From the outside, The Aviary, the new Chicago cocktail emporium run by chef Grant Achatz (see: many of America’s best restaurants), is a model of exclusivity. There’s no phone number to call, but you can request reservations online and they might get back to you. Or you can just walk up. You may get in. Stranger things have happened. It’s wildly annoying.
It doesn’t matter. Suck it up and go anyway; this is more than just a bar.
At The Aviary, there’s no bottle service. A few months ago, a few members of the Bulls left after being rebuffed when they asked for a bottle. This is neither a Jack-with-a-beer-back nor a gin-and-tonic place. Here, you order what they’re making; there are thousands of other bars in the city happy to cater to your pink Cosmopolitan needs.
All this in a place whose executive chef — a title he hesitates before calling himself — admits that he has no experience as a professional bartender. This is part of the reason that I marched in there with David A. Embury’s “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks” under my arm, as a sort of bible to thump while screaming “Repent!” in case things got out of control. It is also, it turns out, why The Aviary is such an impressive success.
Embury reached his drinking prime just as the country fell into Prohibition, and he wrote his book in 1948 as a reminder of how to do things right, a guide to the pleasures of a well-made drink. With its combination of wisdom and zeal, his book is the bartender’s equivalent of M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me” or Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” (It’s also enjoyable to imagine what might happen if he spent an evening with either of those ladies.)
To further ground myself in the classics before heading to The Aviary, I ordered a classic dry Manhattan at Le Coq d’Or at the Drake Hotel, a bar that touts itself as “the second establishment in the city to serve a drink after Prohibition’s repeal.” I should have found the first. On this night, the bar was full of drunken louts who should have been kicked out hours earlier, and a bartender who took little pride in his work. My drink smelled old and musty, a smudge on the name of good bartending and a reminder that the Drake is now a Hilton hotel.
I retreated for a drink atop the John Hancock Tower, happily watched a thunderstorm knock the city’s socks off and put myself in the right mindset for The Aviary.
Arriving to meet Craig Schoettler, the aforementioned executive chef and the person who “owns” The Aviary’s “spin” on every drink on the menu, I was escorted to a low table, the top of which seemed to be a frozen composite of stone and steel. The room, divided into three sections, has a luxe-hotel-lounge vibe. The space where the drinks are made is set off by an interior fence that gives an appropriately aviary-esque feeling, while also resembling the cage that protects bands from projectiles in dive bars.
“There is no bar. There’s what we call ‘the pass,’” Schoettler said, borrowing a kitchen term as he gestured to a stainless-steel expanse where we began our walkthrough.
Herein lies one of the keys to the whole place: The Aviary isn’t designed like a bar; it’s based on the idea of a kitchen.
When nothing’s happening, the pass is almost large enough to function as a landing strip for a small plane. Covers are lifted to reveal five independent workstations. There is no altar of drinks behind the barman, no top shelf, no well. As at a cook’s station in a restaurant, each “bar chef,” as they’re known here (they’ve all come from cooking stints at Alinea, one of Chicago’s two three-Michelin-star restaurants, also owned by Achatz), has everything he needs for the drinks he makes just below his fingertips.
Schoettler takes me downstairs — an underground warren dedicated to making sure things are perfect upstairs — and the kitchen similarities continue. One room houses the 45 types of glasses The Aviary uses, while another, a dedicated walk-in, keeps them cool. In the hallway, an ice-block maker with its own winch creates crystal-clear slabs for carving. Schoettler recently crushed his left pinkie while moving a block; it’s not pretty. There’s an office with normal 9-to-5 chaos, and against one wall, two rotovaps whirl away, making non-alcoholic distillates like sorrel water.
My favorite is the ice room, where “ice guy” Micah Melton presides over a pair of recirculating chillers, which bring little vats of grain alcohol and water down to subfreezing temperatures.
“You can do stuff in those that you can’t do in a freezer — you can’t get circulating air to do stuff like you can with circulating liquid,” said Schoettler. “You can freeze stuff from the outside in.”
For the drink called In The Rocks, Melton slit open a balloon holding an ice ball made in one of the chillers, drilled a tiny hole in it with an old Black & Decker drill (“One dollar at a garage sale!” he crowed), and sucked the remaining unfrozen water out of the center with a big syringe. Later, he’d inject a superchilled Old Fashioned into the orb.
After that, he’d freeze Peychaud’s bitters. With frozen alcohol, instead of a drink becoming more diluted over time, it evolves.
This is the Achatz advantage. After decades of premixed or poorly made drinks, craft bartenders are focused on rebuilding a rock-solid foundation. Chefs come in and completely rethink the way things should be run.
“At a normal bar, the bartender has to entertain you, make your drinks and collect your money. It’s not very efficient,” mused Schoettler. “Plus the guys who work behind the bar don’t always have amazing people skills.”
While most bartenders around town prepped by slicing limes for garnishes, here Alinea alum Heather Feher pre-loaded a custom-made vessel known as a “porthole” — a sort of glass-sided canteen that houses a drink called the Blueberry. Inside she placed mint, flowers and long ribbons of citrus zest she’d spent much of the afternoon meticulously peeling, along with fresh and dried blueberries and strawberries. When she stood the porthole up again, it looked like the cutaway of a still life. When an order for the drink came in, Feher simply handed it to Schoettler, who poured a mix of rye, sweet vermouth and verjus into the vessel tableside.
“If you eat a 95-ounce steak at a steakhouse, you get bored after bite four. We wanted something that engaged your palate,” he explained, setting out seven small glasses and immediately pouring a small amount in the first. The almost untouched taste of the rye, verjus and vermouth were prevalent, but every few minutes he poured another glass, and with each, the smell, color, flavor and even thickness changed. Nudge the table a bit, and the glasses swirl in sync for a moment before the sugars in the ingredients slow the “older” versions down. The drink becomes a sort of standalone vertical tasting.
How did Schoettler, with zero bartending experience, come to be the person thinking up drinks like these? After 3½ years in the kitchen at Alinea, he’d garnered a reputation as someone interested in drinks, spending his free time with the Violet Hour’s former bartender Troy Sidle: “On our days off, I’d show him how to roast a chicken and he’d show me how to make a daiquiri.” Later, Schoettler was charged by Achatz with making Alinea’s edible cocktails.
“Grant would come up with something like, ‘The only criteria is that it has to fit inside a kumquat,’” he said. “For that, I made a Sazerac.”
Here I imagine Embury — who makes his Sazerac with sugar syrup, Peychaud’s bitters and whiskey — being of two minds, either playfully popping the whole kumquat into his mouth or refusing it outright, lining the spiked fruit up under one index finger and punting it back toward the bar chef with the other before heading elsewhere to seek out the aforementioned steak.
“Embury is the point of departure,” said Schoettler, who’s actually mulling serving his Manhattan in a flask inside of a copy of Embury’s book. “Everything is grounded in classic cocktails. You still have to balance your booze.”
The bar’s version of a Hurricane comes as a seven-layered wonder in a vase waiting to be poured into its voluptuous glass and crowned with a paper umbrella. Each layer — cranberry, passion fruit, orange and lime juices and three kinds of rum — is lowered into the vase during the afternoon prep, using a cup with a wire running through it that looks like it would be at home in a radar lab. Here they call the cranberry juice “cranberry stock” (“Like chicken stock!” said Schoettler); it’s made from cranberries and water, cooked, steeped, strained and pressed with a bit of sugar added to — get this — increase the liquid’s specific gravity in order to keep the cranberry layer from mixing with other layers.
I try a little taste of the stock — it’s not pasteurized, not from concentrate. It gleams like a ruby. It tastes alive.
The Aviary’s drinks aren’t good because the bar has, say, reinvented the Hurricane. Brand new or tradition-based, its drinks hit the spot because of the time and care that have been put into figuring out how to make every aspect of every drink better. The bar chefs have tasted every drink, every ingredient, dozens of times until they come to life for them.
I asked Schoettler to imagine Embury walking through the front door, and he looked at me wide-eyed — a bit afraid, a bit excited.
“If he put it in our hands, I’d make 47 cocktails for him,” he said, regaining his composure. “I hope he’d like it. I hope he’d think we’d taken a different approach.”
What approach?
“It’s like, you know, a kitchen.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
It doesn’t matter. Suck it up and go anyway; this is more than just a bar.
At The Aviary, there’s no bottle service. A few months ago, a few members of the Bulls left after being rebuffed when they asked for a bottle. This is neither a Jack-with-a-beer-back nor a gin-and-tonic place. Here, you order what they’re making; there are thousands of other bars in the city happy to cater to your pink Cosmopolitan needs.
All this in a place whose executive chef — a title he hesitates before calling himself — admits that he has no experience as a professional bartender. This is part of the reason that I marched in there with David A. Embury’s “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks” under my arm, as a sort of bible to thump while screaming “Repent!” in case things got out of control. It is also, it turns out, why The Aviary is such an impressive success.
Embury reached his drinking prime just as the country fell into Prohibition, and he wrote his book in 1948 as a reminder of how to do things right, a guide to the pleasures of a well-made drink. With its combination of wisdom and zeal, his book is the bartender’s equivalent of M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me” or Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” (It’s also enjoyable to imagine what might happen if he spent an evening with either of those ladies.)
To further ground myself in the classics before heading to The Aviary, I ordered a classic dry Manhattan at Le Coq d’Or at the Drake Hotel, a bar that touts itself as “the second establishment in the city to serve a drink after Prohibition’s repeal.” I should have found the first. On this night, the bar was full of drunken louts who should have been kicked out hours earlier, and a bartender who took little pride in his work. My drink smelled old and musty, a smudge on the name of good bartending and a reminder that the Drake is now a Hilton hotel.
I retreated for a drink atop the John Hancock Tower, happily watched a thunderstorm knock the city’s socks off and put myself in the right mindset for The Aviary.
Arriving to meet Craig Schoettler, the aforementioned executive chef and the person who “owns” The Aviary’s “spin” on every drink on the menu, I was escorted to a low table, the top of which seemed to be a frozen composite of stone and steel. The room, divided into three sections, has a luxe-hotel-lounge vibe. The space where the drinks are made is set off by an interior fence that gives an appropriately aviary-esque feeling, while also resembling the cage that protects bands from projectiles in dive bars.
“There is no bar. There’s what we call ‘the pass,’” Schoettler said, borrowing a kitchen term as he gestured to a stainless-steel expanse where we began our walkthrough.
Herein lies one of the keys to the whole place: The Aviary isn’t designed like a bar; it’s based on the idea of a kitchen.
When nothing’s happening, the pass is almost large enough to function as a landing strip for a small plane. Covers are lifted to reveal five independent workstations. There is no altar of drinks behind the barman, no top shelf, no well. As at a cook’s station in a restaurant, each “bar chef,” as they’re known here (they’ve all come from cooking stints at Alinea, one of Chicago’s two three-Michelin-star restaurants, also owned by Achatz), has everything he needs for the drinks he makes just below his fingertips.
Schoettler takes me downstairs — an underground warren dedicated to making sure things are perfect upstairs — and the kitchen similarities continue. One room houses the 45 types of glasses The Aviary uses, while another, a dedicated walk-in, keeps them cool. In the hallway, an ice-block maker with its own winch creates crystal-clear slabs for carving. Schoettler recently crushed his left pinkie while moving a block; it’s not pretty. There’s an office with normal 9-to-5 chaos, and against one wall, two rotovaps whirl away, making non-alcoholic distillates like sorrel water.
My favorite is the ice room, where “ice guy” Micah Melton presides over a pair of recirculating chillers, which bring little vats of grain alcohol and water down to subfreezing temperatures.
“You can do stuff in those that you can’t do in a freezer — you can’t get circulating air to do stuff like you can with circulating liquid,” said Schoettler. “You can freeze stuff from the outside in.”
For the drink called In The Rocks, Melton slit open a balloon holding an ice ball made in one of the chillers, drilled a tiny hole in it with an old Black & Decker drill (“One dollar at a garage sale!” he crowed), and sucked the remaining unfrozen water out of the center with a big syringe. Later, he’d inject a superchilled Old Fashioned into the orb.
After that, he’d freeze Peychaud’s bitters. With frozen alcohol, instead of a drink becoming more diluted over time, it evolves.
This is the Achatz advantage. After decades of premixed or poorly made drinks, craft bartenders are focused on rebuilding a rock-solid foundation. Chefs come in and completely rethink the way things should be run.
“At a normal bar, the bartender has to entertain you, make your drinks and collect your money. It’s not very efficient,” mused Schoettler. “Plus the guys who work behind the bar don’t always have amazing people skills.”
While most bartenders around town prepped by slicing limes for garnishes, here Alinea alum Heather Feher pre-loaded a custom-made vessel known as a “porthole” — a sort of glass-sided canteen that houses a drink called the Blueberry. Inside she placed mint, flowers and long ribbons of citrus zest she’d spent much of the afternoon meticulously peeling, along with fresh and dried blueberries and strawberries. When she stood the porthole up again, it looked like the cutaway of a still life. When an order for the drink came in, Feher simply handed it to Schoettler, who poured a mix of rye, sweet vermouth and verjus into the vessel tableside.
“If you eat a 95-ounce steak at a steakhouse, you get bored after bite four. We wanted something that engaged your palate,” he explained, setting out seven small glasses and immediately pouring a small amount in the first. The almost untouched taste of the rye, verjus and vermouth were prevalent, but every few minutes he poured another glass, and with each, the smell, color, flavor and even thickness changed. Nudge the table a bit, and the glasses swirl in sync for a moment before the sugars in the ingredients slow the “older” versions down. The drink becomes a sort of standalone vertical tasting.
How did Schoettler, with zero bartending experience, come to be the person thinking up drinks like these? After 3½ years in the kitchen at Alinea, he’d garnered a reputation as someone interested in drinks, spending his free time with the Violet Hour’s former bartender Troy Sidle: “On our days off, I’d show him how to roast a chicken and he’d show me how to make a daiquiri.” Later, Schoettler was charged by Achatz with making Alinea’s edible cocktails.
“Grant would come up with something like, ‘The only criteria is that it has to fit inside a kumquat,’” he said. “For that, I made a Sazerac.”
Here I imagine Embury — who makes his Sazerac with sugar syrup, Peychaud’s bitters and whiskey — being of two minds, either playfully popping the whole kumquat into his mouth or refusing it outright, lining the spiked fruit up under one index finger and punting it back toward the bar chef with the other before heading elsewhere to seek out the aforementioned steak.
“Embury is the point of departure,” said Schoettler, who’s actually mulling serving his Manhattan in a flask inside of a copy of Embury’s book. “Everything is grounded in classic cocktails. You still have to balance your booze.”
The bar’s version of a Hurricane comes as a seven-layered wonder in a vase waiting to be poured into its voluptuous glass and crowned with a paper umbrella. Each layer — cranberry, passion fruit, orange and lime juices and three kinds of rum — is lowered into the vase during the afternoon prep, using a cup with a wire running through it that looks like it would be at home in a radar lab. Here they call the cranberry juice “cranberry stock” (“Like chicken stock!” said Schoettler); it’s made from cranberries and water, cooked, steeped, strained and pressed with a bit of sugar added to — get this — increase the liquid’s specific gravity in order to keep the cranberry layer from mixing with other layers.
I try a little taste of the stock — it’s not pasteurized, not from concentrate. It gleams like a ruby. It tastes alive.
The Aviary’s drinks aren’t good because the bar has, say, reinvented the Hurricane. Brand new or tradition-based, its drinks hit the spot because of the time and care that have been put into figuring out how to make every aspect of every drink better. The bar chefs have tasted every drink, every ingredient, dozens of times until they come to life for them.
I asked Schoettler to imagine Embury walking through the front door, and he looked at me wide-eyed — a bit afraid, a bit excited.
“If he put it in our hands, I’d make 47 cocktails for him,” he said, regaining his composure. “I hope he’d like it. I hope he’d think we’d taken a different approach.”
What approach?
“It’s like, you know, a kitchen.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
