Dillon Raaz has had the Algonquin on the back burner for a decade now. He first discovered it when he was at Mercantile (which he describes as “a formative, cut-my-teeth bar”), when he and a fellow bartender came across the original recipe (two parts rye, one part French vermouth, and one part pineapple juice). Maybe it was the strange combination of ingredients or straddling of genres—but the results weren’t pleasing. “We played around with it and couldn’t find a version that we liked,” he says.
The original Algonquin cocktail was named for the Algonquin Hotel and its Round Table, a circle of writers and intellectuals that met there regularly. The recipe started popping up in the 1930s, first in a book called Along the Wine Trail (where it’s called the New Algonquin) and then in a 1937 issue of the magazine Esquire.
Despite its name recognition, cool backstory and inclusion in cocktail revivalist sources like Jim Meehan’s PDT Cocktail Book and Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, the Algonquin hasn’t ever gained the 21st-century traction that many of its contemporaries have enjoyed. And that might be because—as Raaz discovered all those years ago—it’s a bit of a challenge. Fast forward 10 years and Raaz has honored the Algonquin with the Weird Al ‘Gonq’ovich, a stirred drink with rye, pineapple gum syrup, tepache, Tokay wine and chocolate nocino, finished off with a spritz of cacao nib-infused peaty Scotch.
Whenever possible, Raaz prefers to use local and regional products at Atoma, where he is now bar director. It was one such product that sparked the idea for him to dig up the Algonquin again: a 90-proof bottling from Woodinville Distillery made with Washington state-grown rye. Its spiced nose and vanilla and chocolate notes on the palate subtly guided the secondary flavors in Raaz’s Weird Al ‘Gonq’ovich.
Perhaps the biggest innovation Raaz made for his Algonquin riff is the use of the traditional Mexican fermented pineapple beverage, tepache, to replace most of the vermouth and some of the pineapple component. Raaz and his assistant bar manager, John Lundahl, thought something fermented might actually be historically accurate. “[We] had joked about that, like dry white French vermouth in the ’20s probably was fermented anyway ’cause of lack of good refrigeration,” he says. He likes the way the tepache’s fermented quality dries the palate in spite of its fruitiness. As a result, Raaz says, “it drinks like a Martini.”
