april-2012

ON THE TOWN: ORLANDO
THE LOCAL BUZZ BY BETH D’ADDONO
Farm-to-table is passé for forward-thinking foodies. The latest locavore movement takes the seasonal
farm grown ingredients off your plate and plops them into your Martini glass.
The next time you visit a farmer’s
market, don’t think salad, think
cocktails and enter the refreshing
sibling of the farm-to-table
movement: farm-to-drink. And
with its unbeatable selection of fruits and
veggies, Central Florida is the best place to
embrace the trend.
Having originated at pioneering spots
like Cure in New Orleans and the Clover
Club in Brooklyn, this latest foodie trend
has expanded to Florida, shaking up
Orlando’s craft cocktail scene. While
classic cocktails will never die, more
and more bartenders are pouring drinks
powered by seasonal fruit, herbs and
specialty elixirs, most of which grew rew only
a few miles from where the drink is being
mixed, muddled, shaken and stirred. d.
At the Ravenous Pig
(theravenouspig.com), bartender
Larry Foor is making divine
libations using housemade sour
mix from local citrus, rosemary
and lavender. The heirloom
tomatoes, which are the foundation ion of
their signature Bloody Mary, were e picked
from family-owned Waterkist Farm, rm, 20
miles from the restaurant. “We can an get
tomatoes almost year round,” Foor or said.
“Our talented chefs work with me e on all
sorts of purees, syrups and infusions ons that
change throughout the year.” Not far from
the restaurant’s downtown location, on, an
urban apiary supplies organic honey ney for
a cocktail called the Bee’s Knees, a shake
of Hendricks’s gin, local honey syrup rup and
The difference in
flavor is just night
and day.
housemade sour.
The Rusty Spoon’s (therustyspoon.com)
Chef Kathleen Blake uses fresh, seasonal
ingredients as the base for her cooking.
Those same specialty ingredients,
Plant City strawberries, Waterkist Farm
heirloom tomatoes, Hammock Hollow
micro herbs—none of which traveled
further than 20 miles—show up on the
cocktail cocktail menu. “What’s What s in season drives
all of our menus,” she said. “If one of my
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farmers has a ton of lemon verbena or
chocolate mint, that’s what shows up in
our drinks. We’ll make a syrup and put our
heads together to create a fun specialty
cocktail around it. If we’re going to spend
the time and eff ort we do on sourcing
ingredients for our food, why wouldn’t we do
the same thing for the bar? The diff erence in
fl avor is just night and day.”
At sister restaurants Luma on Park
(lumaonpark.com) and Prato (prato-wp
.com), senior bartender Jeremy Crittenden
insists on local and fresh ingredients on
his bar rail and sources these at farms like
Rabbit Run (25 miles away) and Waterkist
(35 miles away). In fact, the Meyer lemons
in a recent special lavender Collins
were grown in the family—by one of his
bartender’s
grandmothers. “She told me
her ggrandmother
had a big crop,
so
we took them all,” he said.
“ “Seasonal ingredients give
uus
inspiration and direction.
It It’s a no-brainer really.” When
a ru run of gorgeous Rabbit Run
Farms
strawberries threatened
to overw overwhelm the pastry kitchen,
Crittenden
and his crew concocted the
strawberry
martini, muddling the fruit
with organi organic basil-infused vodka and
Cointreau,
fi nishing it off with a drizzle of
Balsamic reduction. re “You can’t compare
the fl avor. IIt’s
like cooking, If you pick a
tomato out
of your garden, it beats the
canned pro product every day. Use that same
tomato to mmake
a Bloody Mary and you
get something somet
really special.”