CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - 7
COCKTAILS A–C - 10 An Aside: On Service, or The Maury Povich Puff Piece COCKTAILS D–F - 59 An Aside: Only in Dreams, or A Week (That No Longer Exists) at Twelve Mile Limit COCKTAILS G–I - 93 An Aside: Surface Tension COCKTAILS J–L - 112 An Aside: On the Possibility of Anti-Racist Bar Ownership COCKTAILS M–O - 140 An Aside: How Bars and Bartenders Can Help Fight Sexual Harassment and Assault COCKTAILS P–S - 181 An Aside: The Delicate Art of the Bum’s Rush COCKTAILS T–Z - 215 AFTERWORD - 237 GLOSSARY - 239 APPENDIX: THE COCKTAIL NAME PLAYLIST - 253 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - 254
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INTRODUCTION A Brief Q&A with the Author on Selection Criteria, Format, and Terminology
Hi! My name is Cole. I own a bar! It’s called Twelve Mile Limit, and it’s in New Orleans. We sell fancy cocktails, but we’re not all fancy about it. After all, there are more important things in life than fancy drinks. That being said, here is a big book filled with fancy drinks! Well, the book is filled with recipes for fancy drinks—it would have to be much bigger to be filled with drinks, and not made of this kind of paper, and shaped differently.
How’d you decide which drinks to include? All the cocktails that have appeared on the menu at Twelve Mile Limit, up through the time of this writing, are herein contained. We change the menu all the time, though, so by the time this book is on shelves there will have been many more. As such, this can never be a complete collection. You’ll just have to visit the bar to find the latest drinks. The cocktails from Twelve Mile Limit are accompanied by several from my tenure at the uptown bistro Coquette and a smattering from earlier in my career. A few that were created for contests and consultations have also made the cut. The cocktails have been arranged alphabetically because that’s the easiest way to sort them. Original recipes are my own unless otherwise noted. I apologize and volunteer for erotic flogging for any accidental omission of credit. Classic cocktails are included here if they are ordered often enough to warrant their own card in the recipe box we keep behind the bar, or, in the case of more obscure classics, if they’ve been featured on the menu. Little heed has been paid to historical accuracy or prevailing trends when deciding on a formulation for classic recipes; the versions here simply represent my personal preferences, the ones that I’d make for a guest at my bar unless otherwise directed. If a guest does not specify a preference for a cocktail that has many permutations, it can be assumed that they want your spin on that cocktail, and I am happy to oblige.
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Are these your “official” recipes? Sorta! Recipes are constantly in flux. Any given bartender may have their own preferred variation, so these recipes may or may not even be the ones used on any given night at Twelve Mile Limit. I don’t ask that all of my bartenders make every drink the exact same way that I do, as long as they have considered their approach. Please do not wave this book around claiming that your drink has been made WRONG. (That’s just, like, your opinion, man.) This is not gospel, even in the bar from which it hails.
Do I need to be a mixologist to use this book? Spoiler alert: You are a mixologist! Have you ever combined two different sodas from a soda fountain? Mixology! Have you ever prepared salad dressing, even from a mix? Mixology! Have you ever taken two bars of soap and mashed them together to form one big bar? Mixology! If you’ve taken any time to combine any flavors for any purpose, then you’re a mixologist. That said, while I like to use the term more broadly, the more common usage is to describe someone who professionally creates cocktail recipes. In this professional sphere, I do not use the words “bartender” and “mixologist” interchangeably. A bartender prepares drinks (and generally oversees a bar), while a mixologist develops new drinks. The best bartenders are usually pretty good mixologists, and vice versa. If the bartender making your drink self-identifies as a mixologist, though, beware: they are usually just a slow bartender with an elevated sense of their own importance. Oh, to actually answer the question: No, you do not need to be a professional mixologist or bartender to use this book. Most of the techniques described here should be accessible to a layperson.
What will I find in each entry? The format for each entry includes a brief history or anecdote about the drink, often including the rationale behind the name. (After some time, naming drinks becomes more difficult than creating them.) The recipe, basic instructions for preparation, and any explanatory notes follow. Not sure about an ingredient? The glossary includes information on all alcoholic ingredients and recipes for house-made components, which are mostly syrups. Name brands are listed when I perceive no direct substitute, or when the cocktail was created for a contest or other promotional event.
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Instructions will be kept brief, so here’s a quick how-to: •
TYPE OF PREP: Mostly “stirred,” “shaken,”
mouthfeel and flavor sensitivity—but the
or “built.” Unless otherwise noted, drinks are
differences are mostly negligible. My drinks
stirred with ice in a mixing glass or shaken with
are almost all served in a rocks glass (shorter
ice in a cocktail shaker and then strained into
and wider), a collins glass (taller and narrower),
a fresh glass. A drink that is “built” just has its
a chilled mason jar, a flute, or, simply, up. If a
ingredients added to a glass, then it is iced and
drink is served up, use either a coupe or Martini
served—no further action is required. There are
glass. (We use coupes at Twelve Mile Limit.) I
a few other variations on these techniques, but
also refer to an Old Fashioned glass, but exclu-
most drinks will fall into one of those three prep
sively when calling for a Sazerac prep. By Old
types.
Fashioned glass, I simply mean a rocks glass that tapers a bit and has dimples in the side.
• There is a specific “Sazerac prep” that •
involves prechilling an Old Fashioned glass
TYPE OF ICE: Options will be limited to
or mason jar, coating the inside with an
“crushed,” “rocks” (ice from a standard restau-
aromatic spirit or liqueur and discarding the
rant or bar ice machine, home ice maker, or ice
excess, and then pouring a stirred drink into
tray), or “big ice rock” (a single, large piece of
the prepared glass. There’s also a “French 75
ice from a mold or special tray, chipped from a
prep,” which involves shaking all the ingredi-
block, or from a super fancy ice machine).
ents except a carbonated one, straining into •
a glass, and topping with the fizzy stuff.
TYPE OF GARNISH: I don’t usually go fancy with my garnish game, preferring ease instead.
•
TYPE OF GLASS: To be candid, a drink will
Most garnishes used in these recipes are fruit
basically taste the same no matter what you
wedges, “wheels” (circular cross-section slices
serve it in. There are some exceptions—surface
of citrus), or peels. Occasionally more obscure
area affects aroma, glass temperature affects
produce will be called for.
What else do you have in here? In addition to the recipes, I’ve included several essays on service philosophy, cocktail science, and a range of other topics. My hope is to explore the emotional landscape of bar ownership as much as the practical and logistical elements, and to do so in a way that is simultaneously illuminating to professionals and engaging to the casual reader. Let me know how I did. Anyhow, without further ado, let’s get to the drinks!
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The Baudin Oh, the Baudin. I could live a hundred years and might never invent a better drink. It’s primal—it tastes like a drink that has always existed and was just waiting to be discovered. I laughed out loud the first time I tasted it, and I count it as a great privilege to have stumbled upon it. Of course, leave it to me to create a million-dollar cocktail and then give it a name that is borderline unpronounceable. For the record: Boh (rhymes with slow)-din, bow (as in wow!)-din, and baw (like slaw)-din are all acceptable, as is the traditional French pronunciation (boh-DA). The cocktail is named for the cross street that runs along the length of the bar (we’re at the corner of Baudin and Telemachus), and as with many a New Orleans street, there are probably a dozen acceptable pronunciations. Just don’t say it like “boudin” (pronounced boo-dan)—that’s a sausage. The street itself is named for the French naturalist, explorer, and hydrographer1 Nicolas Baudin, a fact I learned years after having settled on it as a cocktail name. This was something of a relief, given this city’s one-time propensity for christening streets for heroes of the Confederacy. (For the record, I’m glad we were ahead of the curve on taking down those statues, even though there’s still a long way to go. It makes me proud to be a New Orleanian.)
1.5 oz bourbon .75 oz honey syrup .5 oz lemon juice 1 dash Tabasco Lemon peel, for garnish
Shake ingredients with ice, strain into a rocks glass, and top with fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon peel.
1 I’m not entirely sure what this word means. 19
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NOTES: I usually dress drinks served over regular ice with a straw, but I prefer not to with the Baudin. Lingering spice on the drinker’s lips is part of the effect. Recently, I’ve been trying to break the habit of using straws at all because of the earth. To that end, at Twelve Mile Limit we’ve switched to compostable bioplastic straws, and they’re mostly given on request. I take it as a point of pride that the Baudin has started popping up on other bar and restaurant cocktail lists, even one as far afield as Los Angeles. I suppose I would rather be asked first, which isn’t usually the case, but if one aspires to create a “classic” cocktail I don’t recommend fighting its free proliferation. Nobody asks if they can put a Cosmopolitan on their cocktail list—they just treat it like something that’s always existed. People stealing this drink for their menus is a high compliment. A restaurant uptown even put the Baudin on their list with tequila instead of bourbon and agave nectar instead of honey. It still works, and it’s a sign that the drink is truly starting to take on a life of its own, becoming, like the Negroni, more a style or template than a single cocktail. True success for me will be if people are arguing over the “right” way to make the Baudin a century from now. The cocktail was originally formulated with Louisiana brand hot sauce before I settled on Tabasco. Any hot sauce in this vinegar-based style (including Crystal and Cajun Chef) could work, but Tabasco, in addition to being the most widely available, is barrel aged, which gives it more nuance than some of its competitors. They all have slightly different recipes, though, so adjust to your palate if you’re using an alternative. Hot sauce is a big deal in New Orleans. Having just moved here to do a volunteer year with AmeriCorps, I recall being struck when visiting a homeless shelter that all of the tables in the cafeteria had hot sauce on them. All of them. In New Orleans, even people experiencing homelessness are entitled to flavorful food. Tony Bennett once sang this line about Capital City, but it applies even more aptly to New Orleans: “It’s the type of town that makes a bum feel like a king/And it makes a king feel like some nutty, cuckoo, super-king.”
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Belle Fleur I made an early version of the Belle Fleur when I was working at Commander’s Palace, the centuries-old haute creole restaurant in New Orleans’s Garden District. Commander’s has garnered great and well-deserved renown over many years and also happens to be where I landed my first serious bartending gig. I sat on the recipe for a while and ended up putting it on my first cocktail list as head bartender of Coquette, which is right down the street from Commander’s. There it stayed, along with the Bailout (see page 14) and Le Rêve (see page 187), for the entire time I ran their program. As one of my first forays into professional cocktail creation, the Belle Fleur bears the hallmarks of an inexperienced mixologist: a little too sweet, all fruit flavors, not especially complex. That having been said, it’s delicious and fairly cost effective, and a well-planned cocktail menu (outside of only the most esoteric bars) should feature a good, accessible vodka drink. It’s the only spirit that many patrons are comfortable with, and as such it can be a great way to bring people into the world of cocktails. If you don’t have an easy vodka drink, a lot of people won’t try your cocktails at all.
1.5 oz orange vodka .5 oz Calvados .5 oz PAMA Pomegranate Liqueur .5 oz sour mix 1 oz Moscato d’Asti Orange peel, for garnish
French 75 prep! Shake ingredients (except Moscato) with ice, then strain into a chilled flute. Top with Moscato. Garnish with an orange peel.
NOTES: Named for an ex whose middle name is Belle, the whole name translates to “pretty flower,” which is particularly cheesy. There’s another trick to naming cocktails: a simple phrase can sound really classy in a foreign language. We made our own flavored vodka at Coquette while I was there (this one was infused with orange peel), but if I were to make this drink today, I would use a commercially produced version and save myself the trouble.
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City Park City Park in New Orleans is awesome. It has eight-hundred-year-old live oak trees. Chef Chris got married at the Peristyle there. The New Orleans Museum of Art is there, in all its glory. It has a golf course, a mini golf course, and a disc golf course, plus a small train, a softball quad, a soccer stadium, and a dog park. And a school. And botanical gardens. And a sculpture garden. And there are wild hogs there, and alligators. Seriously, it’s rad. More than the specific City Park of New Orleans, though, this cocktail is named in honor of all urban green spaces.
1.5 oz Crystal Head Vodka .75 oz maraschino liqueur .5 oz Rainwater Madeira .25 oz Branca Menta .5 oz lemon juice Lemon wheel, for garnish
Shake ingredients with ice, then strain and serve up. Garnish with a lemon wheel.
NOTES: Crystal Head Vodka is owned in part by Dan Aykroyd, comes in a clear, skull-shaped bottle, and is “filtered” by pouring the liquid over magic crystals before bottling. It’s truly the Indiana Jones 4 of vodkas. (Just kidding. It’s pretty good.) I call for Crystal Head here because they were the sponsor brand for the event where I debuted this cocktail, but pretty much any unflavored vodka will do the trick.
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AN ASIDE:
On Service, or The Maury Povich Puff Piece Well, then, now that we’re thirty or so drinks in, how about we take a little break to talk about something else. I, for one, have little interest in reading a book that’s basically a long string of recipes, so I hope to periodically insert a bit of advice on owning and managing a bar, to the extent that I am qualified to do so. For those who just want the recipes, feel free to skip ahead. For the rest, let’s take a moment to discuss service. At Twelve Mile Limit we have worked hard to earn our reputation for quality customer service. In the classic New Orleans fine dining style, we bend over backward to accommodate requests whenever possible, and we do it with pride and good humor. We strive to be, as one of our mottos dictates, “Classy as fuck,” or as they say on day one of training at Commander’s Palace, “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” We may have a chalkboard list of dumb fake porno titles on the wall
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(You, Me, and Everyone We Blow still makes me giggle, as does The Fast & The Curious), but we strive to treat each guest with honor and courtesy. The basic idea is this: Be nice and respectful to everyone all the time. Bars of all stripes—from dive bars, where the service is often surly, rude, and gruff, to fancy-pants cocktail bars, where the service is often condescending, pretentious, and inhospitable—routinely fail the basic test of niceness. I’ll admit I have an edge when it comes to being nice to everyone at the bar: I love them. Every single person who has ever spent time in my bar, I love you! You make all of this possible. You may be a complete asshole in every other way, but if you make the decision to come in to my bar off the street and give me a dollar, on at least one level you’re okay by me, and I respect your decisions. I let a shell-shocked Vietnam vet named Ernesto hang out at the bar for two years, even though he routinely shouted obscene, surreal threats at the staff and guests. I love and miss you Ernesto, and I’m sorry I eventually had to ban you from the bar. That being said, I may love you, but that doesn’t mean I have to like you. (Most parents should know what I mean here.) We try to treat everyone with respect, even people who don’t deserve it: people who are too drunk to know what they’re doing, for example, or those who think that, because they are going to tip you, they can do or say whatever the fuck they want. But God damn if it isn’t hard to be respectful to drunk assholes. (For the record, it is much easier to give good service to people who treat you well but fail to tip than it is to people who tip well but treat you like shit. That said, please tip.) My other advantage when it comes to being nice under adverse circumstances is that I have a true role model, a master of dispensing unearned respect: Maury Povich. I’ve been a fan of Maury since my undergraduate years, when a forgiving schedule allowed me ample time to develop an appreciation for the vast wasteland of daytime broadcast television. To this day, when I catch his program in some waiting room, I am struck by his uncanny ability to be nice and even respectful to utter, unabashed dicks. The subject matter of Maury’s talk show is admittedly indistinct from others that share the genre. Guests lament the hedonism of their out-of-control children. They reveal to their partners that they are secretly living a double life. Or, in what is probably the most frequent and popular of his themes, they submit their lovers to paternity tests. What separates Maury from the chaff, however, is his reluctance to project a false divide between himself and the guests he features on his program. Hosts of similar shows might lord over the proceedings like deranged ringmasters orchestrating elaborate, endless freakshows, or treat their guests more like cautionary tales than actual people, attempting to use every anecdote as a teachable moment. Maury does neither. He just adopts a sad look that says, “That sounds really hard,” and then offers some sort of honest, if obvious, advice, like, “Don’t you think you should be nicer to your mother?” Maury Povich is distinguished by his manners. Guests that have been accused of dishonesty, infidelity, abandoning their children, or worse are greeted the same way as their accusers and alleged
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victims: with courtesy and a willingness to hear their side of the story. How many of us do the same? He appears to leave judgment aside. His howling audience mirrors the knee-jerk, id-based reactions many of us have when we meet such alleged villains, but Povich’s onstage persona mirrors our better aspects, our capacity for fairness and understanding, our willingness to offer a second chance, or at least hear an explanation. I will concede that being the most palatable shock-jock daytime talk show host is a dubious honor at best, like being heralded as an unusually lovable serial killer. Indeed, there are some very real and powerful exploitative aspects to Mr. Povich’s oeuvre. While some of the people he interviews seem to be seeking any means possible to find their fifteen minutes of fame, many are there because they essentially have no choice, unable, for example, to afford a more private paternity test. Maury has been extensively criticized for crassly making millions of dollars pretending to care about their problems. One critic went so far as to call his show, “The worst thing on television . . . miles further down the commode than Jerry Springer.” His critics have a point. Maury, the program itself, can be difficult to defend. A call for potential guests, captured in a viral photo, reads, “Have you or someone in your family ever had sex on a religious icon in front of your dead child?” I’m not sure whether the photo was real or intended as a joke. It feels plausible, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is real, and if someone did call claiming to have engaged in the behavior described, you can be sure that they would wind up being prominently featured on the show. But ultimately, is the criticism valid? Or, at minimum, is it unique to this show? Maury may be exploiting his guests for financial gain, but aren’t we in the hospitality industry doing the same? At least he treats them like human beings. His sincerity may be feigned, but isn’t feigned sympathy better than none at all? I, for one, do not believe his sympathy to be false—the stories of his guests are often highly tragic—but even if it is an affectation, so what? Helping an impoverished single mother identify the biological father of her child is the right thing to do, and the venue, shameful as it may feel, allows him to give away what are otherwise expensive services. For those who (often repeatedly) fail to pinpoint the identity of their baby’s daddy, being sympathetic, even if you are only pretending to care, is far better than saying, “Look at this nincompoop,” or “How can you behave like this?” “That sounds really hard” is just about the most humane thing one could say. By this point, you may be wondering, What do Maury Povich and his attitude toward guests have to do with bartending? On some level, nothing, and I am sorry to have wasted your time. But more accurately: everything. Nobody should be surprised to learn that bartenders, like Maury Povich, often see people at their worst, help them process their miseries, and, occasionally, pick them up off the floor. People in bars are prone to pretty ridiculous behavior, in part due to drinking and in part due to the things that drive them to drink. And some of them are just assholes, but it is not a bartender’s place to
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judge. We’ve all been there, to a certain degree. All we can do is say, “Rough,” at least credibly pretend to care, and be nice and kind and respectful to everyone, all the time. (Of course, if someone being an asshole is ruining someone else’s night, by all means intervene, especially if they’re being abusive.) That having been said, as much as I take pride in my Povich-like attitude toward service, there are times when I have failed to live up to his example. At Coquette on the day of the Uptown Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in 2009, a trio of guests—a woman and two men—sat down at the bar for drinks well after the festivities had died down. It appeared that they had been drinking for some time already, but they were not so intoxicated as to deny them service. I have since forgotten what the men ordered, but the woman had one of our house cocktails, a Margarita variation with palm sugar syrup and a jalapeño infusion. After tasting it, she appeared dissatisfied, and I inquired what was wrong. She said that it tasted off, and it did. In hindsight, the jalapeño had over-infused and broken down, imparting an unpleasant vegetal flavor. As a replacement she ordered a beer, but she then refused to let the matter pass, going on for several minutes trying to parse exactly why the drink was so bad. I tried to be helpful and attentive, but she kept pushing buttons, and she crossed the line between rude and personally hurtful when she said, “It tastes like you peed in it.” While I had maintained my composure until then, I suppose she could tell that I was perturbed, and, in an attempt to make things better, she said, “Don’t get mad, it’s not like you invented the drink,” which, in fact, I had. To that I replied, “Oh, now that I think of it, I did pee in yours.” Then I walked away. When I returned to check on her and her party, I discovered that she had not received that comment well, so I took it upon myself to give her the beer free of charge, and explained that I had only been joking and that I had not actually urinated in her beverage, although by that point I almost wished I had. At least she tipped well. My point is, don’t be like me. Be like Maury Povich. Now, who wants a drink?
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AN ASIDE:
On the Possibility of Anti-Racist Bar Ownership Ten years ago, I bought a bar in a neighborhood that was, at the time, majority Black and lowermiddle class. Now houses in that same neighborhood, one of which I own, sell for three times what they did before I showed up, and the buyers increasingly look like me: young, white, and fairly well off. Throughout this transition, I’ve recognized that my stewardship of a century-old neighborhood bar has played a role in making that neighborhood look less and less like the one I moved into. For too long I’ve been content to largely throw my hands up, comfortable in the knowledge that at worst I’m only accelerating a transition that seems inevitable anyway. Recently, though, I feel more compelled to push back on that idea. I don’t want to be the reason that the neighbors I love can no longer live near the bar. At the same time, I know that by simply continuing to exist in this space I make the neighborhood more comfortable for other white people to inhabit. This comfort creates an upward trend in property values, raising rents and property taxes and making the neighborhood less livable for the people who were here before me. Are these forces completely intractable? Is it possible to be a gentrifying bar owner and an active anti-racist?
A Brief History of the Bar That Is Now Twelve Mile Limit and Its Neighborhood, MidCity Answering that question with any clarity first requires examining how we got here. And while this story is in some ways unique to my bar, other bars in New Orleans and around the country—often the trendiest bars in any town—have followed a similar trajectory. I assume many other white business owners and white residents in gentrifying neighborhoods struggle as I do with concerns about their roles. My understanding is that the building now occupied by Twelve Mile Limit was built as a neighborhood pumping station to drain water from previously uninhabitable swampland sometime in the early 1900s. Within a few years of the building’s construction, pumping technology had improved considerably, and soon fewer, larger, more centralized pumps became the norm for keeping low-lying areas dry. Buildings that housed the smaller local pumping stations transitioned to other uses. Mine became a bar. From the time it was settled through the middle of the twentieth century, this part of MidCity was predominantly white and middle class—a status enforced, likely violently, by redlining, the systematic exclusion of Black homebuyers from white neighborhoods. Then, in the late 50s and 60s, what had been a long wave of urban growth in New Orleans crested and began to roll back (as it did 130
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in cities across the country). White flight from urban centers to tonier suburbs was in part a reaction to the civil rights movement, integration of public schools, and broad racial fearmongering meant to sow further division and hate. Racist policies like redlining reinforced these trends. Jim Crow laws might have been officially tossed out in the mid-1960s, but a patchwork of formal and informal systems kept segregation alive and well, including the aforementioned discriminatory lending practices, law enforcement profiling, and racist land use policies, such as locating interstates and other infrastructure with the specific intent of disrupting Black communities while protecting and uplifting white ones. White residents largely fled to the suburbs or retreated to the older areas of Mid-City near City Park and Esplanade Ridge. Some white residents remained, but the bar’s immediate neighborhood became mostly Black, and as a result properties in the neighborhood lost a lot of their appraised value. (Banks routinely assign a lower price to otherwise identical properties in neighborhoods without many white people.) To the best of my knowledge, though, the bar was always white-owned. In the 1920s, it was known as a hangout for ballplayers. Patrons likely included notoriously heavy drinker Babe Ruth, as nearby Pelican Stadium was the spring training home to the New York Yankees at the time. In the 1950s, that stadium was torn down and replaced with one out by the airport, an early harbinger of the white exodus that would accelerate in coming years. I bought the bar from an older white man named Marlon, who had himself bought it in the 1990s explicitly as a way to extract money from low-income Black people via video poker. He grew up in Mid-City but had since moved to Metairie, a nearby suburb. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, New Orleans had already long been suffering from the slow-moving disaster of economic neglect and urban decline. Then levees that were supposed to protect the city failed, the pumping stations were abandoned, and all the neighborhoods that are below sea level (by that point some 80 percent of the city, geographically) flooded. The bar took on about six feet of water and was all but destroyed.
1. POLICY BECAUSE OF WHITE SUPREMACY, BEING WHITE GIVES YOU UNEARNED POWER. THAT POWER IS MAGNIFIED WHEN YOU OWN LAND OR A BUSINESS. USE YOUR POWER FOR GOOD.
In order to interrogate ways that I can push back against the forces of gentrification that I’ve been accelerating, I sat down over drinks on the patio at Twelve Mile Limit with Jenga Mwendo and Maxwell Ciardullo. Jenga is a Black native New Orleanian who has worked in equitable land use for over a decade through community gardens, community land trusts, and affordable housing 131
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development. Maxwell has lived in gentrifying neighborhoods as a white man, used his urban planning degree to study ways to push back against displacement, and has worked in the fair housing policy field for the past six years. Maxwell articulated three areas to focus on: public policies, internal choices, and organizations to support. Before beginning to address my questions, though, both had warnings for me as I embarked on this process. Jenga, from our earliest interactions, was critical of how I articulated my desire to be more “solution oriented.” As she points out, “The terminology of ‘solutions’ is troubling because it makes it seem like we can solve this problem by giving to this organization. We’ll cure racism if we just do this. ‘Me as an individual, I can fix it all by just doing this.’ But that’s not the case.” There are no easy answers for individuals. Instead, Jenga focuses on how we can collectively shape policy, saying, “If we’re not going to burn everything down and start over, if the revolution is not going to happen tomorrow, then the next best thing is to look at where we can change policy.” She cites Congress moving on a House bill that would empower a commission to study reparations as a good first step and one that people are beginning to discuss seriously for perhaps the first time. (Note to self: Call your senator.) A lot of policies, though, are made at the local level, and it’s there that a white local business owner might have real sway. From the earliest days of our republic, when only white male landowners were allowed to vote, the interests of men who were white and wealthy enough to own property were weighed as greater than the interests of those who weren’t. This systematized favoritism continues to the present. The prioritization of the needs of the white owner class conveys considerable privilege, which is problematic and undemocratic, but, as author and activist bell hooks has said, “What matters is what we do with privilege.” To reframe that in the parlance of Marvel Comics, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Should I have that outsize power? Absolutely not. But I do, so I have a moral obligation to use it for good. With that in mind, what sort of local policies should we support, what should we fight, and where are the access points? To start, Maxwell recommends: Get involved with your local neighborhood associations. Be that voice that speaks up and says, “We don’t need a security district with rent-a-cops running around with guns.” Mid-City already has a security district, but I could imagine the Bywater [where Maxwell lives and my other bar is located] trying to do that at some point, and as a business owner you have a stronger voice there than a lot of people. Part of me has long been aware of the inherent unfairness of neighborhood security districts, which partially privatize what should be a democratically accountable public good. In June 2020, quite recently as I write this, a private security guard shot and killed Carlos Carson, an unarmed Black motel guest in Tulsa, just a few days before a now-infamous presidential campaign rally, bringing these concerns even more to the forefront. Whether by empowering private security guards, who 132
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often face even less accountability than the police for similar actions, or by employing off- or on-duty police officers, clouding their loyalties and mandates, private security districts invite numerous ethical questions. On top of rightful concerns about fairness, there are also those of efficacy. In New Orleans, at least, studies have shown that private security districts are not effective at preventing violent crime, underscoring the twisted logic that leads to their perpetuation. Expanding our scope somewhat from the neighborhood level, Maxwell encourages people to speak up at city council meetings to help drive decisions that create more affordable housing, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods. (Remember, though, when you speak at neighborhood or citywide meetings, there’s a fine line between using your privilege to amplify Black voices and drowning them out. Don’t be silent, but tread lightly.) Creating affordable housing is one of the most important ways to keep residents from being priced out of a neighborhood. Conversely, it’s also one that often gets fought against the hardest. Speaking about a specific affordable housing development being proposed in the Bywater, Maxwell says, “There’s been concerted effort from mostly white neighbors against that, and a lot of businesses have also joined them.” I understand the fear of being seen as working against the wishes of local residents, but the crucial thing to remember is that members of a neighborhood organization are not always representative of that neighborhood. And so, that concern can lead to a silence on certain issues that runs counter to both my personal values and my business interests. From a strictly business perspective, as an owner of bars that strive to be approachable, affordable, and neighborhood oriented, I see having more residents in the neighborhood—at all income levels—as a way to bring in more potential customers. Politicians and residents alike often cite the “cultural economy” as one of the draws of “trendy” neighborhoods like the Bywater, or of cities like New Orleans in general. At the same time, though, when they fight against affordable housing, these very people show that they desire the benefits of Black culture but don’t value Black lives. “The only reason the Bywater is a ‘cool’ neighborhood to begin with is because it used to be a majority Black neighborhood, it had Black corner bars, it had musicians that lived there, it has architecture built by Black craftspeople, and it’s still coasting on that reputation,” Maxwell explains. Fighting for affordable housing, he says, “means showing support for the people who make New Orleans what it is.” Security districts and affordable housing are just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless proposals at the neighborhood and city level that are racist and contrary to both the business interests of the average bar owner and the interests of residents who don’t want to see their neighborhood get whitewashed. Increasing housing density for working-class residents, ensuring taxation and regulation of short-term home rentals, and fighting onerous surveillance laws are all policies that I’ve used my voice as a white business owner to shape, in hopes that they better align with both my economic interests and my personal values.
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Mantis The Mantis, a Twelve Mile Limit original, is like a Grasshopper in that it also has a mint liqueur component, and it is unlike a Grasshopper in practically every other way. If it had the chance, the Mantis would probably grab the Grasshopper in its pincers and devour it, thereby absorbing its powers. I once saw a mantis holding a large bee by its head and stinger while eating it like an ear of corn. The Mantis is a badass like that.
1 oz Neisson Rhum Agricole Blanc .25 oz Branca Menta .5 oz orgeat syrup .5 oz lime juice Lime wedge, for garnish
Shake ingredients with ice, then strain into a rocks glass and add fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wedge.
NOTES: With the r(h)um, orgeat, lime, and mint, this reads as an unintentional Mai Tai riff. Branca Menta is basically fernet + mint syrup, and you can credibly fake it when the real deal is unavailable by following that template.
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