Saturday, July 28, 2012

Tales of the Cocktail - Day 2




Cocktail lovers sure do start early! Where else would you see people with excitement writ large on their faces and a glass in hand? And that was evident when invitees turned up at 9 in the morning (including your’s truly ;)) for an Irish Breakfast hosted by Kilbeggan.



The second day of Tales saw the organised chaos just spilling over every nook an corner of the French Quarter of New Orleans. The seminars as usual rolled by and by my guesstimate, all of them ran housefull! One of them that I attended saw Cocktail Historian Dave Wondrich and Alexandre Gabriel of Cognac Ferrand pitted alongside the witty Philip Duff as they made their presentation on the ultimate Curacao Master Class and if that was not enough, David did a demo of freshly distilled curacao! Later in the afternoon I was joined by my friend Hemant Pathak who’s just shifted to New York from Delhi and now runs his own bar called the Island Stake House and Bar in Lassau County, Long Island. You should hit him up if you are ever in NY! Hemant was the first bartender from India to crack Diageo’s World Class and went on to represent India at the Global world class finals. Life surely has changed for this lucky bum and deservedly so!



NOLA is also home to the Museum of the American Cocktail (MOTAC) and at a fund raiser yesterday sponsored by Macallan, TOTCites were invited to take the plunge into the Macallan Ice pool! And with the smug kind of weather here, there were more than a hundred happy plungers! The evening also saw people gathering at the One Eyed Jack for the bar room bash thrown by NYC’s celebrated bar, the Employees Only along with all the big boys from the booze business.



And I did take out time to go down to two very well known and historic bars in the city – The Napoleon House (set up in 1797!) and Arnaud’s French 75. And drink there as well…but that’s a story that I’ll leave for another day! 




- Rohan Jelkie

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