Whose mix is it anyway?

If James Bond were to ever visit one of the lounges in Bangalore, he’d have died of shock. For, his favourite martini has undergone transitions that even the most edgy bartenders wouldn’t have thought of.

From tender coconut water to cardamom to cinnamon and even rasam, the martini menus in the city have taken really innovative turns. Martinis are just the tip of the iceberg.

The cocktail drinking lot in the city has multiplied. They want different flavours and they are no longer shy to express their liking for Indian flavours. The good old Cosmopolitan and Long Island Iced Tea may be on the menus still, but overshadowing them are their Indian cousins, spicier, hotter and a lot zingier.
Merlin Griffiths, global ambassador, Bombay Sapphire, says, “The Indian fruits make great ingredients for cocktails. Take the ever so popular Tom Collins for instance. This drink can be given a nice little Indian touch by using the musambi juice and make it that ideal Indian summer drink.”

And this phenomenon of using Indian liquids seems to have caught on big time. Take for instance restaurants like Pink Poppadum and Bon South, these Indian theme fine dining restaurants have bar menus which serve alcohol with a unique twist to it, which includes cocktails like Rasam Mary, where the spicy Tabasco sauce is replaced with spicy tomato rasam, giving the drink a unique desi spin.

The bar at Vivanta by Taj, Whitefield has one such Indian mix as their signature drink, which is called Flirt and has kokum juice as the mixer.

If there is one school of thought that believes in retaining the essence of the drink and just changing the mixer to an Indian one, the other school likes reinventing Indian treats with an alcoholic touch. The most popular examples of this school of thought are the vodka pani puri and the rum/vodka golas.

We have many popular Indian joints in the city like Oye Amritsar and Kabab Studio introducing these items in their drinks menu. While there may be many of the conservative thinkers who argue that items like vodka pani puri need to find a place in the food menu as compared to drinks, the bartenders at these restaurants say that the vodka-mixed pani is quite a rage as a cocktail in itself, which led to this move of theirs.

Kumar Manish from The Park Hotel believes that mixology is in a very nascent stage in India. He points out, “These innovations are just the beginning. This is much like how the cocktail culture spread rapidly in the West in the past two decades, where Oriental and other ingredients found their way to the bars. Indian bartenders are just realising this and we will get to see a lot more interesting drinks.”