Chris Hannah has all the time been a taciturn “heads-down” bartender, the alternative of a garrulous “heads-up” bartender. Visitors at his New Orleans bar aren’t more likely to get any silver-tongued banter concerning the problems with the day. When Hannah talks, it tends to be in his personal sideways language, which may resemble a Forties-inflected kind of Brooklyn argot. He wears classic garments. His favourite music dates to the phonograph period. He has three expressions: bemused, amused and aggravated. Usually these are on show abruptly.
But Hannah stands out as the most fluent bartender I’ve ever encountered in terms of the language of drinks, particularly basic cocktails. When he arrived in New Orleans in 2004, he dropped off his résumé at a handful of bars across the French Quarter, however targeted on people who had been round for a half-century or extra. Fortunately, he discovered a house at Arnaud’s French 75 Bar (opened 1918), with its vintage mahogany backbar, quarter-sized white tiles and sepia patina of cigar smoke (smoking was banned in 2015).
Arnaud’s was the right perch for Hannah to discover the drinks that made New Orleans well-known. He researched and perfected native favorites, such because the Ojen Suissesse, Roffignac and Brandy Crusta. The bar was compact, had a restricted palette of liquors and scant room to prep fancy garnishes. So his cocktail model was lean by each alternative and circumstance. When he compounded his personal drinks, they have been constructed on a sturdy basis of time-tested classics.
That applies to the Bywater, which Hannah created at Arnaud’s in 2007. The drink is basically a distant Southern cousin to the Brooklyn Cocktail, which itself dates to 1908. The unique drink was a mix of rye, candy vermouth, Amer Picon and maraschino liqueur, making it a extra assertive, elaborate and Continental model of a Manhattan.
The Brooklyn was rediscovered within the aughts, whereupon it spawned a sequence of whiskey-based spinoffs named after New York neighborhoods. The primary was the Pink Hook, created by Vincenzo Errico of Milk & Honey in 2004. Over the subsequent 5 years got here the flood: the Bensonhurst from Chad Solomon at Pegu Membership, the Cobble Hill from Sam Ross at Milk & Honey, the Bushwick from Phil Ward at Dying & Co. and The Slope from Julie Reiner at Clover Membership.
“Everyone was doing their very own neighborhood,” Hannah says. “All of the individuals who began the New York scene have been doing it, and I needed to do the identical down right here.”
It made sense to increase this to New Orleans—a metropolis the place the native accent sounds extra like Brooklyn than Savannah. Hannah regarded for inspiration within the Bywater, a neighborhood that was a 20-minute stroll downriver from the French Quarter. It’s a former working-class neighborhood unfold alongside the riverfront, as soon as populated by stevedores tending to an unlimited community of close by wharves and warehouses.
When the delivery trade went to containers and moved elsewhere, cottages within the Bywater have been purchased and restored by musicians, artists, shopkeepers and others, and painted in shiny, garish colours. “New Orleans is commonly described because the Caribbean’s northernmost metropolis,” Hannah says, and the Bywater’s structure is closely influenced by the islands.
To mirror that affect, Hannah swapped out the whiskey for rum. He added falernum, a conventional Caribbean liqueur with prime notes of allspice, lime and ginger. As a substitute of vermouth, he opted for Averna—“amaro has extra physique than vermouth,” Hannah notes. The amaro supplied a definite tang of orange peel, one other staple of the South and a tip of the hat to the orange-heavy Amer Picon within the Brooklyn.
To make it extra herbally assertive, he added a scant half-ounce of inexperienced Chartreuse, which acts extra like a backup singer than a diva. It’s additionally a nod to one more Brooklyn neighborhood variation, the Greenpoint, created by Michael McIlroy, one other Milk & Honey alum.
The Bywater has emerged as greater than a regional curiosity. It appeared within the 2009 version of Meals + Wine Cocktails, compiled by Jim Meehan, and it began cropping up in different bars, some fairly distant. “I noticed it on the Teardrop Lounge [in Portland] in 2009,” Hannah says. And it’s appeared on cocktail lists in Boston, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Hannah says he’s seen it served in bars in Asia. Nevertheless it’s the drink’s hometown that will adore it essentially the most.
In 2019, Hannah left Arnaud’s to associate with a number of others and open his personal bar, Jewel of the South, just some blocks away. No shock: The cocktail menu there may be constructed round enduring classics, notably the Brandy Crusta, a pioneering New Orleans cocktail served on the long-gone Victorian-era saloon from which Jewel took its identify.
The Bywater at the moment may be discovered on menus round New Orleans—at Fives Bar on Jackson Sq., and at Manolito, the Cuban-inspired bar through which Hannah can be a associate. The place it doesn’t seem, nonetheless, is on the menu at Jewel of the South. (One other of Hannah’s fashionable classics, the Evening Tripper, does.) Possibly it’s modesty, perhaps it’s practicality in a time of Chartreuse shortages. Nonetheless, a few times per week a buyer is available in and asks for it. A drink made by its inventor, in a bar anchored deeply prior to now.
