Drink garnishes are coming in full circles lately, with spots, dots, discs, drops, and orbs sitting inside, resting atop, and decorating the rims of our glasses. Though the trend has bubbled up over the past few years, I hadn’t noticed just how many different ways bartenders were incorporating the same basic shape until I saw them all together on the menu at the bistro Causwells in San Francisco. “This whole menu I just gravitated to circles,” says Elmer Mejicanos, beverage director and managing partner. “I should have called it the circle menu.”
Nearly half the drinks on the menu incorporate circles in some way. The simplest of the bunch is the Holy Trinity Martini, which receives a tableside garnish of three drops of blood red pepper oil. Vodka for the cocktail is infused with the “holy trinity” of Cajun cooking: celery, bell pepper, and (in this case, pickled) onions. The infused veggies are then roasted and made into the oil for the garnish.
In three other drinks on Mejicanos’s menu, the drops sit atop layers of foam. In the Honey-Dew You, bright green drops of basil oil are perched on egg white foam like dewdrops; the Shitake Happens looks like a cartoon mushroom with extra-large drops of Caribbean bitters sitting on passion fruit foam and served in a mushroom-shaped glass. The stunner of this trio is the Mango Lassi that Mejicanos garnishes with fruit-flavored red, green, blue, and yellow dots. Inspired by the Hindu Holi festival, the juxtaposition of colors set against yogurt-and-egg-white foam calls to mind Fruity Pebbles in a bowl of milk.
Circling the Globe
While foams provide a pristine backdrop for such garnishes, drops of oil atop Martini variations have also become a familiar sight in cocktail bars over the last few years. At San Francisco’s Devil’s Acre, the Full Moon, made with mezcal, apricot, and vermouth, receives drops of sesame oil as a garnish, while truffle oil adorns a Dirty Vodka Martini variation at Bar Sprezzatura not too far away.
But even a few years before the current trend, one of Europe’s most creative bartenders plopped colored dots atop cocktails. When he was head bartender at Paris’s acclaimed Little Red Door, Remy Savage created a tri-color garnish of three “functional oils” in red agave, yellow citrus, and green hops. Seen in this video, the drops provide the finishing touches to a clear tequila and citrus cocktail created by fellow bartender Keila Urzaiz De Callignon.
Colors and shapes are a running theme throughout the menus and cocktails Savage has created for Le Syndicat in Paris and London’s A Bar with Shapes for a Name, whose name itself is represented by a yellow triangle, red square, and a blue circle. When asked if he has an overall aesthetic for his drinks, Savage says: “I think more than a code of aesthetics we try to look for coherence. Each of our bars takes inspiration from a different art movement and a drink being served in a bar based on Bauhaus wouldn’t work if served in an Art Nouveau place.”
At Le Syndicat, a drink called Apollin’air sees a fermented citrus base and a foam top head garnished with three small discs in red, white, and blue, representing the colors of the French flag. The crème de coconut-based discs have bitter, acid, and sweet flavors. At Shapes, meanwhile, bartenders serve carbonated bottled cocktails with a highball glass in which they stack alternating cube and sphere-shaped ice. Savage says that they don’t have “visual garnishes” for most of the drinks at Shapes, so the circles there are mostly in the form of ice for now.
Fellow European superstar bartender Simone Caporale has also been taking a circular approach to cocktail creation lately. At the Barcelona bar Sips Drinkery House that he co-owns, several of the cocktails on the menu feature discs, spheres, or dots. A black jelly disc made from colored orange juice sits on top of a big cube in the Black Dot; a giant orange orb floats in the bar’s Negroni; and discs of ice interlayered with discs of citrus leaves are stacked inside a glass for the Mil Fulls.
Caporale is also a founder of The Art of Shaking, an online and touring course of advanced bartending techniques, including some to make drinks like those at Sips. The website teases some other circular tricks: One pictured drink features a stack of colored ice disks, creating a rainbow in a glass; another receives a perfectly spherical smoke bubble created with the Flavour Blaster device. In a third, Caporale adorns the outer glass rim with dime-sized, colored dots made from freeze-dried fruit and maltodextrin.
What Comes Around, Goes Round
Back in San Francisco, Mejicanos says, “I try not to watch too much of what other bartenders are doing because I don’t want to be too influenced by it.” Instead, he says, he pays attention to how pastry chefs “manipulate color and flavor and shapes” and how fine-dining restaurants arrange food on the plate to create an overall concept or design. Then he tries to bring that concept to the much smaller canvas of the top and sides of a cocktail glass. “A lot of times I know what the drink is gonna look like before I know what it’s gonna taste like,” he says.
For one new drink from the Causwells menu, the staff dehydrates and pulverizes pomegranate seeds and skins leftover from making a pomegranate tea. When serving, the bar team dusts a circle of this powder over a large square cube in a glass filled with the tea, whiskey, and Chinese 5-spice bitters. Mejicanos says he created the powder to find another use for the pomegranate scraps, while the visual concept is loosely based on the Japanese flag.
He also serves a clarified Piña Colada in a rocks glass with three circles cut from banana leaves pressed against its inner walls. Circular leaves have become a micro-trend in San Francisco, too. The bar True Laurel featured a cocktail for Pride month last year named God Loves Figs with a circular cut fig leaf. Across town at the new rooftop bar Cavaña, bar manager Emilio Salehi offers a clarified mezcal kiwi drink with a round Mexican pepperleaf (hoja santa) resting atop a big square ice cube.
Causwells’ showstopping Pimm’s Cup variation comes served in a flute filled with marble-sized ice, made from the pulp of strawberries and cucumbers that are juiced for the drink. Mejicanos says these not only look great, they prevent the cocktail from becoming overdiluted quickly as it would with unflavored cobblestone ice. However, dots were not his first choice for this cocktail. Mejicanos attempted to use mini-square ice cubes of these same flavors, but found the cubes stacked atop each other too tightly inside the flute. Dots hit the spot.
The spherical shapes are an accidental overall theme, but it seems to be working out. “We’re digging the circles for sure,” Mejicanos says. “Maybe the next menu will be all squares, I don’t know.”
Until then, at Causwells and across other top cocktail bars, we’ll keep seeing spots.
