nocino manhattan – as advertised, made with housemade nocino. tastes like a manhattan up front with walnuts on the finish. awesome.

i figured out (took me long enough) another solution: sober up before driving. bring a computer, find wifi.

last night jp encouraged me to go cocktailing (i must be particularly mopey and pouty these days); i obliged, as obliging is my default behavior of late. and so i finally made it back to pizzaiolo. cate whalen was in the house, yay. i drank the following:
– italian 75 (gin, lemon, lemon verbena, aperol, prosecco)
– mai tai (rum, cointreau, lime, orgeat, mint garnish)
– martinez (rye, vermouth, maraschino, orange bitters) [note: online recipes say this is usually made with gin. coulda been. i can't remember.]

the italian 75 was really delicious. champagne cocktails bring to mind so many terrible mimosas so i often avoid them. but: can champagne cocktails be made simply by adding champage to a good regular-cocktail (with maybe a minor adjustment for very sweet or very dry champagnes)? colin macdougall served me a champagne cocktail with bourbon, whiskey bitters and apple liqueur which rocked the fn sockhouse. but it could have stood on its own without the bubbles.

the mai tai was great…the orgeat was lighter and more aromatic than–and far superior to–mine; possibly because of the use of apricot kernels instead of almonds.

cate chose the martinez as a pairing for pizza. though i shy away from spirit-heavy drinks like this (they scare me and often taste like cough syrup), this was a good choice to cut through the oil and cheese and tomato.

observing cate’s customer interaction made me think of david at west restaurant, for their similarities as well as their differences. they both have a high level of engagement (more so than most other bars and bartenders, maybe owing in part to a relatively small seating area), but are stylistically opposite. david is a maestro: mannered, deliberate, didactic, encyclopedic. his bar is a master class on alchemy. cate, on the other hand, is more like a peer, a chat-pal. her bar is like hanging out around a kitchen island with some of her other (cooler-than-you) friends. neither is better than the other, just different, and worthy of admiration.

addendum: from 530-645 bar seating was pretty readily available. by the time i left, at 7p, it was a madhouse inside and out.

the brown butter ended up in little clumps, i guess that should be of no surprise to anyone with a basic understanding of food chemistry, or life. maybe i should have mixed it into the orgeat, somehow.

i don’t taste raisin at all, and the brown butter only a little. but the brown butterness is nice, greasy clumping aside. so, something will have to be done about this.