If we’re to believe the origin story of the Negroni Sbagliato, we know that sometimes the best recipes are born from mistakes. Such is the case with Kirk Estopinal’s Search for Delicious, a drink that might never have come into existence if it weren’t for human error.
The story goes that Estopinal, the current co-owner of Cure and Cane & Table in New Orleans, was working with Stephen Cole at the Violet Hour in Chicago circa 2007. A few years later, after Estopinal had moved down South, Cole told him about a drink he had come up with called the Bitter Giuseppe, now a cult favorite in the amaro cocktail canon. “I wanted to try it, but as usual, oral history failed,” recalls Estopinal. His version, which makes a few minor departures from Cole’s recipe, became “basically an accidental reinterpretation due to bad memory.” The resulting “slightly different drink,” however, was a winner.
The Search for Delicious, which appears in Rogue Cocktails, the rule-breaking recipe book from Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak, builds off a base of Cynar, complemented by Punt e Mes, a splash of lemon juice, orange bitters and a pinch of salt. Like most things that seem simple on the surface, the Search for Delicious is undergirded by precision: 18 drops of lemon juice, six dashes of bitters, five swaths of lemon peel expressed over the surface of the drink. These measurements are not arbitrary, but exacting, and they serve as a reminder that familiar ingredients, when used in thoughtful, novel ways, can yield unexpected, downright delicious results.
The Search for Delicious has all the richness of a Manhattan layered with herbal complexity. Because of its low proof, I think of it as a weeknight-appropriate spin on the classic. But what keeps me coming back to the drink is, at least in part, the act of building it. With its precise measurements, the preparation becomes a ritual in its own right. “I love drinks that have process and ceremony to them,” says Estopinal. Around the time he published Rogue Cocktails, “the idea was swimming around to make drinks that were aggressive or over the top in one direction and try to balance them through light manipulation.” Here, the assertive bitterness of the drink’s constituent parts is cleverly tempered by a pinch of salt. The result, Estopinal says, is a “happy accident with some nerd concepts and a bit of pomp and circumstance.” For a nerd like me, it ticks all the boxes.
