Hidden inside Chicago’s bustling tropical bar Three Dots and a Sprint, the Bamboo Room is an oasis that feels just like the adults-only pool at a seaside resort. It’s intimate and complicated, and its smaller scale provides the chance for cocktails to be delivered in a means that’s as novel because the bar’s bespoke glassware.
As a hideaway devoted to celebrating the huge variety of rum and rum cocktails, the Bamboo Room presents a powerful choice of greater than 300 expressions of the spirit. Equally expansive is the bar’s method to drink growth: Making use of modernist methods to basic tropical recipes, they create an expertise that’s each acquainted and engaging. Take the Banana Daiquiri 2.0, for instance, the most recent iteration of a beloved drink that balances a rum mix with lime acid, banana cordial and “banana snow.”
Kevin Beary, beverage director on the Bamboo Room and Three Dots and a Sprint, says the bar has been “pushing the bounds on banana cocktails” for years. Nevertheless, he laments the difficulties of incorporating ripe banana into drinks due to its starchiness. Many banana liqueurs in the marketplace, alternatively, “style of candied or flambé banana, not contemporary banana,” in keeping with Beary. To avoid these shortcomings, he makes use of centrifugal clarification, which creates a much less mucky banana ingredient, whereas nonetheless tasting just like the contemporary fruit, to star in his newest rendition of the basic flavored Daiquiri.
Beary begins by mixing bananas right into a purée earlier than treating them with pectinase and amylase to interrupt down the fruit’s starch into easy sugars, priming the ingredient to yield a greater banana juice. The purée is run by means of a centrifuge at a excessive velocity to separate the fruit’s solids from its clarified juice. Beary combines among the juice with white sugar to make a banana cordial; the sweetener replaces easy syrup within the Daiquiri. The remainder of the juice turns into a “banana snow,” which is used because the cocktail’s dilution. To make the snow, Beary blends one half banana juice with one half filtered water, freezes the liquid right into a block, and shaves shards of banana ice right into a coupe glass utilizing a kakigori ice shaver.
The rum for the Daiquiri is a mix of Actual McCoy 3-year and Rum Bar overproof for a punchy sprint of tropical flavors like overripe banana and pineapple. Lastly, “lime acid” (a mix of citric and malic acid powders combined in water) and saline answer assist spherical out the drink, which Beary says was “finicky to steadiness.”
As a substitute of merely shaking the components, Beary opts for a extra bespoke serve, one which feels at residence on the revolutionary Bamboo Room bar. The liquid components are mixed and poured right into a slender, hand-blown glass within the form of a banana, which friends can, a lot to their pleasure, use to decant the drink right into a banana snow–crammed coupe. Lastly, to complete the layered bitter, the bar serves it with a facet of freeze-dried banana, toasted coconut and macadamia nuts sourced from Chicago’s purveyor of effective and uncommon components, Uncommon Tea Cellar.
Altogether, it’s a crowd-pleasing Daiquiri with panache—one which marries a cheeky presentation with an elevated taste profile, excellent for the modern tropical escape. Or, as Beary places it: “It’s a lightweight and refreshing banana monster.”
