Appertif: Kir Cocktail

I was at brunch a week or so ago with Tori who ordered a kir cocktail as an appertif.  While I’ve had the Kir Royale – it’s very old world and you don’t see people drink them much anymore – I love the taste and it has a very sophisticated feel.  However, I had never HEARD of the Kir cocktail but have now added it to my repertoire.  Here’s the details:

The Kir became popular in French cafes in the middle of the 19th century and was further popularized by Felix Kir after World War II. The then mayor of Dijon in Burgundy, France, served the drink often to promote his region’s fine products (wine and creme de cassis). The name Kir has been associated with the drink ever since. There are also many variations of this wine cocktail (see below), each unique but carrying on the Kir tradition. The choice of white wine is something of personal taste; dry wines are preferred, Chablis is great.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 oz creme de cassis
• 2 1/4 oz dry white wine

Preparation:

1. Pour the creme de cassis into a wine glass.
2. Slowly add the dry white wine.

The Perfect Reading Chair

1. Cappellini’s Capo Chair

With its slightly pitched seat, Capo is a chair that you lean back in. Designer Doshi Levien gave the chair flat armrests that splay outward. Because the armrests start out narrow and get wider as they move away from you, they’re not ideal for typing on, but they do give you a convenient spot to rest your laptop or tablet. Like your tablet, the Capo appears impossibly light—it’s little more than legs and upholstery. The designers compare the chair’s high walls to an upturned collar. Understandably, the sides are not so tall that you can’t see over them when seated, and they’re rigid but offer a bit of give. Even without walling you off, though, Capo lets you opt for privacy. Turn Capo’s back to the room (it’s light enough to do this easily), and there’s no mistaking that you’d prefer not to be disturbed. $5,000,cappellini.it

2. Blå Station’s Innovation C

The Innovation C may look like it was designed for intergalactic space travel, but the chair can complement grand, traditional spaces as well. (I first came across these chairs in the centuries-old, medieval Salaborsa Library in Bologna, Italy, where they dot the periphery of the ground floor.) Its novel shape—essentially two parallel planes—also happens to be practical. What’s most innovative about Innovation C is its open-endedness. Instead of a vertical seat back, Innovation C’s goes horizontal, offering a comfortable place to rest your elbows when you’re leaning back (no bulky armrests required). Swivel the chair around so the seat back is in front of you and you’ve got a surface on which to rest your laptop or book (it’s set at the perfect height for working) or lean on while making a phone call. $4,525, blastation.com

3. Jayson Home’s Canopy Chair

Lest you assume all visually and acoustically isolating seating to be a product of the iPod age, behold the Canopy Chair. It’s a reproduction of a “porter’s chair,” which hails from the 16th century. Back in the day, the hall porter would hunker down in one of these; the high seat back and sides protected him from front-door drafts, while the hooded headrest helped him stay attuned to distant sounds. Its signature headrest is just as practical today. The “hoodie” is kind of like holding your hands up to your ears: In noisy environments, it makes conversations more intelligible; in quieter places, chatting with someone feels more intimate. If the burlap and exposed brass nailheads of this reproduction aren’t your style, there are other equivalents. Jaime Hayon’s Showtime Poltrona for BD Barcelona is a sleeker, but no less spectacular version, and it comes in glossy indoor and matte outdoor versions. $1,895, jaysonhome.com

4. Moroso’s Take a Line for a Walk

If walling yourself off from the rest of the room is too extreme, designer Alfredo Häberli’s Take a Line for a Walk strikes a good balance between intro- and extroversion. As with Arne Jacobsen’s iconic Egg Chair (the midcentury classic that this chair evokes with more angular lines), the generously proportioned seat encourages you to curl up, while the enveloping headrest gives you a sense of separation without coming off as anti-social. It does an exceptional job of blocking out the periphery so you can pay attention to what’s in front of you. There’s a matching ottoman to complete the look, as well as a version of the chair with a low integrated footrest made of tubular metal that lets you take a load off without wondering whether you should remove your shoes. $4,126, moroso.com

5. Vitra’s Alcove Sofa

The Alcove Sofa’s soft, high walls allow it to play impromptu meeting area, workspace or nap spot—it serves all three purposes exceptionally well. Plop down in one and you’re surrounded by the equivalent of sound-absorbing tile, which makes it ideal for contemplation, intimate conversation or recording the next episode of your YouTube series. Designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec supply the sofa with firm, fitted pillows, rather than overstuffed ones, to give rigor to what will easily be the coziest and most coveted spot in a home or office. (The Love Seat model is shown here.) The Alcove aspires to be a serious workplace as well. A single-seater “Workstation” model has a contoured desk on one side that flips up to reveal a storage compartment with slots to run cables through. It’s the type of cubicle you’d want to trade your office for. $9,225, vitra.com

6. Offecct’s Small Room

As its name suggests, Ineke Hans’s series of short to long sofas provides the building blocks for creating a room within a room. The sofas have high backs and sides (roughly five-and-a-half-feet tall) and come in three complementary sizes—1, 1½ and 2 meters (about 3¼- to 6-feet long)—so they can be mixed and matched to fit various expanses. (The 1½-meter version is shown here.) Because each sofa has one enclosed side, they can be arranged in any combination (in a line, back to back, flipped front to back). The wide armrest can be outfitted with a writing surface or even a built-in flowerpot.$4,076,

Happy Cinco de Mayo

IN SPANISH, margarita means “daisy.” But in North America, I believe the translation is closer to “super fun time.”

Totally fine to think of the cocktail that way, but let’s put down the ready-made, Day-Glo sour mix, step away from the margarita machine and take the drink seriously for just a moment. The margarita may conjure images of spring break in Cancún and fishbowl glasses with cactuses as stems or yardstick-long containers filled with boozy slush. But the cocktail is so much more than that.

It doesn’t take much to elevate the margarita to the top of the drink canon. Despite its unfortunate reputation as the Lindsay Lohan of the drink world, it deserves to rub elbows with the likes of the Manhattan and the martini. A properly made margarita is like Emma Stone—fun-loving but, deep down, classy and smart.

Like any other drink, it is only as good as its worst ingredient. Fortunately, the basic margarita only has three: tequila, triple sec and lime juice. Choose a spirit made of 100% agave, stock your bar with a solid orange-flavored liqueur, squeeze fresh lime juice—think of how strong your forearms will get!—and nail the proportions and you’ll have a wonderfully balanced sweet, tangy, slightly earthy (that’s the 100% agave) drink to sip this Cinco de Mayo and throughout the summer.

“Where’s the strawberry?” you might be asking. “Can I get extra salt on my rim?” Purists scoff at alterations to the margarita—yes, the harshest sticklers say no salt—but the add-ons are part of the drink’s fun factor. “Margaritas are like burgers,” said Bobby Heugel, owner of Anvil Bar & Refuge in Houston, one of Texas’s craft cocktail meccas. “There can be good ones on the high, gourmet level, and good ones at the low, fast-food-like level, too.” At Anvil there are several versions of the margarita, a basic one (1¾ ounces tequila, ¾ ounce Combier, ¾ ounce lime juice, 1 bar spoon agave) and the special Anvil margarita, which is a blend of different agave-based spirits as well as orange bitters. (Mr. Heugel keeps the exact recipe a secret.)

In the margarita experimentation game, as long as you’re using quality ingredients, you’re winning. That means no margarita mixes. Variations can be as subtle as swapping one citrus out for another, choosing an aged tequila over a blanco or, as in Tommy’s margarita from Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, ditching triple sec in favor of agave syrup. On the more elaborate end of the spectrum, margaritas can be imbued with fruit purées, rimmed with chipotle-spiced salt or incorporate spirits outside of standard margarita territory, such as Campari or green Chartreuse.

But the key ingredient, really, is fun. We’ve gathered some of the best margarita recipes from around the country to help you prepare for the warm months ahead. And if you need an excuse to pull this article out in the fall, Sept. 16 is Mexican Independence Day. So here’s to the margarita…and to super-fun times.

 

The classic Margarita plus five intoxicating electives

1. Siesta

A bright and fresh margarita variation for those who like things a little more tangy. The Campari and grapefruit juice round things out with just the right amount of bitterness.

1½ ounces blanco tequila

¾ ounce fresh lime juice

¾ ounce simple syrup

½ ounce fresh grapefruit juice

¼ ounce Campari

Orange twist

Shake liquid ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

2. Joey’s Margarita

It is a little-known fact that green Chartreuse partners well with tequila. The French liqueur adds a beautiful je ne sais quoi to this cocktail while the egg white gives it a sophisticated, airy body. A grown-up’s margarita.

2 ounces blanco tequila

1 ounce fresh lime juice

½ ounce green Chartreuse

¼ ounce agave nectar

½ ounce egg white

Shake ingredients without ice to emulsify egg white. Add ice, shake again and strain into a rocks glass over ice. Salted rim and lime garnish are optional.

3. The Classic Margarita

Ask five bartenders for their classic margarita and you’ll get five slightly different recipes. That’s OK. The margarita aims to please. Consider this recipe a base line. Too sweet? Use ¼ ounce more lime. Too tart? Add agave, ¼ ounce more orange liqueur or both. Too boozy? Delete a ¼ ounce tequila. (We find serving it on the rocks covers up slight imperfections.) A request: When you make a slam-dunk margarita, try it with no ice and no salt. You’ll make the cocktail gods happy.

2 ounces tequila

¾ ounce orange liqueur

¾ ounce fresh lime juice

¼ ounce agave nectar (optional)

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass or over ice into a rocks glass. Salted rim and lime garnish are optional.

4. Tommy’s Margarita

Julio Bermejo, the state of Jalisco, Mexico’s “Ambassador of tequila to the United States” invented this drink 15, 16 or 17 years ago—”Things get blurry over the years,” he said—because he didn’t feel like saccharine triple sec was doing tequila justice. Instead, he swapped it for agave nectar to create a classic in its own right. Once you try this seminal margarita variation, you may never pick up another bottle of triple sec again.

2 ounces 100% agave tequila

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1 ounce agave nectar syrup (1 part agave nectar to 1 part water)

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

5. Sangre de Cenobio

This elegant margarita variation uses dessert wine (a Lacrima or Sauternes is recommended) instead of triple sec to give the drink a surprising, complex sweetness. The black lava salt is a nice theatrical touch and a nod to the volcanic soil where agave plants commonly flourish.

Black lava salt

2 ounces tequila

¾ ounce dessert wine

1 ounce fresh lime juice

½ ounce agave nectar

Lime peel

Rim glass with black lava salt. Shake liquid ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with lime peel.

6. Breakfast Margarita

A ‘rita that’s fresh and light enough to have instead of a bloody mary or a mimosa with breakfast.

1½ ounces blanco tequila

¾ ounce Cointreau

1 ounce mango nectar

1 ounce fresh tangerine juice

¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

¼ ounce ginger juice

Tangerine wedge

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a rocks glass over ice.

The ultimate cinco de mayo playlist

• “Las Voces” — Josh Rouse
• “Margarita” — The Traveling Wilburys
• “Dejalo” — Rilo Kiley
• “Cinco de Mayo” — War
• “Satchita” — Playing For Change
• “Candela” — Buena Vista Social Club
• “Oye Como Va” — Tio Puente
• “Para Donde Vas” — The Iguanas
• “Spanish Moon” — Little Feat
• “Hot Tequila Brown” — Jamiroquai
• “Mexico” — That Handsome Devil
• “Margaritaville” — Todd Snider
• “Samba Pa Ti” — Santana

This list appeared in the weekend edition of the WSJ – it was created by DJ Jane Buffett, Jimmy Buffett’s daughter.