When a drink is flavored with a bunch of ingredients that have seemingly never been assembled before, I have to sigh; novelty is no guarantee of goodness. This happened recently when I saw cilantro, chocolate, tequila, black olive, and lemon combined into a cocktail called Always Daring at 53 AD, a tasting room and bar from Empirical, the spirits-maker that recently relocated its distillery headquarters from Copenhagen to Bushwick.
I still ordered the drink, and the weirdness paid off, first appearing to be rather normal in a rocks glass with an extra-large ice cube garnished with a single, chocolate-covered olive. The cilantro note was strong and green, like a spritz of cologne, but playful with the tequila and lemon, offering an interesting counterpoint to the aromatic chocolate liqueur, while the salinity of the black-olive brine tied all of the flavors together, as salt is wont to do. The drink was tangy, tart, and salty. The most refreshing part may have been the $16 price, which qualifies as a bargain these days.
Head bartender Giancarlo Quiroz Jesus conceptualized the recipe as a sort of dirty martini that drinks like a margarita, something where the added saltiness makes you crave another sip, calling it “quite moreish.” As the base, it uses Empirical Spirits’ latest release, a cilantro spirit that, when tasted plain, captures the aromatic experience of sniffing freshly misted herbs from a supermarket shelf. Empirical’s cilantro shows up elsewhere in a highball with yuzu and lime soda, and as a shot alongside some verdita and a Monopolio beer.
Lars Williams started Empirical in 2017 after eight years running Noma’s research and development division, intending to make spirits with the same curiosity toward flavor creation and new technology in an industry in which history and tradition tend to dominate. “We designed a still that could do the distillation at room temperature, essentially,” Williams says, allowing him to “capture the most delicate and volatile flavor compounds, which you typically associate as aromas or smells.” It’s why the cilantro tastes fresh instead of cooked, and why their Doritos spirit — the viral hit that came out last year — is so true to the experience of opening a bag of nacho chips.
While Empirical hosted tastings before, a full bar is a new enterprise. They want 53 AD — “53” for the address on Scott Avenue; AD for “after dark” — to function as a showroom, but it’s clear that a lot of thought when into the drinks, all of which (regrettably?) have names that can be abbreviated with “AD”:
The goal is still to educate people and show off uses for the Empirical range, but “at the end of the day, we are a bar,” says Jesus. The Always Disco mixes a sorghum spirit, Soka, with clementines and cold brew before it’s clarified like a milk punch with a technique that employs silken tofu. The Always Domini, their answer to the martini, gets a bit of heat from Ayuuk, a pasilla-chile spirit, and manzanilla sherry for complexity. For something more refreshing, the Always Demure is a carbonated highball with peach and a finishing spritz of tomato essence. It tastes like the best alcoholic iced tea you’ve ever had.
Another part of the menu lists “hero serves,” classic drinks revamped with Empirical’s products, like a coffee negroni made with a plum spirit evocative of amaretto, which also shows up in “the plum and cola” highball, a drink that takes advantage of each ingredient’s spice. Jesus also has his sights set on making more cocktail components from scratch, like the apricot cordial used in the Always Deceptive, which he created by lacto-fermenting — pickling, in essence — end-of-season summer fruit and mixing it with Soka and Greenpoint’s Hana Makgeolli. The drink is both delicious and a bit of branding. “If it wasn’t for Noma,” Jesus says, “a lot of bartenders wouldn’t know what lacto-fermentation was.”
