#120: The Last Straw

The Bar

The Last Straw. 1914 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 9/7/18 @ 9pm.

UPDATE: The Last Straw has closed.

The Drink

Mai Tai. House rum medley (Rhum JM, Hamilton Jamaican Black, El Dorado 8 year), dry curaçao, orgeat, lime. $6.

I had been served a Mai Tai at COLLiDE atx, but naturally a more tiki-inclined establishment's version of the modern classic was always going to be more elaborate (check out the awesome carved wooden drinking vessel) and more in keeping with the official recipe. That means curaçao, which the other rendition lacked. This version has dry curaçao, which turns out to deserve its own historical tangent. Curaçao is named after the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao where it was first distilled. Like most liqueurs it's made with fruit, in this case specifically with laraha oranges, a bitter variant of Valencia oranges from Spain, which are in turn descended from wherever in Southeast Asia the first ancient citron reared its mighty head. Dry curaçao, however, draws on techniques pioneered in Burgundy to modify the recipe, using a different starting basis for the spirit and flavor profile development. Curaçao is the same thing as triple sec (the "sec" means "dry" as in "dessicate"), so you can think of dry curaçao as a dry Caribbean liqueur made from a variant of Spanish oranges made even drier by way of France. It's globalism at its best, and while the average joe like yours truly might only get a hint of the rich web of world-spanning connections among the various rum flavors and orgeat, it's the attention to detail and commitment to the experience that separates a top-tier Mai Tai like this one from less-successful attempts. I didn't even mention all the fancy rums they use, which you unfortunately can't really taste distinctly. or maybe I was just too busy admiring the cup.

The Crew

Aaron, Kyle, Travis, Geoff.

Notes

It's a shame that Chicon did not last longer in this space, since they had one of the best cocktail menus on East Sixth. But no matter, their replacement is quite good on its own. The Last Straw is not quite a tiki bar, but it's about as tiki-adjacent as you'll find on Sixth Street. They've redone the interior, so it's got an extremely colorful tropical interior that's inviting by day and still convivial at night, when the entire joint is bathed in crimson. Red glow at night, drinkers' delight! It actually somewhat reminded me of a late night on the Drag, in one of the coffee shops with similarly unusual lighting conducive to maintaining your night vision. It's all the better to see what you're drinking, as all of their drinks come in neat little tiki/Hawaiian/tropical delivery vehicles, possibly for immediate Instagram production but also because it looks fun. Everything about this place is seemingly designed for a good time - how can you hate owners who designed a cocktail to drink while watching Caddyshack? They have an extensive food menu (though oddly it's a Mexican-themed menu rather than anything tropical), but we didn't sample any of it.