S.F. mule bar packs a kick
Martini bars are a thing. So are margarita bars. Now, in what may be an international milestone, San Francisco has its first mule bar: the Rusted Mule.
For theme-bar-saturated San Francisco, it may be a small step, but it’s a giant leap for the mule.
The mule, as a family of cocktails, refers to a concoction of a base spirit, ginger beer and lime juice. More distinctive than its ingredient list is its requisite glassware, a copper mug. The original and most enduring iteration, the Moscow Mule, is based on Russian vodka, but you may also have come across the Kentucky Mule (bourbon), the Gin-Gin Mule (gin), the Irish Mule (Irish whiskey). The possibilities, once you master the syntax, are
endless.
Although it can’t really claim to be a timeless classic in the mode of the martini, the mule has surged in popularity lately. The New York Times, citing data from analytics firm GuestMetrics, reported that menu placements of the Moscow Mule increased 60 percent year over year in 2015, and comprised a full 7 percent of all cocktail orders that year. Those figures seem all the more remarkable considering that the article’s author, the distinguished cocktail writer Robert Simonson, had never heard of the drink a decade ago.
In other words, the Rusted Mule’s timing couldn’t be better.
Chris Mansury, one of the bar’s owners, confirms: “We’re selling mules like gangbusters.”
Mansury, formerly of Comstock Saloon and Dogpatch Saloon, has teamed up with fellow S.F. bar veterans Christina Mae Henderson (also of Dogpatch Saloon), Kristian Cosentino (Dirty Water) and Richard Vila (Poquito). They’ve created a spacious, stylish, two-story bar in this Sutter Street space, just off Polk Street’s raucous drinking corridor.
Michael Brennan, who designed Farallon, Jardiniere and many others, realized the owners’ vision of an “industrial steampunk” aesthetic: exposed brick, abstract metal sculptures, rusty metal fragments. Steampunk movie posters rotate through a wall placement — “Metropolis,” “City of Lost Children,” “Brazil.”
Environmental consciousness — not mules — was what guided the team initially. “We were always going to be a draft heavy program,” Mansury says. “No bottled beer, as much wine on tap as possible, and draft cocktails, so we’re not filling up 10 blue bins every day with glass bottles that then have to get melted down.”
For example, the bar buys wine in 5-gallon kegs — roughly 20 liters each. That one reusable keg saves the equivalent of about 25 glass wine bottles. Similarly, they’ve invested in a pebble ice machine, and use pebble ice instead of cubed ice wherever possible. “The efficiency of a pebble ice machine is above 90 percent in water-saving efficiency,” Mansury says, as opposed to a cubed ice machine’s 50 percent.
The centerpiece of the Rusted Mule’s menu is a rotating selection of four mules on tap ($9 each). Anchoring the lineup, of course, is the vodka-based mule, here called the Rusted Mule. “Technically, a Moscow Mule implies Russian vodka,” Mansury says, and they’re using Ketel One, which is Dutch. The drink is heavy on lime and the least ginger-forward of the bunch, simple and straightforward by design.
More gingery is the Oh-Be-Joyful, the genever-based mule, which adds dry vermouth. Its botanical elements add a welcome pop of flavor lacking in its vodka-based counterpart. The Mula Verde (with Tequila and Ancho Reyes Verde, a chile liqueur) is fresh and herbaceous, spicy from both chile and ginger. The whiskey mule, here called the Aeronef, adds another reference point; it’s also a riff on the Paper Plane cocktail, adding Amaro Montenegro and Aperol.
Ginger beer and lime aside, the mule’s most defining characteristic is surely its vessel, and the Rusted Mule folks were smart to revel in that detail. Their Tequila-based mule comes in a terra-cotta jar; the whiskey mule, in a soup can (“It took us four months to find soup cans with finished edges,” Mansury says); the gin mule, in the sort of mug you’d screw off the top of a camping thermos.
All substitute the customary ginger beer for a house-made ginger syrup. “We hand-process anywhere from 90 to 120 pounds of ginger every week, cook it down and turn it into a really strong, ginger-forward, citrusy syrup,” Mansury says.
Always, the mule is a reliable crowd-pleaser; hence the gangbusters rate of sales. It’s one mixologist-inflected notch up from the sorts of generic drinks peddled at many a crowded Polk Street bar — whiskey ginger,
“We... 90 hand-processto 120 pounds of ginger every week, cook it down and turn it into a really strong, ginger-forward, citrusy syrup.” Chris Mansury, one of the owners of the Rusted Mule
vodka-soda-splash-of-lime.
In fact, the mule’s very conception was born in just such an environment. Legend has it, the mule was invented in 1941 by two masterminds who each had a product to sell: Jack Morgan, president of Cock ’n Bull Products (whose ginger beer was showing sluggish sales), and John Martin, president of Heublein (who was trying to promote Smirnoff vodka). They may have hatched their brilliantly simple recipe at the Chatham Hotel in New York, but it was in Los Angeles, at Morgan’s Cock ’n Bull restaurant, that the Moscow Mule met the masses.
The way Martin recalls the story in a video repurposed into a 2016 Smirnoff commercial, Morgan’s girlfriend, Ozeline Schmidt, had recently inherited a copper factory from her father. That would explain the mug. (Unfortunately for the Schmidts, recent research has suggested drinking acidic liquids from copper vessels can lead to copper poisoning. Most mule mugs now are lined with stainless steel or other materials.)
Martin and Morgan weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel. The cocktail world could already claim the buck as an established family of cocktails, defined as base spirit, ginger and citrus. Moscow Mule was simply a specific sort of buck — crucially, a product-specific buck. It couldn’t just be ginger ale; it had to be ginger beer. It couldn’t just be any spirit; it had to be Russian vodka. And it couldn’t be served in just any cup; it had to be a copper mug.
That the Rusted Mule can riff so wildly on that original, limited definition is a testament to the widespread popularity of the Moscow Mule today. Everyone knows the basic vodka version already, so maybe they’re ready to take on Tequila and chile liqueur, too.
The Polk Street masses may not be quite ready, however, for some of the Rusted Mule’s more challenging, non-mule (and non-draft) variations, such as the cocktail called A Child’s Dream ($13), made with peanut butter-washed Jack Daniel’s, celery salt, raspberry liqueur and St. Archer white ale. It’s a retelling of that classic snack of your youth, ants on a log, and it sounds a lot wackier than it tastes. The saccharine raspberry flavor dominates.
Equally eyebrow-raising is the pairing, in the One Single Tear ($13), of lowbrow Hypnotiq liqueur with a highbrow tincture of Life Everlasting Flower. The drink tastes like curacao — that is, like Hypnotiq. To my palate, it could have used another balancing element to the Hypnotiq’s sappy sweetness.
Then again, Hypnotiq and ants-on-a-log drinks seem destined to please the denizens of Polk Street nightlife. It’s not too far off from the strategy Jack Morgan and John Martin figured out 75 years ago.
“Everyone can start out with a Moscow Mule,” Mansury says. “It’s driving people to our house cocktails, too. The mules make it accessible, and then people can graduate on to something a little more challenging.”