A winding staircase from the ground floor of Eleven Madison Park leads to an inconspicuous door that conceals the nine-seat Studio at Clemente Bar. Inside, the bar team, under the direction of Sebastian Tollius, is pushing the boundaries of what a cocktail bar can be, designing a liquid degustation that marries the artistry of the kitchen to the craft of bartending over five courses.
The marriage is a product of two decades of experience crafting a shared language that exists across the culinary and beverage program at EMP driven by seasonal ingredients. But what actually goes into designing the $225, multicourse cocktail tasting menu? Here, Tollius shares, in his own words, the creative process behind the endeavor.
Sometimes a pairing starts with a cocktail idea and other times it starts with a dish. We collaborate with the kitchen extensively. These conversations can range anywhere from a quick interaction like, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about doing this,” to full sit-downs when we’re actually putting things on paper and writing out the menu. One dish might be a little bit more astringent, so we might want to cut back the acid in the cocktail, or it might have more richness to it, so we might want to add more of an acid component to the cocktail.
For one of the cocktail pairings, we make a buckwheat miso that goes into a Manhattan variation to pair with 100 percent buckwheat soba noodles. We offer two different versions of the dish. The cold version is served with tomatoes, Thai basil and lemongrass, so [it’s] super bright, and the warm option comes with mushrooms in a richer style with dashi. Each dish pairs with a different cocktail, but both are made with the buckwheat miso. For the pairing with the tomato soba, we focus on lighter flavors with a basil eau de vie, Knob Creek rye, Amaro Nonino and a touch of amontillado sherry. With the mushroom soba, we focus on those richer notes, adding dark rum to the rye base with a bit of Nardini Amaro. Each one is finished with different flavored oil, like a spicy gochugaru oil for the tomato and an umami mushroom oil for the cocktail that pairs with the warm soba. I definitely think it’s pushing boundaries to design cocktails that are more culinary-focused, and that’s where we can really also make this connection between kitchen and bar.
The real point of doing the Studio for me, in terms of the bar side, was getting away from the world of batching and bringing back the craft of bartending and that artistry of what we do with techniques like milk-washing and spherification. We want to bring things that are usually done behind the scenes to the forefront of the experience. A milk punch might take 12 hours to strain after resting in the fridge overnight. But guests never get to see that. So, I really wanted to showcase the process of how the drink is made. Since it’s the last pairing of the meal, we started playing with how the timing would work if we filtered and clarified the drink in front of the guest. It takes about 60 to 70 minutes to fully strain nine portions (through a giant coffee siphon), so we could have it ready by the final course if we start the process when guests arrive. We’re currently serving a 50-50 Martini where we mix Roku gin with Acqua di Cedro and a touch of Salers Aperitif to pair with the first course, “Pickled and Fried,” which begins with a plate of housemade pickled vegetables. We use liquid nitrogen to freeze a caramelized leek vermouth onto the bottom of the glass, so as the drink is warming up, it turns into almost, like, a dirty Martini for the second bite of the first course (a tempura-fried leek).
The last few years, we’ve really been focusing on building our fermentation program at EMP and are building off that now with Clemente Bar. Using koji fermentation allows us to create layers of umami with ingredients like miso. We also make clarified amazake (transparent nonalcoholic sweet sake) and various lacto-ferments that we can utilize to create umami and lactic notes in cocktails. So, we’re always thinking of how we can showcase more savory flavors. The dessert option is either a banana chocolate or mango sticky rice sundae. When the milk punch is finished straining, we use it as the base of two different cocktail pairings for each dish finished tableside. For the mango sticky rice, we serve the milk punch base in a Champagne flute and top it off with some sparkling sake, and for the banana chocolate dessert, we’re whisking a traditional matcha tea ceremony that gets poured over the milk punch, so you see this beautiful, clear drink underneath with the matcha tea still floating on top.
We always have to be cognizant that serving five full-size cocktails during a 90-minute or two-hour experience is a lot of drinks. We want to make sure that we’re creating a balance in terms of flavor that’s really going to be impactful toward the dish or vice versa, but also something that’s going to be enjoyed throughout the entire dining experience, without leaving you totally inebriated by the end. So, we’re designing Martinis that are split with more vermouth or lighter-style highballs. For the second course, we take a block of ice and we break it down with a soba-kiri knife, and we do a classic Japanese highball-style presentation, with just a little bit of whiskey, cucumber, yuzu and effervescent water (charged in old-timey seltzer canisters). We also serve some smaller pours and have to be very intentional with the glassware that we’re choosing, so that we’re pouring tasting sizes of the cocktails. A lot of thought goes into how we can get the most flavor out of a smaller cocktail, without having that affect the quality of the experience.
We want everybody to have the same experience with the N/A option, and we didn’t want to create something that’s completely different. This is unique from our typical nonalcoholic pairings at EMP, where we focus much more on acid components, like vinegars and shrubs, teas for tannins, or different juices. Here, we really mimicked a similar version of the same cocktails in the nonalcoholic pairing. For the soba course, we’ve created a nonalcoholic bourbon, where we infuse tea with oak to mimic bourbon flavors. But we can also play with more of those tannins that you get from different ingredients, like using gentian in our first pairing by infusing it in Seedlip to make a similar nonalcoholic Martini, with a little pickle brine for acid. So, we’re taking inspiration from the base spirits from each course and creating an alternate nonalcoholic base. We’re living in an amazing time now, where we have all these incredible alternatives that we can use to make nonalcoholic cocktails more exciting.
—Sebastian Tollius, beverage director of Clemente Bar, as told to Adam Reiner
