“But when they try it,” Cabrera says, “they fall in love. His customers are perhaps hesitant to order a rum drink that fails to fraternize with lime. Cabrera admits that it’s not one of his top sellers. His choice of curaçao is Pierre Ferrand.Įl Presidente is a cocktail that thrives in obscurity, invariably pleased when an adventurous toper discovers it. His ultimate preference was for Banks 7, a blend of rums from an array of countries, and either Comoz or Dolin Blanc Vermouth de Chambéry. Cabrera experimented with a variety of vermouths and rums. Here, bartending virtuoso Constantino Ribalaigua Vert perfected the drink’s proportions and established it as a classic. Later, the addition of curaçao liqueur gave the cocktail a subtle citrus note, and by the 1930s, it had become a mainstay at El Floridita, Havana’s high temple of Cuban quaffing. However, it was also the moment of Prohibition in the United States, in an era when presidents believed public actions conveyed private meaning. This was obviously a moment of peak presidentiality.
It was notable enough that when President Calvin Coolidge visited Havana in 1928, Cuba’s president offered him one at the presidential palace.
It consisted of equal parts rum and vermouth, with a dash of grenadine. The drink is said to have first been concocted in Cuba around 1913, and was named in honor of President Mario García Menocal. “It is the aristocrat of cocktails,” wrote the impeccably named Basil Woon in his impeccably titled 1928 book, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba. Instead of wearing a backward baseball cap and lurching disconcertingly at a beach party, here was rum in a top hat dancing on my tabletop with the grace of Fred Astaire. If you like, well notify you by email if this restaurant joins. I first sipped an El Presidente fifteen years ago, in Havana, at a sidewalk café across from a vendor selling postcards of Che Guevara. Unfortunately, this restaurant is not on the OpenTable reservation network.
0 kommentar(er)
