RIDE LIKE THE WYND

  

I know my readers are a cool lot, so I expect many of you are familiar with Viktor Wynd, he of the Last Tuesday Society, his museum of curiosities – skeletons, taxidermy, (separate) jars containing Amy Winehouse’s and Kylie Minogue’s poo; and much else besides.  And then there's his Absinthe Parlour.

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

You may also be familiar with food and drink funsters Bompas and Parr, who are equally cool in a somewhat different way.  That’s Sam Bompas below on the right:

 

And lately there’s been a collaboration, possibly a convergence, between Wynd, Bompas and Parr.  The Absinthe Parlour currently has a display celebrating the book Cabarets of Death by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.  

 

And as part of the celebration Bompas and Parr have curated a Cabinets of Death cocktail menu.  Which looks like this:

The list only contains 4 cocktails and one of them - Divine Nectar - is a mocktail so inevitably we gave that a miss, but there are a couple of real winners.

 

Below is the Captain of Death – the name refers to tuberculosis.  The drink contains Devil’s Botany Chocolate Absinthe Liqueur, Bourbon, Gold Rum, Barberry and Wild Thyme Syrup, and Clove Bitters.

pic by Caroline Gannon

I didn’t even know that chocolate absinthe was a thing – and it was very good.  But even better was the Eternal Nothingness - Devil’s Botany London Absinthe, Tequila Blanco. Sour Apple Cordial, Lime Juice, Green Apple Maggots (Green apple ‘maggots’ are in fact ‘popping boba pearls’  It looked like this:

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

Now we all know it’s easy to overcomplicate a cocktail and this sounded very complicated indeed, but it worked. You could taste all the ingredients but the drink was much more than the sum of its parts, even if I could probably have done without the maggots.

 

Also on the menu was Flames of Hellfire, which we gave a miss, largely because we wanted to be able to walk rather than crawl out of the bar.

 

Absinthe of course is made from wormwood – which I grow erratically and only semi-successfully in my own garden, by which I mean it either grows out of control all over the path or it looks like it’s about to die. 

 

And in the ‘live and learn’ department I only recently discovered that although wormwood is an ancient plant, it didn’t grow in the Garden of Eden until after all that business with the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall of Mankind and so on.  Wormwood only appeared after God had cursed the serpent (or whatever the creature was at that stage while it still had legs) and made him crawl upon his belly out into the world beyond.  Wormwood grew along the track where the serpent had slithered.  Who wouldn’t want to make a drink from an ingredient  like that?

 

CHOWING DOWN WITH THE GREEN FAIRY

 You know I’ve always been interested in how the owners of restaurants decide what name to give to their establishments.  And for years I’ve been walking past a restaurant with the inscrutable name No Tomatoes, an Indian café in a mini- mall on Beverley Boulevard.

Why would you call a restaurant No Tomatoes?  Why would you choose that name as opposed to, say, No Partridges, or No Bull’s Pizzles.  I’ll probably never know.

I walked past it again a couple of days ago.  It was first thing in the morning and I was on my way to an appointment.  It was early and the place wasn’t open yet, but it looked as though it was still in business.  They had even, it appeared, recently taken a delivery of large amounts of tomato. Wha?

But what really caught my eye on the menu displayed in the window was the naan ‘wich – not an especially exotic or difficult thing to make – just curried vegetables and chicken wrapped in naan - but since I’d never had one, I decided it’d buy one on my way home after the appointment.

Back I went, at about 11.30.  There were tables outside the restaurant, the front door was open, and as I stepped inside I could smell the sweet rising scent of curry, and see food sitting in warming trays.  And behind the counter there was a harassed looking man, obviously Latino rather than Indian, who said, harshly, “Closed.  No more open.”

I wasn’t quite sure what that meant.  Did it mean maybe that he was getting things ready and the food wasn’t hot yet but he’d be opening later?  Or had there been some sudden disaster, a power cut maybe?  It did look a bit gloomy in there.  I tried to ask for more details, but the guy repeated, a little louder this time, “Closed.  No more open.”  Well, I can take a hint.

So I headed home, and decided I’d go into the local supermarket on the way, and buy something for lunch.  In I went and, blow me down, they had a salami flavored with absinthe!!!  I couldn’t resist any more that you’d have been able to.

 Man that was a good salami.  I tried to convince myself that I could taste the absinthe and maybe I could, but it really wasn’t the full on Green Fairy experience. 

But I could definitely taste the hatch chiles, very hot but not burning, and there was something gorgeously rich and greasy about the whole thing. 

Probably it was better than a No Tomatoes naan ‘wich would have been, but having looked on Yelp it seems that No Tomatoes is closed permanently, so I suppose I’ll never know.  But that still leaves a few unanswered questions.  Why was the name still up, why was the menu still in the window, why were their tables outside, why was there food in the heating trays inside, and why had they bought so many tomatoes?  Somebody out there possibly knows.  Here’s a picture from Yelp that shows what I missed: