11/03 Cocktails at M. Wells

March 11, 2011, 10:41 am
By ROBERT SIMONSON
Jackson Couse

M. Wells, the diner in Long Island City, Queens, serving Québécois culinary inventions, will begin pouring cocktails with dinner on March 15, with a separate brunch cocktail menu to follow.

The drinks will be created by Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, a young bartender at the nearby Dutch Kills.

Mr. Gelnaw-Rubin worked closely with the chef Hugue Dufour in devising the program.

“We will be striving to develop drinks that follow suit with the style of the restaurant’s food menu,” he said, “new twists on old favorites, big, bold flavors, but subtle in its own way, seriously artful, but with a touch of camp and humor. The space is an old diner, and chef wants the diner spirit to run through all his offerings, so don’t be surprised to find bright red maraschino cherries in your cocktails.”

Among the brunch drinks, which will start at $10, are the Take 3, a Cynar-based highball with lemon juice, St. Germain and soda which Mr. Gelnaw-Rubin said was designed to settle the stomach and kill hangovers. The Red Rooster spices up tequila blanco, lime juice, and raspberry syrup with sriracha hot sauce. The More Better Mimosa includes a choice of spirit, grapefuit juice, Campari, crème de cassis and Cava. And the Slapshot — which was named by Mr. Dufour, who is a big hockey fan — is a highball made with Canadian Club, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, Angostura bitters and soda, garnished with the aforementioned neon-red cherry.

Among the dinner cocktails will be the J.F.K. Harris (white rum, lemon juice, sugar, mint, served on the rocks with a float of red wine), Sans Frontieres (tequila reposado, Sortilège — a Canadian maple liqueur — and orange bitters), and M. Gibson, a variation on a Gibson, the details of which are still being worked out.

Perhaps most interesting creation is the R.I.P. Topsy, which Mr. Gelnaw-Rubin says is a spin on the Electric Current Fizz, a Depression-era concoction consisting of a silver gin fizz (basically a gin fizz made with egg white) in which the raw yolk is served on the side seasoned with salt, pepper and vinegar.

“Modern Electric Current Fizzes often utilize hot sauce and Worcestershire,” Mr. Gelnaw-Rubin said. “For the R.I.P. Topsy, chef DuFour will be whipping up a special sauce for the raw yolk, and there will be a twist on the fizz as well.”

The drink is named after a Coney Island elephant that, deemed dangerous to the public, was infamously electrocuted in 1903.