Shaking up the culinary scene
With increased emphasis on food and food pairings, Cocktails and Culture Culinary Festival is nod to fact that mixology is as much about cooking as it is spirit alchemy
Natalie Bovis is redefining the liquid lunch. For one thing, it should actually involve lunch because for Bovis, cocktails are as much a culinary matter as they are an alcoholic one, both in terms of the ingredients and the foods that they’re paired with. But more than that, Bovis, through her company, the Liquid Muse, wants to make cocktails something we not only celebrate things with, but something we celebrate for their own sake.
Now in its fourth year, the Cocktails and Culture Culinary Festival (formerly the Cocktails and Culture Festival) is vying to be one of Santa Fe’s premier foodie events. This year’s incarnation will be held Friday through Sunday, mostly at the Drury Plaza Hotel. The addition of “culinary” in the name speaks to the increased emphasis on food and food pairings, and it is a nod to the fact that mixology is as much about cooking as it is spirit alchemy these days. Bovis, the festival’s one-woman impresario, is Santa Fe’s unofficial queen of the cocktail. Bovis grew up in Santa Fe and, like so many, left to find a career and brought it back here with her. After years of doing publicity for restaurants and then being among the early adopters of cocktail blogging, Bovis has become a liquor brand ambassador, an event planner and a champion for that au courant beverage, the culinary cocktail.
“I came to the realization that mixology is the liquid element of the culinary world,” Bovis says, “in a different way from wine. Cocktails you actually make — they bring elements together the way a chef brings elements together.”
The long weekend of the festival includes several seminars taught by luminaries of the cocktail world, such as Dale DeGroff (aka the King of Cocktails) and master mixologist Tony Abou-Ganim, as well as a couple of prix fixe cocktail pairing dinners at Coyote Cafe and Eloisa (not included in the festival pass). But the liveliest events promise to be the competitions, where chefs from across the state (well, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, anyway) compete to see who can create the most — ahem — spirited combinations.
There are three competitions this year, all food-related, two very much so. On Friday, the second annual iteration of Taco Wars will pit 12 of New Mexico’s restaurants against one another in a fight to see which one can fill a corn tortilla better. These are not necessarily tauqerias — in fact, most are not taquerias. Quasi-gastropub Rowley Farmhouse Ales will be participating, as will Eloisa (which already has a nonconformist pastrami taco on its menu), Osteria D’Assisi (which entered last year with a chicken Parmesan taco) and the fine dining restaurant at Inn of the Anasazi (chef Edgar Beas won last year’s taco battle).
Sunday, after a fundraising bike ride, the Bloody Battle & Cocktail Brunch will commence, a bartenders-only competition that began weeks ago when entrants from around the state submitted recipes for “classic cocktails with a New Mexican spin.” Three finalists (and an alternate) were chosen, and those three on Sunday will be challenged to create an original bloody mary mix that will then be paired with vodka, tequila and, oddly, whiskey (sometimes called a bloody molly). After creating (and sampling) their drinks, competitors will then have to make a final drink with the ingredients of a mystery basket, echoing the method of the similarly sadistic Chaînes de Rôtisseurs competition.
But the big show happens Saturday, with the Chef & Shaker Challenge, a battle royal between chef-and-mixologist teams from New Mexico restaurants to create cocktail and dish pairings. Each team will be randomly assigned a different spirit (Hendrick’s gin, for example, or Tito’s Handmade Vodka or the potentially challenging BarSol Pisco) and will be asked to craft a cocktail and a matching dish, both of which must incorporate said spirit. Teams will precook their dishes and bring them to the arena (the Drury ballroom) and have three hours to sample their creations to the salivating masses (and the judges). Santa Fe restaurants in the mix include cocktail powerhouses such as Coyote Cafe, Paloma and Eloisa, but there also will be restaurants that normally serve beer and wine only, like La Boca and Arable. From a little farther afield, we have Hotel Albuquerque, Sister Bar, MÁS at Hotel Andaluz and the Artichoke Cafe. Sample-size small plates and cocktails from at least 12 restaurants will end up feeling like about four courses of food and just enough cocktails to make your night.
“Cocktail and food pairings are still kind of a new idea here,” Bovis says. “The idea is to get people thinking ‘Oh, I can be pairing courses with cocktails, not just wine or beer.’ And you can really manipulate a cocktail to pair very specifically with a dish. That’s what’s fun about it.”