House-pickled cocktail onions and orange juice à la minute have made the contemporary barfly more sophisticated than ever, but also more demanding. Drinks must be diluted just so, the choice of ingredients exact — and it all has to be done now, now, now. Many hotel bars, like those at the Ace and the Mystic, are leading the charge, which has only furthered public perception of the hotel-room minibar as an outdated amenity: Why settle for a rum and Coke when a perfectly mixed mojito is just an elevator ride away?
The Ace Downtown LA’s solution: bottled cocktails served straight to the room, starting today. The brainchild of Jud Mongell, the proprietor of the hotel’s LA Chapter restaurant (and the perennially popular Five Leaves in Brooklyn), the new program adjusts the hotel’s recipes for classic cocktails so they can be mass-produced for busy or crowd-averse guests. Naturally, shaken drinks like the daiquiri or the margarita are a no-go (they’d lose their aeration waiting to be served), but the Manhattan and the Negroni, among others, are fair game.
Bottled cocktails may seem a bit 1880s for some drinkers, and no assembly line will ever replace the bartender. But big names in the industry, like Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Dave Arnold, have become famous for uncompromising batch-made cocktails; and the distiller Rob Cooper has found success on liquor-store shelves with his Slow & Low Rock and Rye, which mixes rye whiskey with rock candy, citrus and bitter herbs. While the Ace doesn’t currently have plans to completely do away with minibars, their days may be numbered.
Below is the Ace Hotel’s recipe for batch Negronis, enough to serve eight.
Batch Negroni
8 oz. Campari
8 oz. Carpano Antica Formula Sweet Vermouth
8 oz. Water
.5 oz. Regan’s Orange Bitters
1. Place ingredients into a large, non-reactive container. Stir well, but be careful not to agitate; you don’t want bubbles.
2. Pour into a screw-top or flip-top resealable bottle. A clean wine bottle and a cork will do just fine as well. Cap and refrigerate (but don’t freeze!).
3. To serve, simply pour 4 oz. of the cocktail into rocks glass filled with ice.
4. Express an orange peel over the top of the drink and rub the skin side of the peel around the rim of each glass, if desired.
