Daily Archives: May 9, 2009

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BOTW–Blue Apron

Blue Apron

Last week Mrs. Flannestad and I had the pleasure of traveling up to Napa for a long weekend.  We were celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary, so we decided to do it up a bit.  I even left work a bit early so we could make our dinner reservation at Ad Hoc in Yountville.

Ad Hoc is a restaurant concept from Thomas Keller & Co, of French Laundry fame.  Like the French Laundry, it only offers one menu a day.  Also, like the French Laundry, it sources much of it’s produce and supplies locally.  It is, however, a much less formal, and somewhat cheaper, restaurant than the French Laundry.

The two highlights of the meal were a salad of fava beans, haricot verte, and small lettuces from the French Laundry Garden and a bottle of Blue Apron Ale.

Blue Apron, so the story goes, was created for Mr. Keller’s New York outpost Per Se.  They asked Brooklyn Brewing to make them a special batch of beer as a special gift for their investors to celebrate some anniversary or another.   However, Brooklyn Brewing couldn’t make just 30 bottles, they had to do a whole batch.  Per Se didn’t really know what to do with the leftover beer, as it is a very upscale restaurant, so they shipped the remainder out to their more casual outpost, Ad Hoc.

As the label below states, it is a delightful Belgian-Style Brown Ale.  We found it a very nice accompaniment to both our salad, described above, and main course of roasted pork tenderloin.

Blue Apron Back Label

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Odd McIntyre Cocktail

Odd McIntyre Cocktail

Odd McIntyre Cocktail.

1/4 Glass Lemon Juice. (3/4 oz Lemon Juice)
1/4 Glass Kina Lillet. (3/4 oz Underhill Kina Clone)
1/4 Glass Cointreau. (3/4 oz Cointreau)
1/4 Glass Brandy. (3/4 oz Dudongon Cognac)

Shake well and strain into cocktail glass.

Third time we’ve made this exact cocktail. Previously we’ve known it as the “Frank Sullivan” and “Hoop La!“.  It still is a Corpse Reviver No. 2, with Brandy instead of Gin, and no Absinthe.

It is still an enjoyable, if not amazing, cocktail.

To quote from the Wikipedia:

Oscar Odd McIntyre (February 18, 1884, Plattsburg, Missouri – February 14, 1938, New York City, New York) was a famed New York newspaper columnist of the 1920s and 1930s. The Washington Post once described his column as “the letter from New York read by millions because it never lost the human, homefolk flavor of a letter from a friend.”

For a quarter of a century, his daily column, “New York Day by Day,” was published in more than 500 newspapers.

As regards cocktails, Mr. McIntyre was one of the founding members, along with Harry McElhone, of the I.B.F. or International Bar Flies, an organization started as a press stunt at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris some time around Christmas of 1924.  See the Mud Puddle books edition of Harry and Wynn’s “Barflies and Cocktails” for more information regarding that institution.

This post is one in a series documenting my ongoing effort to make all of the cocktails in the Savoy Cocktail Book, starting at the first, Abbey, and ending at the last, Zed.