New Orleans cocktail book shows city’s elegant drink side

A new book from the owner of a New Orleans craft cocktail bar is showing readers an elegant look at cocktails in a city known for drinking excess. Neal Bodenheimer founded Cure in 2009 and since then has gone on to open other bars and restaurants. His new book is titled “Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em.” It showcases drinks created by Cure staff and well-known New Orleans drink staples such as the Sazerac or the Ramos Gin Fizz. The book includes essays about the city and its drinking culture. Bodenheimer says the book is a “love letter to the city from me.”

If your idea of a New Orleans cocktail is a Kool-Aid colored, alcohol-heavy concoction served in a plastic hand grenade or a novelty glass resembling a hurricane lamp, stop thinking like a college freshman on his first trip to Bourbon Street and take a look at the new book from upscale bar owner Neal Bodenheimer.

“Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em,” by Bodenheimer and food writer Emily Timberlake, is full of recipes for cocktails created at Cure, the craft cocktail bar Bodenheimer founded in 2009. The bar is widely credited with being modern-day New Orleans’ first destination bar for craft cocktails. The book has recipes for sours, Manhattans, and bittered slings interspersed with some history of New Orleans, its drinking culture and the men and women at Cure who created the drinks.

Bodenheimer, whose family first settled in Louisiana in the 1850s, was a bartender in New York with plans to eventually open a cocktail bar there. But then Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005, and like many New Orleanians who watched the catastrophe unfold in their hometown, Bodenheimer felt an immediate need to return.

“I just decided that I wanted ... to go back home,” he said.