For a previous bar menu, Purcaru incorporated lumpy huitlacoche—the product of a fungus that attacks corn, turning ears gray and giving the kernels notes of licorice, truffle, and mushroom—into an old-fashioned style cocktail featuring Maiz Nation, a whisky made with local corn.
On another evening my wife Elisabeth and old friend Rob and I ordered three of Selva’s trickiest cocktails. First came the Selva: the hoya santa leaf, a young mezcal, lemon, agave syrup, poblano chili liquor, and juniper bitters, a little laundry list of ingredients that might not play well with others.
Medicinal, wild, and bright green, the Selva is unique and beautiful enough to have earned itself a slot in the recent bar book, Signature Cocktails. I said it reminded me of an unstable energy source in a Marvel movie, to which Elisabeth immediately added, “or flubber.”
At the bar, the hoja santa is treated like a controlled substance. The leaf is destemmed, weighed, and trimmed down until it measures nine grams, then it’s rolled into a cigarette shape and stored in a special tray. The ingredients are combined and liquefied in a NutriBullet personal mixer, then given a hard shake followed by a triple strain.
“This drink destroys the NutriBullet,” a bartender quipped while making one, noting the fibrous quality of the leaf. “We use it because it’s quiet-ish, but we go through them fast.”
Next, we turned our attention to the Morada cocktail with rums from MK and Paranubes and lime, along with jasmine that infused into the drink as we sipped. Paranubes is a personal favorite because it’s so peculiar, a white Oaxacan rum that’s almost Caribbean in style, with far-out tasting notes of roasted pineapple, cinnamon, clove, pickle brine (!), and sugarcane juice. At the bar, Purcaru aged the MK Rum with roast plantain skin, which imparts a desirable tart astringency. The drink was like an extra-tropical margarita cousin with inherent salinity.
For the Passiflora cocktail, on the other hand, she mixes passion fruit, Lillet Blanc, and Valdeflores rum that’s been fat-washed with coconut oil. (The latter meaning the spirit sat with the oil in it before being chilled so the fat can be removed, in this case leaving a delicious tropical vibe.) Most notably, she uses curry powder in the drink to bring out the tobacco notes of an aged version of Paranubes’ rum.
Perhaps it’s understandable that opinions in our little crowd were split by a drink containing curry, but it was undeniably interesting. “It’s like soup,” said Elisabeth as Rob and I started wondering about heartburn while still enjoying it, peculiar but coherent and pleasingly tropical.
There is a lot of daring in these cocktails, and also a lot to figure out. Those funky-saline flavors of Paranubes change as the rum ages, but it turns out that it goes well with the artichoke liqueur Cynar, or the sweet orgeat syrup usually made with almonds and orange-flower water, where it can bring out ripe fruit notes.
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