By Luca Cinalli

As an Italian, Luca relates closely to Mediterranean lifestyle. This Master Class for Diageo World Class Malaysia 2014 program has found the best hand for the job and the Malaysian bartenders had hell of a time catching up with this skillful craftman.

*Luca is currently based in London and working at Nightjar. Nightjar serves cocktails, Spanish tapas with Greek influence and jazz music. Owners of Nightjar are musicians and they mainly in charge of the performance in the bar. Nightjar provides an experience to their customers and makes an effort to be different from their competitors. The recipes created in Nightjar are to cater the customers’ palate and are based on the location of the bar.

The Italian, Spanish and Greeks are always looking for bitter sweet aperitif. For the Italian, it is social whereas for the Spanish and Greeks, aperitif is for break time.

The freshness in aperitif is part of the Mediterranean lifestyle as it is to clean the palate and coat the stomach before a full meal. Aperitif is usually paired with bread, food with salty and fatty flavour. As such, the drink has to be fresh and in some occasion, with bubbles and bitter sweet. Something similar to Negroni that uses gin, Campari and vermouth.

Cocktail 1

Ingredients
40ml Tanqueray No.10
30ml Campari
25ml Artichoke tea
2 dashes of Balsamic vinegar

Garnish
Orang twist
Caramelised rosemary

Instructions
1. Put all the ingredients in to a mixing glass, top it with ice cubes, stir.
2. Strain the drink into a rock glass and add ice cubes.
3. Add a few dashes of coconut oil to for some fattiness to the drink.

Cocktail 2

Tanqueray No. 10 increases the sweetness of Campari. As the gin has high ABV, adding sweet vermouth will bring up the ABV further and from the business point of view, this means selling less cocktail. Instead, artichoke is added for the bitterness. (Artichoke is used in many vermouth for its bitterness. Some of them use only leaves but some use even the heart.)

Bring the bitter agent to the drink, in this recipes, artichoke tea from Vietnam is used. As the the ratio of water for the tea and structure won’t be strong enough, extract the flavour using moka pot.

To make it less sweet, cut the sugar from the drink using vinegar. Most customers won’t taste the vinegar in the drink. For a drink that is served on the rock such as this one, note to never finish at the right dilution for a drink that is served on the rocks.

Cocktail 3
(Dry Martini style drink for the ladies)

Ingredients
1. Put Ketel One vodka and jasmine tea into an espuma, charge it to create a 15ml infusion. The bubble in the infusion will expand the flavour while added to the drink.
2. Cut the dryness with vermouth
3. Increase the colour, spiciness and sugary flavour using European traditional Chartreuse Jaune (yellow), which taste is on the herby side.

Technique
Roll the drink instead of stirring or shaking. Rolling gives the right dilution and bubbles but doesn’t bring down the temperature of the drink too much.

Presentation
Serve in a tea cup on a wooden box.
1. Burn the lavender to release the parfum-like smell inside he wooden box.
2. Add a contrasting colour item, instead of olive, grass jelly to the drink for mouth feeling.
3. Spray Bergamot onto the decorative cards used to cover the drink to add citrusy smell.