Cocktail lists have started to read more like dinner menus lately, with drinks like Double Chicken Please’s Cold Pizza, LilliStar’s Hot Dog Martini, and the Foie Gras Sidecar at Shinji’s making us do a double-take. Is it food? Or an elaborate cocktail? Either way, we’re ordering it.
This is certainly the case at Bar Snack, a buzzy new neighborhood spot in the East Village from Iain Griffiths and Oliver Cleary that offers a series of food-inspired drinks on its eclectic menu. Guests can savor a salad-inspired Negroni or gulp a tequila sour that’s meant to mimic a pistachio cannoli (playfully named “Cannoli Pants”), and the house Martini is made with chicken bouillon and comes garnished with crispy chicken skin.
While most culinary-minded cocktails lean savory these days, employing ingredients like MSG, seaweed, and spring onions, one drink on Bar Snack’s menu stands on the sweeter side, providing a fresh take on a beloved dessert. Modeled after the classic Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor made with chocolate ice cream, marshmallow, caramel, and fudge, Griffiths designed the Phish Food Old Fashioned as an ode to one of their all-time favorite treats.
The drink itself doesn’t contain any ice cream — for guests looking for a frozen fix, Bar Snack actually offers a different cocktail that resembles booze-spiked root beer float — but rather, this Old Fashioned riff evokes the pint’s rich caramel, chocolate, and marshmallow flavors through other ingredients.
A combination of three spirits sets the base for the drink. Old Forester Rye and Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey provide toasty caramel and vanilla notes. And while the Old Fashioned is traditionally a whiskey cocktail, Griffiths adds a splash of Copalli Cocoa Rum — an expression from Belize made from organic sugar cane infused with roasted, locally grown organic cacao nibs — for an extra chocolatey kick.
But how does Griffiths capture the flavor of Phish Food’s gooey marshmallow swirls? The secret’s in the house-made marshmallow fluff syrup that replaces the Old Fashioned’s typical sugar component. Griffiths admits that this particular ingredient took a lot of R&D, but the team now has the process down to a science, using spoons heated with warm water to control the notoriously sticky marshmallow fluff. The syrup is seamlessly integrated into the cocktail, adding a delicate marshmallow flavor without any unwanted viscosity or color.
The drink is then finished off with one dash each of Angostura and orange bitters and topped with a star-shaped orange peel garnish. The result is a booze-forward drink that perfectly balances the decadent flavors of chocolate, caramel, and marshmallow without verging on overly sweet or cloying. While it can certainly be enjoyed as a dessert to end the night, it still maintains the feeling of a typical Old Fashioned, so guests can order it at any point in the evening (or afternoon, as Bar Snack conveniently opens at 2 p.m. daily).
