With so many flavorful spirits at their disposal, it’s easy to see why a bartender would overlook vodka on the backbar. The spirit, defined by the U.S. government as “neutral alcohol,” has long been the butt of bartender jokes. But whatever the U.S. government, or some 2009-era topknot-sporting, bowtie-wearing, insecure rookie bartender (yes, I do mean my 27-year-old self) might think, vodka is not completely useless.
Darryl Chan, bar director for Little Fino in Brooklyn, New York, deftly deploys vodka in the Strega Drop, a riff on a perhaps unfairly maligned Lemon Drop. “I hate saying it,” he says of the drink, a holdover from the ’tinis era, “but it’s a guilty pleasure.”
Traditionally made with vodka, lemon juice, triple sec and simple syrup, the Lemon Drop is, from a structural perspective, basically a vodka Sidecar. Chan, however, rebuilds the Lemon Drop into what he calls the Strega Drop by first swapping out the traditional triple sec for Strega, an Italian liqueur flavored with dozens of herbal ingredients such as saffron, cinnamon and mint. He then supplements the lemon juice with yuzu plus a lemon-lime cordial, all in the service of throwing in “a bit more angles” than the classic Lemon Drop has.
When reimagining an aromatically and structurally simple drink like the Lemon Drop into a more elaborate concoction, there is always the risk of doing too much and ending up with an indistinct soup that’s less than the sum of its parts. Chan finds that sometimes this more-is-more approach leads to elements canceling each other out. He avoids this with a shrewd inclusion of just a half-ounce of vodka. “To be honest, the vodka didn’t come into play until a bit later on when I was like, All right, this just needs some more backbone. We need this to hit a little bit harder.”
As for what kind of vodka is best suited to this drink, Chan advises something “neutral, middle of the road.” And that’s precisely the point: In a drink like the Strega Drop, vodka is critical because of its neutrality. An aspect of the spirit that many see as a liability is actually its strength, the way Chan applies it. Here, vodka gives the drink’s other ingredients room to express themselves without compromising texture or throwing off aromatic balance.
Back when I was just starting out as a bartender, the cocktail community carried itself with a bit more seriousness than it does now. I saw this as part of the broader effort to establish the credibility of the profession. With that credibility comfortably established, however, the bar world has once again embraced the playful drinks of the so-called dark ages—something that Chan is happy to see. Drinks like the Lemon Drop have “made a lot of people happy,” Chan says. “I don’t want to shy away from them.”
