A moment for the Bloody Mary in a state devoted to it
The number of Bloody Marys consumed at brunch in Wisconsin must be staggering. Consider one restaurant group’s numbers:
The Lowlands Group has four (soon five) Cafe Hollander locations, plus Cafe Centraal, Cafe Benelux and Cafe Bavaria, all of which serve brunch on the weekends (the Hollanders and Benelux also serve breakfast every weekday).
Last week, the restaurants sold more than 3,400 Bloody Marys — and that was considered a slow week, partly because of free mimosas for moms on Mother’s Day.
“This summer, with our patios humming and Brookfield open, we’d expect over 6,000 a week,” said Dan Herwig, the marketing director for the restaurant group.
The group goes through so much of its made-from-scratch mix at Cafe Benelux in the Third Ward that it’s prepared in batches, kegged and tapped, Herwig said. (We may have hit peak Wisconsin with that.)
And now come two books with recipes dedicated to the drink. “The Bloody Mary Book: Reinventing a Classic Cocktail,” by Ellen Brown, the first food editor of USA TODAY, comes out May 23. It has 65 recipes for everything from the tomato juice itself and variations on the Bloody to bites to serve with the drink, along with notes on glassware, a dose of history and other asides on the past and present.
Another book of drink recipes, plus tips on throwing Bloody Mary parties and a dip into the origins of the cocktail and its name, “The Bloody Mary” hit store shelves in late March. Its author, New York bar man Brian Bartels, has instant Bloody Mary street cred: He grew up in Wisconsin and tended bar in Madison.
(”I would never trust a Bloody Mary from someone who didn’t hail from the great state of Wisconsin,” Portland, Ore., star bartender and author Jeffrey Morgenthaler said in his blurb for Bartels’ book.)
Bartels now is a managing partner and bar director for the Happy Cooking Hospitality group, previously known as Little Wisco — the restaurants Joseph Leonard, Bar Sardine, Jeffrey’s Grocery, Fedora and Perla Cafe, founded by Gabriel Stulman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad.
It was Stulman who suggested that the New York restaurants serve beer chasers with Bloody Marys, as he’d seen in Madison, Bartels said. Non-Midwesterners presented with the chaser “are almost always taken aback by it,” Bartels said by phone from New York.
The book, in a breezy-light tone to match the drink, offers 50 recipes for Bloody Marys, plus more for seasoned salts for glass rims, infused spirits like bacon vodka and for the Reedsburg Pickling Solution, named for Bartels’ hometown and suggested for pickling vegetable garnishes or just adding directly to the drink.
And Wisconsin does love its Bloody Mary garnishes (it’s a drink and a meal!). Bartels considers it a display of “this is who we are,” he said. “I love it.”
What is it with Wisconsin and Bloody Marys, anyway?
Here’s Bartels’ theory: Wisconsinites work hard all week and get to the weekend ready to play. The Bloody Mary is both an antidote to the night before and another reason for friends and family to get together.
In the book, he calls the drink a public one — its garnishes can make it a head-turner when it’s carried through a restaurant or bar.
Besides Bartels’ own recipes, the book includes Bloody Mary formulas from cocktail luminaries such as Gary “Gaz” Regan and Dale DeGroff.
Some of the book’s recipes are from Wisconsin — Sobelman’s Pub, known for outlandish, attention-grabbing garnishes like a whole fried chicken, is there; so is Madison’s Underground Food Collective and its Bloody Maria.
Some of the other recipes are inspired by the state (see the very green Green Bay Bloody Mary, made with tomatillo juice and served at Bar Sardine in New York).
The Bloody Mary has its reputation as a hangover cure, but Bartels notes in the book that the surest way to avoid a hangover is not drinking liquor in the first place. To that end, the book includes some nonalcoholic versions that can stand on their own — or, of course, the booze simply can be omitted from any of the recipes.
That there are so many variations on the Bloody Mary is tacit admission that the cocktail, maybe more than any other drink, is a very personal one.
“Everyone has their own recipe and their own way of making it,” Bartels said. The recipes in the book, with their range of juices, seasonings and other addins, like beer or anchovies, could end up as inspiration for even more tweaks by the drink-maker.
“That’s kind of the beauty and the unflinching creativity of the modern-day cocktail world,” Bartels said.