Stool Pigeon starts cocktail challenge by making peace with the martini – Press-Register

Michelle Tallent serves up a White Chocolate Martini at the Royal Scam in downtown Mobile. (G.M. Andrews, Press-Register)

Having gotten it into his head to initiate a search for the perfect cocktail, the Press-Register’s intrepid master of the bar beat knew he couldn’t just sit around watching Facebook and Twitter, waiting for tips. That was mere journalism; he had to do some reporting. He had to make a start. But how?

By having a martini, obviously. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Even as a precocious lad, years away from buying his first round, the Stool Pigeon understood what he was seeing on the TV show “M*A*S*H.” Living amid squalid, insane conditions, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce and his cohorts didn’t just use that still in the Swamp to make alcohol, a toxic chemical substance to be gagged down like medicine to ease the pain. No, they maintained a fiction that whatever garbage came out of that contraption was actually gin, and they used it to make what they called martinis. They used cocktail ritual, however farcical, to assert their civilization in uncivilized surroundings.

Speaking of uncivilized surroundings, the Pigeon eventually moved on to one of Alabama’s institutions of higher learning. The day came when he felt the need to make an assertion of his own. He looked up the martini in a book and it seemed simple: Gin, vermouth, olive. He gathered the ingredients and made one and it was the worst thing he’d ever put in his mouth. He donated the gin to a friend and left the vermouth on an enemy’s doorstep.

“I’m pursuing my lifelong quest for the perfect, the absolutely driest martini to be found in this or any other world. And I think I may have hit upon the perfect formula … You pour six jiggers of gin and drink it while staring at a picture of Lorenzo Schwartz, the inventor of vermouth.”

— Hawkeye Pierce of “M*A*S*H”

Over the next couple of decades, he tried a couple of professionally-built martinis and remained unimpressed. Even if made with vodka, they tended to smell like varnish and taste like a hard slap in the chops. He assumed that the cult of the martini was just one of those masochistic things men do, like being avid runners or owning boats, where the participants voluntarily bring pain into their lives and then brag to each other about how good it feels.

But now, as he pondered the beginning of BW’s Cocktail Challenge, he knew it was time to man up. “M*A*S*H” is long gone; now “Mad Men” is the program that sets the tone for cocktail consumption. And the tone is brisk: The martini isn’t sign of civilization, so much as it is a mark that you’re ready to sit at the grownups’ table.

So he steeled himself and put his trust in the hands of a stranger: Karen Landry at the Bienville Club. She recommended a dirty martini; the Pigeon nodded and watched her make it. There didn’t seem to be much to it. But as with making sushi or applying tattoo ink, the art was in the doing. The difference between a disaster and a delight was purely a matter of finesse. And this dirty martini was a delight: It didn’t assault the nose or the tongue. It was potent, yet pleasant. Darned if it wasn’t something a man might look forward to.

What really baffled the Pigeon was that this martini was even starker than the basic recipe. It was just vodka, shaken over ice and then strained, and olive juice. It was all about the little things, Landry explained. For example, she drained the juice off actual olives, rather than just getting it from a jug. She put the juice in the glass first, so that it would mix thoroughly with the vodka as the liquor came in. And so on.

She learned her craft at the Crescent City School of Bartending more than a dozen years ago. She’d been in the medical-electronics business, but she wanted to learn a new trade, something portable, so that she could travel. What bartending school gave her, she said, was “that confidence, the first time I went behind a bar. I wasn’t like, ‘show me how to make this.’ They put you behind a bar, with bottles of water, and they make you work fast. … I wanted to be professional about it.”

She spent years at various location in Alaska, some upscale, some rustic, before coming back to the Gulf Coast to be closer to her grandchildren and other relatives. When she considers the state of cocktail culture in Mobile, she brings some context to the question. In New Orleans, the art of mixology is valued, even celebrated. (They just finished up over yonder with their annual Tales of the Cocktail, billed as “the world’s premier cocktail festival.”)

Landry confirmed the Pigeon’s impression that cocktail culture in Mobile suffers by comparison. People drink beer, wine, mixed drinks. It’s not that they’re opposed to anything fancier, it just tends not to be a big part of her work.

But she sees hope, she said: When she’s offered something special, people have usually been game to try it: mojitos, for example, or chocolate martinis, or homemade hurricanes.

Homemade hurricanes? The Stool Pigeon’s taste buds perked up. He’d never conceived of such a thing, he’s just thought of hurricanes as something ladled out of 55-gallon drums for Bourbon Street tourists. “They loved ‘em, I couldn’t keep enough of ‘em,” Landry said of the scratch version.

The bottom line: People appreciate the fact that quality ingredients, imagination and skill can make the difference between a meal and fine cuisine. It doesn’t take much to convince them that “it’s kind of the same thing with drinks.”

The Pigeon quizzed her closely about her martini. She was reasonably forthright about the difference between a good one and a bad one. “There’s not a lot that goes into it,” she said. “Make it with a lot of love.”

Here’s where the Stool Pigeon plays dirty. He’s told you how good Landry’s martini is. Now he tells you that you can’t have it. The Bienville Club has closed for renovations. You’ll just have to wait.

There are purists who say that by the time you’ve switched from gin to vodka you’ve already committed a martini travesty. Those people need to quit reading right now. Because here’s where the Stool Pigeon shifts to the other end of the spectrum, where anything that comes in a martini glass is a martini.

Send us your recommendations for great drinks and bartenders on the Gulf Coast:

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The Pigeon’s next stop was the Royal Scam, where the menu touts eleven specialty martinis, running $8.50 apiece. Some of them don’t contain vodka, gin, vermouth or olives. The Peppermint Patty, for example, uses Godiva chocolate liqueur, peppermint schnapps and cream, topped with a rack of cherries.

Behind the bar was Michelle Tallent, a Fairhope native who’s tended bar at several area venues over the last 14 years. Among her claims to fame: She’s the inventor of the Moon Pie Martinis that the Scam serves at Carnival time.

Those were out of season, so the Pigeon watched Tallent build a trio of fancy concoctions. In each case, the drink’s visual appeal was a big part of the attraction. The apple martini had a lovely clear green shade, with a rim frosted in sugar. It wasn’t destined to become one of the Pigeon’s personal favorites, but it was definitely interesting: Each sip started tart, thanks to the Sour Apple Pucker liqueur, then turned sweet thanks to the sugar on the rim.

Landry had hinted that women seemed more eager to try out new cocktails than men, and Tallent seconded that. “A lot of ladies get the martinis,” she said as she worked. “Some stick with the same thing, but a lot experiment. They’ll come in and get two or three different ones.” They’ll try the sweeter, frillier versions as desserts.

For the white chocolate version, she put a tracery of chocolate syrup inside the glass, then added a mix of vanilla vodka, Godiva white chocolate liqueur and cream. It sounds horribly rich, but the vanilla vodka cut the creaminess down to a moderate level. Not bad. And the chocolate gradually dissolved and smeared inside the glass as the drink sat there. Usually it’s the drinker who gets blurrier as time passes. How neat is that?

Last up was the flirtini: vodka, raspberry liqueur, triple sec, sweet sour mix, pineapple juice and a dollop of champagne floating on top. It’s hard to be macho when you’re holding a drink with so much fruit on the rim that the glass wants to tilt sideways in your hand. But when you got right down to it, the taste wasn’t that different from sangria.

It had all been very frou-frou. But the Stool Pigeon didn’t feel any less manly for having tried a few new things.

He left the Scam with a smile on his face, having learned Tallent’s “dirty” little secret: If she’s making one for herself, she said, Grey Goose and olive juice are all she needs.

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