At a recent Saturday night at Café Mars, a self-described “unusual Italian restaurant” in Brooklyn, I had a drink that’s stuck with me like an earworm: the Mad World. Devised by Jake Riley, the restaurant’s head bartender, it’s a nonalcoholic combination of Ghia aperitif, carrot juice, lime juice, soda water and a syrup infused with a berbere spice blend. They were inspired by a sausage and beans dish from the restaurant’s opening menu. “But the flavor profile was coming from a sort of North African direction,” says Riley, “inspired by how there’s Italian colonial influence in Eritrea and Ethiopia.”
In the restaurant’s multihued neon lighting, the drink shines with a rusty glow. The first sip reveals the sweetness of carrot against the savory backdrop of the myriad spices that make up Café Mars’ berbere blend, including coriander, cumin, cardamom, paprika, salt and ginger, which also tempers the bitterness brought by Ghia’s botanical, gentian and rhubarb flavor. The salt brings the drink’s ingredients into a gentle, yet certain focus. “I’m always hoping to have a nonalcoholic cocktail beyond lemonade,” says Riley. So they deployed the carrot and berbere spice to round it out with “a bit of earthiness.”
Ingredients alone are often enough to produce a memorable drink, but the Mad World has another trick up its sleeve, a musical hook. Riley shares my feeling that the hardest part of coming up with a new cocktail is naming it. One day before service, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” was playing, which reminded them of Donnie Darko, the 2001 film that features a stripped-down cover of the song. They thought of the “goth bunny” in the movie, and connected it all back to the carrot-infused drink. For a good week after my visit to Café Mars, the song bounced around in my head—just like the drink.
The most exciting thing about our current wave of nonalcoholic creativity is that it represents a chance to reinvent what “cocktail” means. Because nonalcoholic cocktails lack the very obvious and irreplaceable presence of ethanol, we need to take a different path in order to achieve a memorable, delicious drink. The Mad World has elements of a Bloody Mary, with perhaps some touches of a Garibaldi thrown in. This drink feels as familiar to me as it does novel.
