Veggies in your Vodka

What if you could solve the two big challenges of summer vacation – too many cocktails, not enough healthy eating – at the same time? Introducing the salad cocktail, a drink that comes packed with so many delicious veggies, it might as well be a salad. The cocktail engineers at bars and restaurants around the world are coming up with all kinds of ingenious ways to deliver serious veggie nutrients in the form of booze. So go ahead, order another round. You’re on holiday. And don’t worry, cocktails starring these ingredients count as a salad in our book.

RED AND GOLDEN BEETS

Cocktails don’t get much more ambitious than the Nazca Lines drink at Dirty Habit in Washington, DC. It’s made with a new brandy-like spirit called Singani 63, and it features sweet red and yellow beets, along with fresh strawberry and black pepper. Never mind salad: this delicious, nutrientpacked cocktail is like an entire lunch. And if you’re sitting at the bar idly while you sip the drink, ask where its name comes from. Short answer: Nazca Lines are designs in the sand, created thousands of years ago in a Peruvian desert and still visible from the sky.

CARROTS AND CHILI PEPPERS

The Convert cocktail has a lot going for it in the veggie department. Not only does it feature sweet carrots and mildly spicy poblano chili peppers, but it also has a base of Amaro Montenegro, a 135-year-old Italian spirit whose secret recipe involves 40 plantbased ingredients. Try the Convert at the Cambridge, Massachusetts restaurant Alden and Harlow, just off Harvard Square.

FENNEL

The sophisticated, licorice-like taste of fennel delivers a flavor punch everywhere it shows up, and that includes cocktails. At London’s Artesian Bar, fennel makes an appearance in a new cocktail called That Moment When You Discovered Who You Were, where it adds its veggie powers to the blend of premium vodka, prosecco, mango and gentian herb. Will the drink help you discover your identity? We can’t vouch for that, but at least it will make you feel like a grown-up.

JAPANESE YAM

Leave it to a Tokyo bar to create some of the most subtle and imaginative cocktails on the planet. At Gen Yamamoto, you can order a tasting menu of omakase-style cocktails, and the bartender will create a stunning procession of drinks based on seasonal vegetables and fruits. One drink you might come across features Japanese yam, a sweet-potato-like root vegetable, warmed up and mixed with the distilled spirit shochu and topped with a shower of grated dark chocolate. Come back another night, and you might taste a drink made with fava beans or tomatoes or spicy wasabi.

PARSLEY, TARRAGON AND CHERVIL

In the United States, parsley is typically used just as garnish – which seems unfair to an ingredient that deserves its own starring role, as tabbouleh makes eminently clear. But at the new Existing Conditions bar in New York City, parsley adds a key flavor component to one of the boldest cocktails on the menu, the Fines Green, a brandy sour made with Armagnac, green chartreuse, lemon and simple syrup, and showcasing the tastes of parsley, tarragon and chervil. The bartenders freeze the herbs using liquid nitrogen, then crush and muddle them into the cocktail. It’s an herb-centric drink that not only looks green. It tastes green too.

Words Salma Abdelnour