No. 6
Show Off
THE SPARE ROOM AT THE HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT, LOS ANGELES, USA
Created by Yael Vengroff
INGREDIENTS
45 ml (1½ fl oz) Yola mezcal
25 ml (¾ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice
25 ml (¾ fl oz) mango purée (ideally Boiron or Perfect Purée)
15 ml (½ fl oz) Giffard Abricot du Roussillon apricot liqueur
7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) Campari
7.5 ml (¼ fl oz) cane syrup (2 parts organic cane sugar to 1 part water)
Chilli Salt*, to garnish
1 lime wheel and wedge, to garnish
*For the Chilli Salt:
1 teaspoon Tajin chilli and lime seasoning
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon sugar
METHOD
Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Fill a saucer with the chilli salt mixture and rub the lime edge around half of the rim of a rocks glass. Dip the rim of the glass into the chilli salt. Fill the glass with ice, then strain the cocktail into the glass. Garnish with the lime wheel.
Unless you’re planted in a red booth at Musso & Frank Grill, retro Hollywood glitz can feel elusive in today’s sprawling LA. But, walk out of that restaurant dating from 1919 and some ten minutes across Hollywood Boulevard, past the 1920s movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and there is The Hollywood Roosevelt, a hotel where you can easily imagine a dewy Marilyn Monroe reclining on a lounge chair.
In 1929, when the property was just two years old, the first-ever Academy Awards was held here in the form of a small, private dinner. The celebrities, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who once resided in what is now the rooftop penthouse, never stopped coming. That dizzying spirit, reflected through a contemporary lens, is what permeates The Spare Room, where pals share bowls of Nanu Nanu punch (Pierre Ferrand Cognac, apricot, rooibos tea, spiced pineapple, lemon and Domaine Chandon sparkling wine) before hitting the vintage two-lane bowling alley.
Spend the day against a backdrop of palm trees at the Tropicana Pool, graced with an underwater mural painted by David Hockney, then end it playing dominoes, snug on one of The Spare Room’s sofas with a potato vodka and carrot-dill brine ‘Salt and Vinegar Martini’. It’s the kind of carefree, off-set living that bygone stars would surely approve of.
No. 7
Esperanto
THE HAWTHORNE AT HOTEL COMMONWEALTH, BOSTON, USA
Created by Jackson Cannon
INGREDIENTS
60 ml (2 fl oz) Del Maguey Crema de Mezcal
25 ml (¾ fl oz) La Cigarrera Manzanilla sherry
15 ml (½ fl oz) Carpano Antica vermouth
1 dash of Regans’ orange bitters
1 pared strip of lemon zest
METHOD
Add all the ingredients except the lemon zest to a mixing glass filled with ice and stir. Strain into a chilled double old fashioned glass, twist the lemon zest over the drink to express the oils, then discard.
Lucky are the folks who, after seeing a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, need only walk a few minutes over to Kenmore Square to spend the night at Hotel Commonwealth. If they’re die-hard fans, they’ll likely make their way up to the 65-square-metre (700-square-foot) suite chock-full of baseball mementos. Yet there are so many others who flock here, with nary a thought of sport nor sleep, just to drink in The Hawthorne bar.
In what feels like an arty friend’s living room, with plenty of cushy seating that seamlessly mingles zebra print with bright orange, they reach for a ‘Bookmark’ listing the evening’s cocktails – maybe a demure mid-century Champagne ‘Air Mail’, or maybe a ‘Grand Tour’ with El Tesoro reposado tequila, Amontillado sherry, pineapple and lime.
The Hawthorne opened in 2011, courtesy of tireless bartender Jackson Cannon – a well-travelled, music-loving booze scholar, who first cemented the city’s reputation for exalted cocktails at Eastern Standard back in 2005. Also inside Hotel Commonwealth, this boisterous brasserie is where you’ll find oyster-gorging regulars asking for banana daiquiris and rum old fashioneds. Consider the understated Hawthorne, then, an evolution of Cannon’s mission to enlighten.
SPOTLIGHT:
DAVID ROCKWELL
the connection between hospitality design and performing arts
ONE EPHEMERAL EVENING
Rockwell Group’s portfolio of projects is vast, including restaurants, hotels, retail and products. The New York-based architecture and design practice, launched in 1984 by David Rockwell, is also renowned for its theatre work, imagining sets for Broadway hits such as She Loves Me and Kinky Boots. For Rockwell – as he explains here – the connection between the realms of hospitality and performing arts is a fierce one. Hotel bars, for example, and the sweeping stage, are both propelled by a sense of transience, allowing the designer to create magic over and over again.
Design is our filter to examine the world, and it informs everything that we do. Often, the lines between mediums and spaces aren’t as rigid as we might think. Theatre and hospitality, for example, are intertwined in many ways, and this symbiotic relationship really drives our work. Just as with a performance, we approach everything we design from a place of narrative. We are telling a story and crafting a point of view; a unique world that’s specific to the project. In both cases, you are exploring temporal structures, lighting, emotional connection and heightening the atmosphere for impact. We always ask ourselves at the beginning of a project, ‘What is the story we are telling?’ and the answer to that question informs every choice we make thereafter.
At Moxy Chelsea hotel in New York, for example, the story of the flower district weaves a powerful impression on the three amenities we designed. It’s a modern fusion of botanically-inspired elements and Italian Futurism. The Fleur Room, an intimate rooftop bar on the 35th floor of the hotel, is one of my favourite spaces. An extruding bronze bar, recalling the chic precision of intimate bars found in Rome or Milan, contrasts floral accents such as inverted resin cones glowing with imbedded bouquets. These design choices may never be consciously recognised by many who encounter the space, but that doesn’t mean they won’t play on
