Clever bar has short attention span
Time was, a bar could be a place of forgetting: unwinding after work, drinking away your sorrows and entering, through martinis and neat whiskeys, a state of pleasant oblivion.
Not so in contemporary San Francisco. Today, bar-going can be the most intense activity you undertake in a 24-hour period, requiring the attentiveness you’d bring to a theater performance, the allusion knowledge you’d bring to trivia night, the openness to data intake you’d bring to a history lecture.
Such is the intensity of Over Proof, the bar within ABV, the popular cocktail bar in the Mission. That’s not to say Over Proof isn’t enormously fun. It is. And experiencing it may be as rewarding as watching a theater performance or win-
ning trivia night — if you can manage not to drink yourself into oblivion.
Open since January, Over Proof occupies ABV’s newly constructed mezzanine. The upstairs perch was originally planned as private-event space, but as construction neared an end, co-owner Todd Smith came up with a better idea. What if they made the upstairs space into a new bar every three months? And what if, like the Michael Mina Test Kitchen, each iteration of the bar was themed?
That’s how we’ve ended up, from Jan. 23 to April 21, with Over Proof 1.0: the rum-themed Flip Flop. Offering a ticketed tasting menu of five cocktails and five dishes, this sugarcane-fueled adventure is available Thursdays and Fridays, two seatings of 24 guests per night, at $50 per person. (With tax and gratuity, my ticket came to $66.18.)
Brace yourself. First up: “Sippin Rum” with “rum ham” musubi, waiting for you at your assigned seat when you arrive. Looks tasty, but do you get the reference? (It’s actually — get this — a meta-reference, alluding to an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” that itself contains an allusion, involving a rum-soaked ham, to the film “Cast Away.”)
The musubi tastes mainly of its furikake seasoning, gummy with the textures of nori, rice and its house-made version of Spam. It’s hardly one of ABV chef Collin Hilton’s tastiest creations (a high bar to begin with — have you had the burger?), but it’s the perfect palatewhetter for the acts of Flip Flop still to come: smart and original, an inside joke.
A neat shot, to be taken leisurely, the Sippin Rum contains Plantation Pineapple, a mixture of pineapple-infused dark rum and rind-infused white rum aged in Cognac barrels. Just smell it, juicy-fruity, nectarpure, and you know all you need to know.
The irony of serving something as lowbrow as pineapple rum is topped only by the inclusion of coconut rum in the evening’s fourth drink, the Coconut Daisy. “We knew we could toast the coconut ourselves and it would be way more delicious than Malibu,” says managing partner Ryan Fitzgerald, referring to the commercially made coconut rum. It is, and the coconut flavor is subtle, served over ice with a bendy straw. Yellow Chartreuse notwithstanding, you’d never mistake it for a traditional, brandybased Daisy.
Flip Flop’s best drink is likewise an update of a classic cocktail: the Jungle Bird, a piece of tiki esoterica here reimagined as the Pink Flamingo. Rhum agricole, pineapple gum, absinthe and a proprietary blend of tiki bitters, it turns out, produce a drink extremely pink and yet extremely skillful. Its mouth-puckering acidity rounds out the intense jellybean-sweetness of its flavors, making it destined for the ABV cocktail menu downstairs.
These cocktails, created largely by bartender Eric Ochoa, are more showstopping (read: more Trick Dog) than ABV’s typical, more understated fare. (Two of the five are also premade, a convenience that keeps Over Proof ’s service moving swiftly.) The nightcap, a sweet, dark concoction of Plantation Pineapple, Cappelletti liqueur and rancio (oxidized wine), is served in a small snifter with an ice luge frozen onto its side, melting more slowly than an ice cube would.
And cleverest of all is the Cuba Libre, a kind of Coke-less rum and Coke, with Bonal and Cocchi Americano approximating the taste of flat cola. The drink comes in a glass Coca-Cola bottle that’s been force-carbonated three times, using the carbon-dioxide tanks the bar has for beer, then recapped. Your server at Over Proof simply pops the top and pours from the bottle. It tastes remarkably like a rum and Coke, but less syrupy, and with an added, alpine-fresh aromatic dimension.
All the while, you’re getting a lesson in Caribbean geography, cocktail history and culinary customs. Did you know that chow mein is one of the most popular dishes in Trinidad? You will when you get your fifth course, Trini-style chow mein. Which rum-producing nation is the stuffed cherrystone clam meant to approximate? That would be New England, a Colonial-era hub of rum production.
You won’t ask any questions, though, when you’re spooning that goopy mess of sweet Jamaican curry onto a chewy fried plantain, the stew’s al dente chickpeas a foil to tender smoked lamb, falling apart. (In an all-time first for ABV, utensils are offered.) Similarly speech-defying are the chicken wings, not strictly jerk but merely jerk-style, spicier from coriander than from heat, the skin crisp but not tough, the meat moist but not slippery. Quickly, cool the taste of the hot wing with one of the chunks of grilled pineapple, clinging to leaves of mint and cilantro. Please, please, chef Hilton, let these wings stay on the ABV menu after Flip Flop ends.
Don’t mistake this for a “pairing” menu. In fact, Fitzgerald and his team don’t think cocktails pair particularly well with food. “But we figured, we’re giving you five cocktails, we’d better feed you, too,” Fitzgerald says. “How do you communicate ‘this is a party with food and cocktails’ without calling it a pairing?”
The Over Proof backbar contains only rum, and an impressive collection of it; it’s a shame, then, that Flip Flop repeats Plantation Pineapple and El Dorado 12 Year in multiple drinks. Why not explore more of the inventory? Especially since I found no opportunity to order an extra taste of something. (The system is entirely pre-ticketed; no money is exchanged at Over Proof.)
Over Proof 2.0 — Double Back, themed around whiskey — commences May 3. In addition to the two seatings on Thursdays and Fridays, it will add a 7 p.m. Wednesday time slot. The vintage rum advertisements on the walls of Flip Flop will be changed out for decor that Fitzgerald describes as an “izakaya saloon” — imagine a Kentucky-bred watering hole in Tokyo. Although it will incorporate whiskeys from around the world, including Japanese, Scotch and American, Hilton’s food will lean eastward, “more umami than Kentucky fried,” as Fitzgerald puts it. The price per person will increase to $60, before tax and tip.
They’ll repeat this scene change two more times. (I’d put money on mezcal, Fitzgerald’s personal passion, making an appearance.) Once the fourth act of Over Proof has ended, in February 2018, Fitzgerald says they’ll do something altogether different with the mezzanine space. Will one of this year’s concepts become permanent? Maybe. All they know is that opening a new bar every three months is not long-term sustainable.
“Flipping it like this is a ton of work,” Fitzgerald says. “We love it. It’s cool, but it’s a lot of work.”
“We figured, we’re giving you five cocktails, we’d better feed you, too. How do you communicate ‘this is a party with food and cocktails’ without calling it a pairing?” Ryan Fitzgerald, ABV/Over Proof