The Bar
Visited 8/24/2019 @ 7pm.
The Drink
Treme Zombie. Haitian/Jamaican/Puerto Rican rums, falernum, passionola, herbsaint, lime. $10.
The zombie cocktail
was spawned out of the famous tiki craze of the postwar years, being invented simultaneously with the Mai Tai and a good deal of other rum-based cocktails, though I am still a bit fuzzy on how exactly the Caribbean-derived liquor rum came to be associated with the general vibe of the Pacific South Seas. Besides Trader Vic's, Don the Beachcomber was the other major bar chain of that movement, and as it happens Donn Beach pioneered the use of one of the ingredients: passionola, AKA
fassionola, is a passion fruit syrup that you'll be familiar with if you've ever had a hurricane, as it gives it that sweet taste and, in large does, that uniquely threatening bright red hue. This is perfectly appropriate because as it happens Lefty's is a New Orleans-themed bar (hence the
name of the drink), and so in addition to including rums from several locations familiar to that major port city, some of the other ingredients are indigenous as well. Falernum is a syrupy rum-based
Caribbean liqueur, and I wasn't very familiar with
herbsaint before, but it's one of the many anise-derived liqueurs, first invented as an alternative to absinthe, and now the official variant is another product under the loving embrace of the Sazerac Company. The bartender was very excited about recommending this drink, and though any drink similar to a Hurricane is guaranteed to alarm my incipient hangover precognitive spider-sense, I did enjoy its sweet liquorice taste.
The Crew
Travis, Kathryn, Neil, Aaron.
Notes
The Arrive East Hotel is one of the newer major developments in this part of town. Happily for me, it has not one, not two, but three separate bars in it, which makes tackling multiple bars in one night extremely convenient. Lefty's is one of the two ground floor options, a New Orleans-themed joint that was highly touted for its Cajun/Asian fusion food, which I unfortunately did not sample but looked pretty awesome. There's a stone-walled interior part that opens onto an enclosed courtyard with seating and standing room. The
garage doors by the entrance are a nod to the building's past, as a bike shop once operated here, and which was
itself a repurposing of a 100 year-old warehouse. So there's lots of history that, as always, you the patron are perfectly welcome to ignore as you prowl around sipping your drink. I don't have a strong opinion on the conversion of the warehouse to a hotel (though I did read a
cringeworthy interview with some of the principals where they refer to themselves as "hospitality disruptors"), but I can say that Lefty's was really nice. After we drank, it was up the stairs to the second stop of the night - a gin bar!
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