Everybody has a Bloody Mary recipe. And everyone thinks that theirs is the best one on Earth.
Everybody also has an assho….

Hey!
Let’s not insult the readers, shall we? Not in the first line, anyway. Besides, what you say is not true. I do not have a Blood Mary recipe.

…!

Among the (many) holes in my cocktail repertoire, perhaps the largest is the Bloody Mary. I always avoided it due to its resemblance to the hated V8 Juice, and thus I find myself with no experience here at all. During a momentary need for escape from Tiki monomania last February, I ordered my first Bloody Mary in a bar and found it darned intriguing. I resolved to undertake the task of developing my own Bloody Mary recipe this Summer. That quest begins here.

The problem is that it is a daunting task. Recipes are highly individualized, and since I have drunk perhaps five Bloody Marys in total, I don’t have a lot of experience to give me leads. I began with the basic recipe, at least as given in the BarSmarts Wired course, which matches up pretty well with a number of my books. It gave me the basic elements of a Bloody Mary: Tomatoes, Vodka, citrus, and spices.
But what kind of cocktailian would I be if I didn’t want to go beyond, to concoct my own twist on this most personalized of classics?

Inspiration struck last week in the form of a date night with Maggi, down to M at Miranova to see Columbus’ best bartender, Cris Dehlavi. (No really, she was just voted Columbus’ Best Batender) With all the mutterings around the web about Aviation variations, I wanted to try her new Violet Sour, an Aviation made with lavender-infused Plymouth Gin.
However, the other new offering I tried was her take on the Bloody Mary, which she calls the Heirloom. The key feature with the Heirloom is that it uses tomato water instead of juice. This makes for a less in your face appearance and a smoother texture that really appeals to me. Cris also garnishes it in a way that is beyond my resources right now, but I’ll work on gilding the lily when I have a lily worth gilding. If you are in Columbus, go try her Heirloom.

Or you can stick with me and give my experiment a try to see if you like it. I think you will.

The easy but time-consuming part is to make some tomato water. There are all sorts of recipes out there on the web, with varying degrees of complexity. I chose to eschew any peppers or other produce for this first run, simply choosing six or seven of the best looking tomatoes I could find and quartering them. I put them in my Blendtec (the new larger carafe makes this work a lot better) and hit the smoothie button. Have I mentioned before how awesome this blender is? It takes about four seconds to go from this…

to this…

Lay your largest strainer over a glass bowl and line it with several layers of cheesecloth. Carefully pour your pureé into the cloth and let drip overnight.

The next morning, you can discard the pulp and you have a lightly cloudy, pale red, very fragrant liquid. The amount it yields will vary on the size and quality of your tomatoes, but you may get more than you were expecting the first time.
Rick Stutz tried this last fall, and recommends refrigerating during the draining, but I chose not to. Cold can do things to tomato flavors and textures that I like to avoid if possible. Cover overnight and live dangerously.
Interestingly, I could not find a commercial source of tomato water anywhere. If anyone knows of a brand of commercial stuff I could keep on standby for when I want a drink now, instead of tomorrow, I’d love to hear about it.

At last, I was ready to make my first shot at a decent, somewhat unique Bloody Mary. Here’s what I came up with, after a few iterations:

Just a quick note here.
Protect your basil from any errant May frosts, or those two measly leaves in the picture will be all you have left that aren’t ruined!

The result is a mildly spicy deliciousness. The texture is far lighter than with traditional Bloody Marys, but it still possesses a definite comforting richness in your mouth and gullet that would be helpful with a delicate constitution. That said, the transient nature of the tomato water means I’ll be looking for a juice version to have on stand by if I ever get around to having my first hangover….

Stick around over the Summer, and help me figure out how to say, Well, my damn Bloody Mary recipe is the best there is! Or you can post your own version in the comments and I’ll steal from it shamelessly down the road if it is any good at all.

A couple of weeks ago, the PeguWife and I made the long but always worthwhile journey downtown to M at Miranova, which I reviewed earlier. Cris, my favorite bartender there, was working (say hi to her a Tales, folks!) and pointed me to her new drink, The Vanilla Bean Old Fashioned.
Both Maggi and I really liked this drink, and given my current obsession with Old Fashioneds I think this is a good time to share it with you. I’ve made a number of these since first trying them at M, and my recipe differs slightly from Cris’s. If you think it is a bit off, blame me and go ask Cris for the original.

The resulting cocktail is rich, complex, and sweet, but not as sweet as it sounds. Maggi declared it to be a delicious vegan eggnog. If those two words make no sense together, like jumbo shrimp or government accountability, just try the drink. Try the drink anyway, it’s delicious.
I will say that I balked at first over putting a full ounce of simple syrup in any drink. I tried it side by side with the full ounce and a half ounce to compare, and learned something. The extra sugar did not make the drink appreciably sweeter. What the extra syrup did do however, was to bring out the flavors of the orange oils and the bitters. I’ve got lots of fun experimenting ahead of me on this effect.

If you happen to hit this post as your first visit to the Pegu Blog, Meandering Through Mitchell’s is a series of posts exploring the cocktail offerings of the Cameron Mitchell restaurants in and around Columbus, Ohio. For more on my reasons for profiling the Mitchell’s chain in particular, read the intro to my review of his restaurant, M at Miranova.
The Ocean Club has been my favorite of Cameron’s restaurants for as long as it has been open. This is remarkable, since it has been tinkered with relentlessly, leaving it in many ways unrecognizable from its original form. We’ve been going here long before I shifted my drinking focus from wine to cocktails. When the Ocean Club first opened ten years ago, it was our place to go drink champagne with dinner.
At its nativity, The Ocean Club was a fish house that served good steaks as well, and was decorated in an avant garde style of blue hues, bubbly glass, and wavy lines. Today, Mitchell’s Ocean Club is a steakhouse, with better and more varied seafood than is the norm. (Better seafood, usually, than that which I’ve eaten at Mitchell’s vaunted Fish Market restaurants, a chain he recently sold off for 3.84 potloads of money.) The decor now is the wood paneled look that seems the norm for steakhouses, but with a lighter, friendlier, more open look than many. The most recent change here is the huge wrap-around balcony. This area provides hands down the nicest, most elegant, outdoor dining seating in Columbus. On nice evenings, it can be a long wait to get a seat out there for dinner. This is actually not so bad, as you can wait in the bar, which is among the nicest in town as well, and the subject of this post.
The bar itself is a huge, black granite-topped rectangle. One of the narrow ends is for service staff, but there is abundant seating on the other three sides. There is lots of overflow area around the bar with places to sit or lean when the bar is full. There is a huge grand piano near the entrance, and live music, mostly of the piano man style. They always manage the pretty difficult trick of having the music be loud enough to hear all through the restaurant and out on the balcony, while not being so loud as to be annoying or make conversation difficult in the bar. The bar is always generously staffed, making for very short waits for service, no matter how packed it sometimes gets.
There is not a cozy nor particularly romantic atmosphere in the bar. Instead it is a great place to wait for a table, or meet up with friends, or wait while a spouse is shopping in the surrounding Easton Shopping Center.
And a darned fine place to have a drink.
The wine list here is excellent. I won’t link to the cocktail menu since the online version is out of date as of this writing. The current set of offerings ranges from a classic like the Bombay Sapphire Martini to a blueberry and blackberry smash of some kind. They even garnish a drink or two with a chunk of dry ice. They used to do this more than now. Back in the chrome and wavy glass days, the dry ice was in everything. You’d look down the bar at a horde of different colored drinks, all pouring mist out the top, and it would look a bit like Quark’s bar on Deep Space Nine. It was fun, and frankly I miss it a little.
As with all Mitchell’s restaurants, fresh citrus rules the roost. I got the whole we don’t have Rose’s here, just fresh lime and simple syrup lecture. While I don’t know if it is true or not, I get the impression that the bar’s spirits inventory is slightly broader at Mitchell’s Ocean Club than at M. But regardless, the selection still shies away from the seriously exotic. The staff knows the classics, and how to make them correctly (Our bartender Pat easily passed my Sidecar test, for instance). But I doubt a drink like a Corpse Reviver #2 has ever been placed on the granite here. The Angustora only comes out for Old Fashioneds and Champagne Cocktails, not even in Manhattans unless specified, and you won’t get vermouth in your vodka Martini unless you beg.
I decided to try a drink off of the cocktail menu called the Cucumber Gimlet. Essentially, it is nothing but a basic Gimlet with muddled cucumbers. Here’s how Cameron’s corporate bar master decrees the drink should be made:

Cameron’s corporate bar master is wrong. Made this way, you have a sweet mess that utterly destroys any character from the gin, and thus in the drink. You might as well make it with vodka.
Now, here is where you see the value of the well-trained staff at the Ocean Club. I never said a thing about what I thought of the drink. Indeed, I was deep in an interesting conversation, and not looking to fuss. But Pat was paying attention, despite being busy, and knew I was not digging it. He did not have to ask did I like it, he just asked if he could get me something else. I asked him for the recipe, and I blanched at the full ounce of simple in the drink. I asked him to make it again, but with just a quarter as much.
The result is a really damn good cocktail. If you visit the Ocean Club, I recommend the drink, just make sure they back the sugar way off.
Incidentally, they offer the same drink at M (I didn’t try it there), only they make it with Hendrick’s, which would seem to make more sense. I should have, in the interests of journalism, had a second Cucumber Gimlet, specifying the Hendrick’s. But I wanted a Pegu, which Pat absolutely nailed on his first try. At any rate, I’ll get a cucumber the next time I hit the store and try both myself.
As I said, the Ocean Club has been a work in progress for a decade. Apparently Cameron feels that he has finally gotten it right, as he has opened five more, under the slightly different name of Ocean Prime in Detroit, Phoenix, and Florida. The one in Tampa is supposedly especially gorgeous. All seem to be holding up very well, despite being premium restaurants, with premium pricing, in a slowish economy. I suggest you drop in, if you have the Ocean Club or an Ocean Prime near you, and find out why.

Here’s a complete list of the posts so far in my Meandering Through Mitchell’s series:

• The Blood Orange Margarita: A "Meandering Through Mitchell's" Find
• "Meandering Through Mitchell's": Mitchell's Ocean Club
• The Vanilla Bean Old Fashioned: A Meandering Through Mitchell's Find
• The Plasma Mary

This is the first post in a new series for me. Columbus, Ohio may be behind (way behind) cities like New York, Portland, or Seattle in the modern bar progression, but we do have a few sparks of light in this vast wasteland of college and alumni bars. I’ve detailed Details to death here already, but as big a fan of that watering hole as I am, the real driver toward a better class of cocktail in Central Ohio is the medium-sized chain of fine restaurants run by Cameron Mitchell. Not so very, very long ago, Cameron got bar religion. The first places in town (and still almost the only places in town) where I actually saw lime and lemons juiced right in front of me were Cameron’s restaurants, or restaurants where he consults. To my regular readership in the cocktailian world, freshly squeezed citrus is so basic as to be akin to Thou Shalt Not Kill. But to the average Central Ohio bartender or patron, explaining the value of fresh lime juice is like explaining the virtues of microwave ovens to an ancient Incan. Now, none of Cameron’s establishments are going to threaten Vessel, or Pegu Club, or the Velvet Tango Room for cocktailian supremacy any time soon, but they are the best I have to choose from around here, especially if I want a full (and damn good) meal to follow my drink.
Therefore, I will be embarking on a series of profiles of the Mitchell’s restaurants, and more to the point their bars, in the coming weeks. It’s hard work, eating in the best restaurants in town and downing good drinks, but I’m willing to do it, for you. I’m going to try to feature a specific drink and/or bartender at each location, as well.
First up in this series is M at Miranova. Located downtown, on the first floor of the Miranova riverfront skyscraper, M is Cameron’s most modern, avant garde establishment. The menu offers sushi, steaks, and other delicate, delicious offerings. I call it hearty haute cuisine. Hear that, Seattle and New York? Come to Columbus, where even the finest food arrives table-side via forklift. (I kid my city, but only a little.)

The bar at M is the central feature of the restaurant, dominating the length of the restaurant with a huge, shifting color, backlit wall. They offer an extensive, well-balanced, and not terribly discounted wine list, as well as a reasonable beer selection, if you must. The cocktail menu actually has a number of original cocktails that are or look to be worth drinking, almost all featuring fresh squeezed or muddled ingredients. I have been eating and drinking at M regularly but infrequently since it opened (it’s a long way from my house). The bartenders have turned over in that time, but everyone behind the sleek plexiglass counter are consistently intelligent, educated, mixologists. Moreover, at M, unlike some of Cameron’s more frantic locations, they usually have time to for a little conversation about booze. This is a major plus for me, of course.
The minuses for the bar at M are the same as those I’ve found at most Mitchell’s joints. Aside from the emphasis on fresh fruits, the ingredients on offer are fairly pedestrian. There are no exotic gins, beyond Hendrick’s, on offer. No absinthe, or Lillet, or orgeat, or falernum peeked their necks out to entice me into a Vesper, Corpse Reviver, or Mai Tai. M’s inventory covers all the basics, and covers them very well. But for the adventurous cocktailian, there is still room for improvement. Of course, they may have a secret stash of Old Raj, Fernet Branca, and homemade cinnamon syrup that I simply didn’t ask the right questions about, but I doubt it.
This last Friday I was at loose ends. I had a babysitter, but I also had a wife in Georgia. Instead of choosing to go out and get into what little trouble Columbus has to offer, I opted for drinks and dinner at the bar at M to kick off this series of posts. My bartender this time was Cris, a mixologist by calling whom I had not encountered before. She and I, and the wine-drinking couple beside me whose date I kept interrupting, had a fine conversation about liquor, cocktails, wine snobbery, and of course the literary phenomenon that is sweeping the nation: The Pegu Blog.
The evening was marred only briefly when Cris revealed to me that she will be attending Tales, the lucky wench. My fellow cocktail bloggers know how much I cheerfully despise them for being able to go when I cannot find the time, so it’s only fair I hate Cris too. I did tell her who I expected her to go pester while there. Consider yourselves forewarned, dudes and dudettes. Oh, and I’ll be interested to see which exotic ingredients that I griped about being missing above show up at M once Cris gets back from Tales.
I went through the cocktail menu and chose a cocktail from the seasonal menu, one it turns out Cris authored herself, the Blood Orange Margarita. It was quite appealing, and although she happily gave me the recipe, I won’t post it here. I won’t because:

• I didn’t ask permission,
• I immediately saw how I wanted to tinker with it, resulting in a cocktail that may appeal more to both me and my regular readership, if not necessarily to M’s usual clientele.

Said tinkering has been accomplished, and it gave me the results I wanted. If you live in Columbus, I suggest you hightail it down to M and try the original, as well as mixing up mine. Let me know which you prefer.

A couple of notes here: I don’t like salted rims that much, as I feel like I either get too little or too much salt with each sip. The salt isn’t really necessary in this Margarita at all, but if you do want some, try mixing it in the drink for a change of pace.

Also, I find it a particularly good application for the Tequila Ocho Plata I specified. I intend to do a full review later on this bottle, but I’ll take the opportunity to talk a bit about it here and now. (It was not what M uses, for what it is worth. Tequila Ocho is not for sale in Ohio, more’s the pity.) The Ocho is very mild, even sweet, and pairs very well with the exotic nectar of the blood orange. In fact, I think this tequila might get a bit lost in a regular Margarita, it is so mild.
As a shot, it is lethally soft. It’s not unflavorfully smooth, mind you, but it is awfully easy to down, especially for an unaged bottle. Beware.
Frankly, for a tequila aficionado, which I am not, I suspect the Plata would be a little bland. For a guy like me who likes to tinker, and also likes the occasional brush with the signature funk of agave, it’s a damn fine bottle to play with. It’s perfect for the drink I just outlined, and I intend to try it very soon with the Mai Tai variant, the Pinky Gonzales, where I think it will shine.

Here’s a complete list of the posts so far in my Meandering Through Mitchell’s series:

• The Blood Orange Margarita: A "Meandering Through Mitchell's" Find
• "Meandering Through Mitchell's": Mitchell's Ocean Club
• The Vanilla Bean Old Fashioned: A Meandering Through Mitchell's Find
• The Plasma Mary