Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘creative destruction’ in 1942, to indicate the relentless march of innovation. This is as good a term as any to describe San Francisco’s celebrated cocktail bar, Trick Dog.
As any bartender worth his shrub will tell you, creating a cocktail menu from scratch is hard. So, to think of a bar, which, after painstakingly creating a new concept (and a dozen linked cocktails), tears it down every six months to launch a whole new menu is mind boggling. But Morgan Schick and Josh Harris, the founders and bartenders of Trick Dog, a long-time resident on the World’s 50 Best Bars list, feel that six months is sufficient time for guests to explore their menu in full and develop a relationship with the drinks. Moreover, after their first switch (in 2013, which, they admit, gave them pause”), they also realised they had underestimated the capacity of their guests to embrace change.
Schick and Harris, along with their director of operations Caitie Connolly, were in Mumbai recently to create some noise at The Bombay Canteen. They took over the restaurant’s newly-renovated bar just over a week ago, and also collaborated on its next cocktail menu, due to launch next month.
Innovation in a glass
Schick leads a small team, who is constantly coming up with ideas for flavour combinations or how an ingredient might fit into a drink. As he told Mid-Day , “Our drinks are much more influenced by culinary combinations than by cocktail history. We use historical cocktail structures as a framework, but we don’t start out thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll make something like a martinez.” Over the years, the “kick-ass, well-made neighbourhood bar” has experimented with unique concepts, from a Pantone theme (printed like a colour swatchbook) to a mural project (where they got artists to create 14 murals around the city, which they photographed and compiled into a menu book). Indian ingredients also feature in their cocktails, including garam masala, and various spices such as cardamom and fenugreek.
This tied in perfectly with The Bombay Canteen, which is at the forefront of menu innovation in India. I remember being pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago, to read about the launch of a new menu devoted to Mumbai’s rich Art Deco heritage, and making a beeline there on my next visit to find a handsomely-produced menu, with drinks like Liberty Cinema (inspired by the iconic cinema in Marine Lines — a mix of gin, sparkling wine and raspberry juice that was a frothy toast to Bollywood).
The global cocktail community is a small one, so when an opportunity to do a pop-up at The Bombay Canteen arose, Trick Dog were quick to say yes. As Schick puts it, they see it as a bar which “has taken on the responsibility of being a global ambassador for the entire country of India”.
The big picture
No Indian bar has yet made it to the World’s 50 Best Bars list, and as far as I know, only one — Aer at the Four Seasons, Mumbai — has ever made it into the Asia’s 50 Best Bars. But, according to Schick and his team, while awards and ‘best of’ lists are great, that shouldn’t be the primary goal. After all, a bar in India will always struggle to be on a World’s 50 Best list as compared to one in London because of the geographical concentration of the voter base. “Instead, a bar should focus on delivering great hospitality and strive to be the best that they can be,” he says.
A discussion on their go-to trends for 2020 leads to a chat on the growing importance of non-alcoholic drinks. Such drinks programmes are going to continue to evolve they say, as the conversation on global health and wellness grows and with the development of non-alcoholic products like Seedlip (a non-alcoholic spirit). It is reassuring to hear the forces behind one of the world’s top bars sign off saying that it is “important to have a significant number of things on the menu that don’t contain alcohol and that should be in line with the beverage programme, so that these items are presented with similar thought and care”. In short, the ordering experience should be similar for anyone who is not drinking alcohol. Amen to that.
