It may be a function of summer or the growing demand for fresh, seasonal and organic ingredients. But some of the most interesting items on restaurant menus these days are on the cocktail lists.
You might think you were reading the dessert menu when you peruse the mojito menu at Cuba Libre with the watermelon and mango offerings. Or perhaps you are imagining a crisp salad when you read the descriptions of the martinis and cosmos made with cucumbers and herbs.
Adding fruits, herbs, veggies and spices has made bartending a culinary pursuit.
Other trends include cocktails made with beer - like the Mexican specialty at Xochitl, spicy tomato juice and lime topped with cold beer - as well as drinks mixed with sake - especially sake infused with blueberries and oranges - and martinis made with tea. And the resurgence of classic cocktails continues, this season with a return to popularity for Sazeracs and Sidecars.
Liquor manufacturers have simplified cocktail-making for the home bartender, with bottled cosmos, margaritas, and a flood of flavored spirits that put exotic tastes in easy reach.
But professional bartenders - make that mixologists - are all about creating their own, adding more purees, muddles and unexpected ingredients to ever more inventive drinks. Freshly made syrups and custom herb and spice blends are the in thing.
One Manhattan restaurant, Milk & Honey in the East Village, even creates custom cocktails to suit the customer's mood of the moment (by appointment only).
The Palm in Center City mixes a strawberry lemonade cocktail, a sophisticated, updated take on a summertime favorite, made with fresh strawberry puree and citron vodka. At Cork in Westmont, owner Kevin Meeker offers a trendy take on a classic - a Cucumber Cosmo - made with Hendrick's cucumber-infused gin, Triple Sec, and white cranberry juice.
While the buzz from Food Central - last month's Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo. - hinted at a fading future for mojitos and touted the gin fizz as the next big thing, the here-and-now bar scene in the Philadelphia environs continues to serve more of those enormously popular tropical rum "mojos" than there are sugarcane stirrers to go in them.
At Cuba Libre, the secret to the signature mojitos is fresh-squeezed sugarcane juice, which gives the drink a natural - not cloying - sweetness.
