Dill Cocktails Take Center Stage At Bars Around The Country
The Seabass cocktail at Indienne features fresh dill and a dill dust garnish.
As cocktails become more culinary in nature, and modern bars continue to overlap with kitchens, the bartender's arsenal keeps expanding. Ingredients usually reserved for Greek salads and roast chickens are now stocked alongside bottles of whiskey and gin.
Add dill to the shopping list. The herb once relegated to savory cooking has begun popping up in cocktails, as more bartenders enlist its unique flavor to liven up recipes.
'To me, dill has a little bit of an eye-raising character to it,' says Logan Rodriguez, the head bartender at Smithereens, a seafood restaurant and bar in New York. 'I like to think of it as a flavor underdog, since I'd wager that the main flavor association in popular culture is with pickles and possibly tzatziki.' He says the herb's grassy, anisette brightness can cut through the flavor noise in cocktails like the Goblin, a Gimlet-esque recipe that draws loose inspiration from leche de tigre. Dill is merged with other savory ingredients, including tomatillo, serrano pepper and cilantro, to provide a counterpoint to coconut oil-washed gin and orange.
At Little's Oyster Bar in Houston, mixologist Oliver Brooks features a dill cordial in his Dill Breaker cocktail. The cordial is made with fresh dill, citrus, sugar and water, and then blended and strained before it's eventually shaken with vodka, lemon juice and rich simple syrup. Brooks wanted to use vodka to let the dill shine, but he says that gin can also work nicely with dill.
Smithereens uses dill's grassy, anisette brightness to cut through coconut-washed gin in the Goblin cocktail.
'The real limit is just how adventurous a drinker you are,' Brooks says. 'I think if you got it just right, rye whiskey would be truly groundbreaking, but it would be tough pairing. I also think some French rhum agricole or Mexican rum would make an interesting Daiquiri–style drink.'
When experimenting with dill, Brooks thinks of complementary, non-spirited ingredients like citrus—specifically lemon and grapefruit—as well as cucumber, mint and parsley. 'Yogurt would also be great, either incorporated into a syrup or as some kind of spirit wash, which would lend a nice creaminess and would soften the dill a bit.' He can even imagine a summery Bloody Mary made with a light tomato base, and suggests consulting Scandinavian, Middle Eastern and Israeli cookbooks to get more inspiration for how to use dill in drinks.
Isai Xolalpa, the director of beverage at W Philadelphia, also mentions Mediterranean cuisines as inspiration for introducing dill's distinctive, aromatic flavor into cocktail programs. 'Dill offers a refreshing and unexpected savory note, perfectly suited to contemporary palates looking for complexity beyond sweetness,' he says.
Patrons of the W Philadelphia's Living Room bar can get a dose of dill in the Oaxacan Negroni, which Xolalpa makes with lemongrass-dill infused mezcal, red Italian bitters, sweet vermouth and super foam, a housemade egg white substitute. The drink is garnished with a trio of pickled onions for an extra kick of savoriness.
W Philadelphia's Oaxacan Negroni features lemongrass-dill infused mezcal as its base.
If you want to use dill in drinks at home or behind the bar, Xolalpa says that 'infusions work exceptionally well, capturing the dill's vibrant aroma, herbal complexity and subtle sweetness. When infused into spirits, dill highlights refreshing notes of anise and delivers intriguing layers of savory flavor.'
Elsewhere, Michelin-starred Indienne in Chicago serves the Seabass, a dilly drink that repurposes kitchen waste. Head mixologist Akshar Chalwadi starts by infusing gin with steamed and blended smoked salmon and sea bass trimmings, a combo that is macerated for 24 hours and then strained. The cocktail also incorporates lacto-fermented cucumbers, which are steeped with dill for 24 hours and balanced with sugar, and the finished drink is garnished with dill dust.
Dalida in San Francisco turns to nearby Presidio Park for inspiration. Bar director Evan Williams wanted to capture the flavors of the park in his beverage menu, so he incorporates a number of fresh herbs, herbal teas and herbaceous spirits. The Halfdan Was Here cocktail calls for dill aquavit, clarified granny smith apple juice, celery, tarragon, musk willow water and lime. In a bit of cocktail inception, it's topped with a vegan foam made from the same cocktail so drinkers can see how the texture changes the flavor.
Halfdan Was Here is a park-inspired cocktail that starts with dill aquavit.
Right, so it's not just dill-spiked Gin and Tonics and Tom Collins we're seeing on bar menus. Though, to be clear, both classics are great vehicles for dill. For decades, the herb has taken a backseat to other more common ingredients, and it's still not enjoying the ubiquity of something like mint. But bartenders are taking notice and harnessing dill's unique flavor.
'As we enter an era of mainstream experimentation in cocktail techniques, there's real novelty in branching out from herbaceous staples like mint, basil, rosemary and thyme and getting a little more culinary,' says Rodriguez.
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