In New Orleans, Nick Detrich has gone back to the foundation of tiki—the early tropical blueprints that you might find in the scribblings of Charles H. Baker—to build a new breed of tropical drink that he hopes is evocative of a time in NOLA’s history when the city was “the gateway to the tropics.”
In going back to the foundation of tiki and building on top of it, he’s created something wholly modern. The result is drinks like his Absent Stars, a combination of Campari, rhum agricole, lemon juice, passionfruit syrup, apricot brandy, saline and grapefruit bitters, which, says Detrich, “takes the tropical notes of a classic tiki drink, but significantly dries them out.”
