{The Charlie Chaplin at Blank Space}
If you dig the inside baseball of the drinking industry, chances are you’ve made your way over to Motown Mondays at Cherokee Street’s Blank Space. The slow-jam sesh at the visual and performing arts venue, according to owner Kaveh Razani, is a confab of the city’s drink-mixing minds and fertile ground for collusion, invention and hip-gyrating fun.
Seeking reinvention, Razani (whose brother Mazi Razani is a partner at Blueprint Coffee) recently called in an industry favor and consulted with cocktail guru Joel Clark at The Purple Martin nearby. The idea was to wed Blank Space’s estimable tea program and its liquor selection, the bottles of which have been gathering dust on a shelf.
“I’ve always wanted to do tea before I wanted to do liquor,” Razani said, explaining that whatever Blank Space is, its customers seldom view it as a drinking destination. He and Clark set out to change that.
“(Kaveh) said, ‘I want to make hot tea cocktails,'” Clark said. “I said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody do that. Let’s do it.'”
The result is a six-item roster of cocktails of a type you won’t find elsewhere in St. Louis, all of them are available hot or cold. Clark described the 20 hours of R&D that went into perfecting what essentially amounts to an ice-less, shaken cocktail. The necessary dilution that comes from ice now is provided by tea.
Clark had help from others – he lost his sense of smell after a seizure – and mixes drinks now using second opinions and a finely tuned sense of dead reckoning.
The spirits are mixed, shaken and strained before fresh hot tea is poured over the top. (Razani sources from the local ReTrailer mobile teamaker and San Francisco importer Vital Tea Leaf.) I tried the Charlie Chaplin – named for a tattoo on Clark’s forearm – a mix of apricot brandy, sloe gin, lime juice and sweet Drop It Like Its Hot hibiscus tea. Garnished with a floating lime wheel, the cocktail is a lovely shade of magenta, bracingly tart and warm all the way down. Also available is the toddy-like Brooklyn Cocktail, made with rye, dry vermouth, Maraschino liqueur, Fernet and mint tea.
You don’t have to wait until Motown Monday to drink the fruits of industry collaboration, mind you. Just be sure to get there this weekend, before the next great idea is conceived.
This article appears in January 2015.