Tag: breakfast restaurants

I wake up to the searing pain in my right foot, the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Worse than the time I broke my back after plummeting 16ft from a cricket practice net, worse than when a rusty nail, jutting out from a rickety armchair, bored into my soft infant arm and worse than any grief from my teeth over the years. I switch on the light, gently remove the covers and discover an angry red lump, the size and shape of a golf ball, pulsing on the big toe of my right foot. I have no idea how this happened. It’s like I’ve been sucked into a cartoon overnight, and Daffy Duck has whacked me with an Acme hammer.

In my non-expert opinion, the toe looks broken. I think I should go to a hospital, but I reason that the NHS is too busy and what can they do about a broken toe except say “you have a broken toe” and send me on my way with crutches and painkillers. Also, I’m too lazy. In fact, that’s the real reason I don’t go; the NHS bit was to make me look good in your eyes. Soz.

Anyway, after much lazy and desperate calls to the hotel I’m staying at, a kindly receptionist collects some crutches from an Argos next door and delivers them to my room. Somehow, I manage to collect my effects and hobble with my new sticks to Euston station.

When I return home, my mum torpedoes my plan to just let the toe heal itself. She tells me my foot could be sore and disfigured for life, or I could end up like Bob Marley, who, she says, famously dismissed a sore toe and died of cancer soon after. The Marley story inspired enough sense of peril in me, and I let Mum drop me off at the Royal Oldham hospital.

After a surprisingly short wait in A&E, I get to tell a triage nurse about the mystery. “Do you think I knocked it during the night?” I ask her, hopefully. The nurse glances at my toe, “No, it’s gout,” she says. “Gout!?” I say. “That’s right,” she says, a bit too gleefully, as she taps away on her desktop keyboard. I don’t believe it. Gout is a condition I associate with elderly rich gluttons or ancient bigamist Tudors, but apparently I’ve managed to cram a lifetime of greed into just 35 years.

Gout occurs because the kidneys can no longer efficiently filter uric acid out of the body. The acid eventually crystallizes in the joints and can lead to severe inflammation.

All the nice things in life can trigger it: foods rich in purines – chemical compounds that form uric acid when metabolized – such as red meat, seafood, booze and cake. It’s why it’s called the rich man’s disease because, for centuries, only a king like Henry VIII could afford to live like that. Now, anyone with a Just Eat app can order their way to an early death. Or, at least, a very painful foot.

If I don’t want this to happen again, I have to quit almost everything I like, and it’s high time, too. This shouldn’t be too difficult, as I don’t dislike healthy food, but cooking is something I did in the noughties when I was skint, long before I could get a meal with just my fingertips. I don’t even have to hand over cash any more; all I have to do is raise my head slightly from my cushion like a tardy tortoise poking its head from its shell, make eye contact with my camera and facial recognition does the rest.

If only it was as simple as switching to healthy food, though. It turns out that oily fish such as sardines and mackerel – universally recognized as being good for your heart due to all the omega-3 they have – may as well be hydrofluoric acid for my gouty kidneys. The fact that red meat and offal risk causing flare-ups is not surprising, but broccoli, spinach? It turns out that even these superfoods can lead to crutches.

I’m doing all right, though. This was the wake-up call I needed. At least the first major warning was an excruciating toe rather than feeling like an elephant had sat on my chest.

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The Creole Cocktail is not the most famous drink to come out of New Orleans—probably because, despite the name, it didn’t originate there at all. “I’ve never really treated that cocktail as part of the New Orleans canon,” says Neal Bodenheimer, author of Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em. “The Creole Cocktail,” he notes, “was an ode to New Orleans by an outsider.” That outsider was Hugo Ensslin, a German immigrant to New York whose relative obscurity during his lifetime failed to presage the legacy of his self-published Recipes for Mixed Drinks.

Originally a stirred, equal-parts mixture of rye and sweet vermouth with small measures of Bénédictine and Amer Picon, plus a lemon twist, the Creole Cocktail reflects both its birthplace—New York—as well as the city that inspired it. It is, in essence, a modified Manhattan in the style of that drink’s earliest decades, before it became more whiskey-forward and ditched the liqueurs and syrups. One could speculate that the French origin of both of the Creole Cocktail’s supporting liqueurs is the reason for the nod to New Orleans.

When Ben Hatch was beverage director at The Elysian Bar in New Orleans’ Hotel Peter and Paul, he was on the hunt for a lesser-known template associated with the city that he could make his own. One of the bartenders on staff told him about the Creole Cocktail, describing it as a cross between an Old-Fashioned and a Manhattan. Hatch was intrigued.

The recipe development process begins with one of Hatch’s favorite American whiskeys: Stellum Rye. He describes the barrel-proof expression as having a silky mouthfeel with “amped up” spice notes. Because his aim was to showcase the rye, he opted for a stepped ratio that departs from the original, with rye in the top slot at one and a half ounces, followed by an ounce of vermouth, a half-ounce of one liqueur and just a quarter-ounce of the next.

For the vermouth, Hatch wanted something super light, so as not to distract from the rye. He reached for Bèrto Ross da Travaj, a Piedmontese vermouth that, he notes, isn’t too “inky” (sweet, heavy and vanilla-forward), but has a subtle herbaceous profile.

The choice of the first liqueur felt obvious to Hatch. Amer Picon was not available in the US, but he knew he wanted to use a similar product. The China-China Bigallet is a common substitution for Picon, as it has the original ABV of the pre-Prohibition French digestif (40 percent) and similarly features a classic bitter orange profile with spice and vegetal notes.

When it came to choosing the second liqueur, Hatch, an amaro fanatic, forwent the Bénédictine and worked an Italian digestivo into the recipe—a choice that makes sense considering the influence Italian culture had in New Orleans. After some deliberation, he settled on Amaro Lys, from the Valle d’Aosta producer Alpe. “I like the heathered honey notes that Bénédictine has, but I think those are showcased better in this amaro,” he explains. Hatch also appreciates the amaro’s dried Alpine herb notes, gentian-forward bitterness and what he describes as “chew”—referring to the product’s pleasant combination of viscosity and bitterness. To finish the drink, Hatch serves it up with an orange twist, rather than the brighter lemon called for in the original recipe.

What began as a quest to find a spirit-forward New Orleans drink beyond the expected Sazerac or Vieux Carré ended up becoming an ode to Hatch’s favorite Alpine producers, resulting in a drink with a deep sense of terroir, effectively taking the drinker on a virtual trip from the French Alps, near Grenoble, through Torino and up to the Valle d’Aosta.

Hatch’s Creole Cocktail makes the case that authenticity of origin isn’t a prerequisite for entry into the New Orleans canon. The bitter, Alpine take on the northern drink reflects many changes to cocktail culture that have come down in the century since it was born, including an emphasis on the base spirit in Manhattan-style drinks, as well as the outsize influence of amaro.

Though some may see this interpretation of the Creole Cocktail as an ideal cold-weather nightcap (and it is), Hatch says that, in a town where Sazeracs are a perennial standard, this drink sells well year-round. “New Orleans is such a boozy town that people aren’t afraid to pull up a bar stool when it’s 110 degrees outside,” he says. “They order a very spirit-forward cocktail like this and enjoy it just as much.”