own kitchens, for that unique spice, herb or fruit that will make the customer go aaah!
Yangdup Lama, ace bartender and partner at Cocktails and Dreams Speakeasy in Gurgaon, has begun work on a range of cocktails that use single estate teas from Darjeeling. I can hear the excitement in his voice as he talks about how the muscatel flavour of select teas from Margaret Hope’s tea estate would work in a cocktail.
Further afield in Manhattan, Hemant Pathak, bar manager at Junoon (helmed by award-winning Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna), has a whole masala library to play with, and he says their mixology programme is all about tea and spices. Best of all, he says, guests love the cocktails because of their unique flavours and the way they complement the food at Junoon. The use of Indian spices and herbs is not unique to Indian restaurants.
According to Pathak, Mace, an award-winning cocktail bar in New York, has a cocktail menu where each drink is named after a different spice or ingredient from around the world. And India is well represented in cocktails such as ‘Saffron’, ‘Nutmeg’ and ‘Clove’.
The use of Indian ingredients in cocktails is not necessarily a new phenomenon. Back in 2006, Dimi Lezinska who was then the brand ambassador of Grey Goose came up with the Grey Goose Chai Tea Martini, which uses his homemade chai tea syrup to good effect in this sensational cocktail.
However, as the cocktail culture has flourished overseas in the past 10 years, so has it slowly begun coming of age in India, leading to an exploration and discovery of Indian ingredients. It could be a drink as simple as a Jamuntini. When I serve it at parties at my house, I spend the whole evening muddling jamuns.
And it’s not just ingredients; bars in India are also innovating when it comes to service. North Indians will be familiar with ‘banta soda’, a carbonated lime beverage served in a uniquely shaped bottle, with a marble acting as stopper, which you need to pop to drink (South Indians know it as the ‘goli soda’). Riyaz Amlani’s enormously popular Hauz Khas Social in New Delhi has sourced a machine that enables them to bottle and sell their own range of ‘Banta’ cocktails. Again, a unique Indian take on the ‘bottled’ cocktails trend in the West.
And then there’s the bar du jour, Ek Bar, restaurateur A.D. Singh’s spanking new concept place in Delhi. Nitin Tiwari has put together its bar menu and says that although bartenders and bars have been working with Indian ingredients for a while now, what has changed is the approach to their usage.
Cocktails like paan martini and imli Caipiroska are now passé, both examples of drinks in which a strong Indian flavour dominates. As Tiwari says, the audience for such drinks is limited, as not everyone might like the dominant ingredient. As bartending in India has evolved, bartenders and consultants like Tiwari have realised the importance of balancing flavours. So, a modern-day paan martini is not made with the complete paan , but with betel leaf and a hint of rose water, so that the paan flavour is represented, but not dominant.
The other factor that has influenced changes in the bar scene is the emergence of chefs like Sujan Sarkar (Ek Bar) and Manu Chandra (Toast & Tonic, Bengaluru), who seek out new Indian ingredients and flavour combinations. Tiwari says he was inspired by Sarkar’s use of mango and ginger in a dish to give a twist to Penicillin, a classic whisky cocktail, resulting in a cocktail called Queen Victoria, one of the more popular drinks on Ek Bar’s menu.
Until now, India’s significant gifts to the world of spirits and cocktails have included Punch, a drink very much in vogue in leading cocktail bars, and Tonic water, which came into being during the British Raj to serve as a way to have your quinine and drink it too!
As mixologists in India and overseas search for the new ‘new’ thing, it’s clear that our next big contribution is going to be the masala drink.
Vikram Achanta is co-founder and CEO of tulleeho.com and Tulleeho, an alcohol consulting firm.
