A New Ice Age Dawns for the Slushy Drink

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/dining/a-new-ice-age-dawns-for-the-slushy-drink.html

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As Etan Fraiman and David Shapiro were envisioning Battery Harris, their new bar and restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mr. Fraiman hit upon the idea of installing a slushy machine to produce frozen drinks. What easier way to telegraph the idea that here was a fun place that didn’t take itself too seriously?

Trouble was, Saul Ranella, their cocktail director, did take himself kind of seriously. He had a solid background in craft cocktails, including stints creating the bar programs for La Mar Cebichería Peruana restaurants in San Francisco and New York.

“I always thought of frozen machines as kind of trashy, to be honest,” he said.

That was then. Today, Mr. Ranella is looking forward to getting a second slushy machine, and is campaigning for a third. He concocts a toasted five-spice ginger reduction for his frozen Dark and Stormy. He boils down large batches of purple corn, pineapple skins, allspice, apples, cloves, oranges, grapefruit, green apple and other ingredients, and combines them with sugar, lime and passion-fruit juice, rum and pisco for a frozen version of a Peruvian beverage called chicha morada, which the bar has named the Purple Harris.

“It’s kind a blast to me that this is coming out of my mouth,” said Mr. Ranella, smiling like a kid with a favorite new toy. “If you had asked me six months ago if I would have been stoked on a frozen machine, I would have said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

It helps that the icy drinks, which cost $10 to $13, sell like hot cakes. On a recent Saturday night, Battery Harris went through 36 liters of slushies. And an increasing number of New York bars have brought frozen drinks in from the cold and given them a place on the menu, including Mother’s Ruin in NoLIta, the Tippler in Chelsea and Nights and Weekends in Williamsburg.

“The other night, I think we had one person drinking a beer,” said Dan Sabo, a partner at Nights and Weekends, which offers two different daily slushies. “Otherwise, it was all frozen drinks.”

Today’s mixologists have become deft at rehabilitating the more embarrassing chapters of drinking history. In the last few years, the once musty, corny tiki drink has been restored to its vibrant 1930s self. Now, it seems, redemption has arrived for the louche frozen drink, which in the late 20th century all but ruined the reputation of the daiquiri and margarita as serious cocktails.

“I’ve noticed, as a general trend with highbrow cocktail bars, that that level of precision and care is getting infused into everything,” said John deBary, the bar manager at Momofuku, which was ahead of the curve when it began serving well-rendered frozen drinks in 2009 at the Noodle Bar. “Even if it’s a lowbrow concept, you’ll still find highbrow execution.”

When T. J. Lynch and his partners at Mother’s Ruin bought a slushy machine in 2011, they thought they would use it to whip up ice cream and sorbet, trotting it out for drink duty only at Sunday brunch, when diners’ drinking habits aren’t as discriminating. “But then we came to our senses,” Mr. Lynch said, “because we realized how much fun it was and the crazy things we could throw in it.”

Mother’s Ruin now has a slushy of the day, and it’s often the best-selling drink in the house. Rotating recipes include a frozen white sangria with nectarines and cardamom, and a concoction using rhubarb, gin, lemon, Aperol and orange-blossom water. At Donna in Williamsburg, the beverage director Jeremy Oertel plans to feed the bar’s new machine with frosty versions of his Bitter Mai Tai, a Campari-based twist of the classic tiki drink, and the Brancolada, a piña colada variation shot through with the herbal Italian bitter Brancamenta.

Another proud new slushy machine owner is Drumbar, a slick cocktail lounge atop the Raffaello Hotel in Chicago. “A lot of people enjoy the juxtaposition of having a childish drink in a sophisticated atmosphere,” said Craig Schoettler, the beverage director.

Slushy drinks are more than just a summer fling. When the Tippler, a cocktail bar under Chelsea Market, opened its doors in the fall of 2011 with a frozen drink on the menu (the bar calls them “lushies,” while Battery Harris uses the term “frozies”), its cocktail creator, Tad Carducci of Tippling Brothers, expected they would stay until temperatures dipped, then be replaced with something more warming. “When we pulled them from the menu in November, we caused a mini-revolt among our regulars,” he said. “We immediately put them back on and served them throughout the winter.”

The roots of their renewed popularity are not hard to trace. The drinks are fun. (As Mr. Carducci observed, “There is nothing cerebral about them.”) And these 21st-century versions taste a lot better than the neon-colored creations served during the days of disco.

“When I first started, you had a big blender behind the bar,” Mr. Sabo said. “You poured in a bunch of rum, grabbed daiquiri mix and dumped that in, grabbed a bunch of ice and dumped that in and blended it up and poured it. Now, these are properly measured, large-batch cocktails.”

Slushies hold an additional appeal for bartenders beyond high sales and a source of playful invention. Once the machines are loaded, they make for light labor.

“From a bartender’s point of view, they’re a dream,” Mr. Sabo said. “We get kind of spoiled. When winter comes and people start asking for cocktails, we begin to think back to summer, when all you had to do was pull a hand crank.”