Cure for the Common Cocktail

“I didn’t want to write an ego book, or be just the next bar to release a bar book,” says Neal Bodenheimer, co-founder of several New Orleans bars and restaurants, including Cure and Val’s (both on Freret St.), and Cane & Table and Peychaud’s (both in the French Quarter).

But he did write a book: Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em, co-authored with Emily Timberlake. It was published this fall, with the title borrowed from Bodenheimer’s flagship bar, which opened in 2009 and won the James Beard award for the nation’s outstanding bar program in 2018.

His book is a wide-ranging journey through two parallel histories — those of New Orleans’ relationship with cocktails and the history of the craft cocktail movement over the last two decades.

Bodenheimer studied history in college, and he felt it important that this book reflect the city’s long and fabled links with liquor, as well as provide context for the more modern cocktail culture. (The subtitle is a riff on Stanley Clisby Arthur’s 1938 Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em.) Along with recipes from more than decade of cocktail creativity at his bars, it features brief essays on drinks that played key roles in New Orleans history, such as the mint julep and the Ojen cocktail. And he gives a nod to many of the city’s historic bars, such as the Carousel Lounge, Arnaud’s, and Tujague’s.

His book is equally about the cocktail revival that began in the early 2000s. It was a national renaissance, but had special resonance in New Orleans, where a good drink had never been wholly displaced by light beer or white wine spritzers. “We are preservationists,” Bodenheimer says. “People here were still making classic cocktails.”

Bodenheimer himself has deep roots in New Orleans — his forebears came to New Orleans around 1900. He left New Orleans for about a decade — college in Texas, followed by a New York City stint working in bars and restaurants. After Hurricane Katrina, he resolved to return home and be part of the rebuilding.

Once home, he discovered that a handful of folks around town were already mining the past when it came to cocktails: Paul Gustings at Tujague’s, Chris McMillian at the Library Bar at the Ritz Carlton, Chris Hannah at Arnaud’s, Danny Valdez and Ricky Gomez at Commander’s Palace. … There was a lot of good energy — Marvin

Allen was doing his thing at the Carousel Bar, and Alan Walter was doing a lot at Iris. It was fertile.”

He partnered with childhood friend Matt Kohnke with the idea of opening their own bar. They stumbled upon a former firehouse that had most recently been an electrician’s shop on Freret St. “It was a dump,” he says, and at the time the rundown street didn’t seem the most promising spot for a high-end cocktail bar. But the pair took the chance, bought the building, and started tearing it up, returning it to the basics. “In New Orleans, it’s all addition by subtraction,” he says.

In 2017, he took another step to preserve and expand New Orleans cocktail culture when he partnered with the Solomon family to acquire Tales of the Cocktail, an annual, international convention of craft bartenders, liquor companies, and other cocktail experts. “It’s one of those events that has really helped create a love for New Orleans from people around the world,” he says.

Much the same might be said of his new book. Visit curenola.com/book to order a copy of Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em, or visit Cure on Freret Street and pick up a copy. Also available in bookstores.