cable car

1 1/2 oz Captain Morgan Spiced Rum (Kraken)
3/4 oz Marie Brizard Orange Curaçao (Cointreau)
1 oz Lemon Juice
1/2 oz Simple Syrup

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass rimmed with cinnamon sugar (about 20:1 cane crystals to Vietnamese cinnamon). Garnish with an orange twist (clementine).

In thinking about Tales of the Cocktails past, I recalled many of the great bartenders that I had the privilege of making me drinks at the Diageo Happy Hour. The Happy Hour was held the first three years I went to Tales (2009-2011) in a different museum each year with 60 bartenders and writers making drinks of theirs. This included bartenders like Joaquin Simo and writers like Wayne Curtis who I had never had the chance of meeting in person before. Somewhere between then and my next Tales in 2015, that event went away and Diageo was throwing large themed parties with games and mechanical bulls instead. One drink that I recalled was one that I never wrote about called the Cable Car by Tony Abou-Ganin that he created for the Starlight Room in San Francisco back in 1993; I was able to fetch this recipe from Robert Hess' The Essential Bartender's Guide to recreate the drink that Tony served to me back in 2011. Hess' book provided the history of, "This drink's name comes from the geography of the its house of origin.... One of the city's landmark properties, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, is located along the famous Nob Hill cable car tracks."
Essentially the drink is a Rum Side Car which was bolstered that year by attending Robert Hess' talk on Embury and the Side Car. I updated some of the ingredients for quality, but I kept the sweeter-than-preferred balance intact (especially with the sugared rim which I do not mind when the drink is on the tarter side). Once prepared, the Cable Car shared an orange and cinnamon bouquet to the nose. Next, a sweet lemon and orange sip transitioned into dark rum and spices on the swallow. Put into perspective of when this drink was created 24 years ago, it is a solid tribute to classic mixology even if it might seem less flashy than many of the drinks of today. Probably that lack of flash is why I never wrote up this drink back in 2011 given all of the other drinks I had to chose from at that Happy Hour, but it is one of the few that I can still recall to this day from that event.