The Thi Rak cocktail from My Noodle & Bar (Photo by Jay Paul)
The fresh, vegetal flavor of celery makes for a transcendent cocktail ingredient, especially when the weather gets warmer and you’re refreshed by the smells of cut grass and seedlings popping up through the fragrant earth. Celery can be juiced, combined with sugar into a saccharum syrup, infused into bitters, or dunked raw into a bloody mary and munched. Here are a handful of fun sips around the city that celebrate celery.
Touch Grass
Dutch gin backs up delicious greenery in this enlivening beauty: basil brandy, grapefruit, fennel, lemon, parsley and — of course — celery, plus a bit of cognac and Manzanilla sherry to smooth the edges. Bright, exciting and expertly balanced.
La Chica Fresa
Funky rums! Bergamot! A romantic wedding of strawberry and celery! This is bound to be a spring favorite, with tropical notes from clarified coconut milk carrying it right into the summer. Tangy lemon puts the flavor profile in the daiquiri zone.
Thi Rak
Behold, one of the smoothest slurps in the city. The celery flavor in this gem-colored cocktail is softened, fluffed up and sweetened (but not overly) by egg white, honey and velvet falernum, and accented with toasty pandan extract. There is Belle Isle Moonshine in there somewhere, but its big muscles are hidden beneath the marshmallow pump cover.
