Photo by Jay Paul
Today’s tipple, even a classic cocktail, is often assembled from an array of bottles behind the bar, syrups and shrubs, orgeats and bitters, often crafted and brewed by the bartenders themselves, requiring a whole different skill set than that of yesterday’s barkeep.
Enter Madison Pere, whom you can find these days at Little Nickel, the Giavos family’s newest venture on the South Side. There she is embracing the neighborhood tiki bar theme with blood-orange pina coladas and strawberry-daiquiri pops.
Pere started climbing the industry rungs at Can Can Brasserie. Told that her knife skills weren’t fast enough for the busy kitchen, she spent a year shucking oysters behind the bar before learning and mastering all the stations in the French bistro, working her way up to grillardin. From the confines of the kitchen, though, something was missing.
“You’re isolated in the back,” Pere says. “You don’t get to see the joy on people’s faces when their order arrives on the table.”
So, off to the bar she went, landing as beverage director at Rapp Session and Rappahannock next door. There, she put her culinary training to good use, cooking up tasty ingredients for their cocktail program, often by simply wandering into the walk-in refrigerators and hunting through the day’s deliveries.
Now at Little Nickel, the ingredients she finds inspire her to create the syrups and bitters. By macerating fruits, she’s able to extract the maximum flavor, while she slowly steeps the herbs and lemongrass, avoiding the bitterness that quickly crushing them might create.
Poaching fruits can leave her with a number of ingredients. Pere can poach a pear in red wine then, when finished, reduce the red wine into an intensely flavored red wine syrup. The poached pear can be pureed and added to cocktails or dehydrated into a gorgeous chip for garnish.
Timing and temperature all come into play when Pere makes an orgeat, the base of which is extracted from almonds. Peeling and slivering are time-consuming, and blanching the almonds just enough to remove the skins but not to cook them is a well-honed skill. When creating the syrup, it must be simmered, not allowed to hit the boiling point, lest the almonds turn bitter.
Of course, not everything Pere creates is complex and outside the skill set of the rest of us. For your own home bar, she recommends making a peppercorn syrup — equal parts sugar and water brought to a boil, then simmered with freshly cracked peppercorns (black, white or pink) and just a touch of basil. Add a bit of the syrup to a bourbon or use it to spice up your margarita.
Read about a suggested pairing for Pere's Skinny Dip cocktail below.
Photo by Jay Paul
Pair It With: Octopus Tostado and Skinny Dip
The Dish: Slices of tender octopus are braised and then grilled before joining a zesty fingerling hash, spicy chorizo, slivers of pickled onions, and a drizzle of sour orange glaze atop a crispy tostado.
The Drink: One may feel the urge for a cooling dip after indulging in this boozy tiki concoction. The bourbon-based drink offers warm hints of vanilla and cherry, while amaro and house tiki bitters provide mulled, herbal notes. Passion fruit and orgeat deliver a welcome nutty finish.
“When you eat them together, the combo makes you feel like you’re on the beach or island where they’re catching fish right out of the water and preparing it in front of you,” says Madison Pere, bartender at Little Nickel. “The tiki cocktail has a lot of spices and flavors, but also a punch of acidity that is needed to balance out the spiciness of the octopus tostado.”
