The new Canard’s bartender is creating artful elixirs.
Canard bartender shakes it up
If there’s one cocktail that exemplifies the personality of the new Canard bar, it’s the evocative Belladonna. A ginless take on the gin-fueled Arsenic and Old Lace, Canard’s lavender-hued Belladonna features sweet and white vermouth infused with apple peel and rose geranium leaf. It’s built on a base of Crème de Violette and floated with absinthe clouded to opalescence by water, which creates a tiered effect when looking at the cocktail from the side. Skimming the surface is a nasturtium leaf with a tiny micro orchid resting on top.
“When I look at that drink, that’s as much a work of art as a painting,” said bartender Leslie Ross, creative director of Canard. “There are colors, there are flavors, and there are layers. It gets people drinking things they think they’re afraid of, like vermouth and absinthe. … People want it because it’s just so beautiful. I feel you eat with your eyes, so you should also drink with your eyes.”
At Canard, Ross is giving customers a lot to feast on. The wee bar at 4721 N. Main, which seats only 45, is a teal jewel box padded in purple velvet and decorated with goldrimmed granny teacups. But those dainty cups aren’t just for show — they’re among the serviceware and glassware employed for a drinks menu stocked with what must be the city’s most cerebral, elaborate, thought-provoking cocktails.
As boutique as a boutique bar can get, the new Canard — another concept from the Treadsack hospitality group that also owns the bar’s next-door neighbor, Foreign Correspondents — is the intensely personal vision of a bartender deeply immersed in the science of flavors and formulas of modern mixology. Ross can also go baroque when creating recipes and backstories for her complex, multichapter compositions. In the end, though, she just wants cocktail aficionados to enjoy the magical offerings from her high-octane genie bottle.
It’s a wonder that Ross, the 33-year-old bartender who impressed many a cocktailian with her work at Triniti before joining Treadsack as bar director, had any juice left for Canard. In the past year, she has helped shape the bar identities of four Treadsack concepts that came in quick succession: Johnny’s Gold Brick, Hunky Dory, Bernadine’s and Foreign Correspondents. Through all those high-profile openings she managed to tuck away creative reserves for the work she knew would be her most intimate project: her own bar. She knew what she wanted from that bar even before going to work for Treadsack. In 2012, during a cocktail competition, she met the owners of White Lyan, a progressive London bar that changed her way of thinking about cocktails. “Creativity is the discipline to forget all that you know” is the White Lyan philosophy that empowered her new outlook — a freedom to explore the possibilities within the familiar structures and profiles of classic cocktails.
Canard’s menu features cocktails including Hemingway Goes to Hebrides (Scotch whisky meets cantaloupe seed horchata, cashew orgeat and lime distillate); Rosicrucian (an Old World-inspired floral theme in which cognac, rose liqueur and pink champagne offer a rose-petal raft filled with drops of beeswax and labdanum); and the Lyan and the Unicorn (a teacup holding a clear elixir of Bombay Sapphire gin, Dolin’s Génépy des Alpes, Manzanilla sherry, Crème de Violette and cucumber, served with a teaspoon and a “sugar cube” of compressed young coconut jelly infused with aloe and cucumber liquor).
The ultra-nuanced cocktails are served by an all-female staff fronting a terribly chic bar that has, since it opened, become decorated with duck figurines. With the name Canard, Ross said she deliberately avoided any type of duck motif or symbolism. But the ducks flocked.
“Ducks show up weekly,” Ross said of customers who brought in duck decorations. “They all came with a special story. There are little ducks everywhere.”
And yet “canard” has a second meaning: a false report or unsubstantiated rumor. That, where Canard’s cocktail prowess is concerned, is surely not the case.
For now, Ross is just happy to be back behind the bar working with creative people while still overseeing bar operations for the Treadsack group. At Canard, she’s in her element.
“I just want to enjoy the ride,” she said. “We know the car runs; now let’s see how fast it can go. That’s my intent with this bar.”