Mumbai's restaurants and bars innovating new techniques

Mumbai: They may be fun and dishy drinks, but cocktails come with an invisible instruction manual — margaritas are served in wide-rimmed glasses so there’s more surface area to salt the rim, martinis come in conical glasses so they can stay chilled without ice and so on. So if you’re a crockery prude and a purist when it comes to alcohol, who knows his or her lowball glasses and champagne saucers from a classic cocktail glass, then a drinking session about town may amuse you in more ways than one. For one, city bars are increasingly breaking away from the traditional glasses to make way for more innovative containers like pickle jars, drip pouches, beakers and conch shells to name a few. They are also making the process more interactive by deconstructing the drink and pouring it right in front of you.

Restaurateur Farrokh Khambatta believes it helps engage all the senses of a person. His rebooted venture Joss serves the classic Cosmopolitan not in a marti

ni glass, but in a hand-blown glass that resembles a pipe. To add to the drama, it is served with dry ice to give it the effect of a smoking pipe. “It’s time to play with food. Besides, it brings a smile to the customer’s face. There was much thought put into the glass because it’s designed in such a way that the dry ice doesn’t hit the tongue. Innovation is essential to food,” he says. He says that while it is important to innovate, the emphasis has to be on the taste.

For Shishir Rane, the brand experience manager at the newly opened Colaba Social, the process is an exercise in exploring the art of bartending and connecting to a younger palette. “India has a very young population. Not all of them may be able to appreciate the intense taste of a Bianco or bitter martini. They need something more familiar and fun,” says Shishir who has introduced a drink called Acharoshka (Achar + caipiroska) served in a pickle jar. 

“The container h

elps enhance the taste of the pickle too. Much like the Trip on the drip served in a drip pouch or Coke and cane, served in a beaker with rum injected with syringe,” he says. The idea, Shishir says was to deconstruct a drink and make the process more interactive. Explaining the idea behind serving screwdriver the drink, with the actual tool as a stirrer he says, “People don’t know why it is called what it’s called. What happened was, many years ago, an Arab who was engineer by profession, used to make himself a drink with orange juice and vodka. Since alcohol is banned in a lot of places in the Middle East, he used to steal a sip at work when no one was looking and used an actual screwdriver to mix it. Our drink tells the story.”

Nevile Timbadia who owns Jamjar diner is all for innovation too. His restaurant serves all drinks in, as the name suggests, jamjars. However, he draws the line at single malts and wine. “Those are the two things we don’t tamper with — the glasses are essential to these drinks. But everything else goes right in the jar,” says Nevile who looks at the exercise as a great way for brand promotion. “It’s not what we consciously did, but over the last few years, people have gotten into the habit of clicking pictures of their food and immediately updating it on social networking sites. It works great for any brand in creating awareness and becoming a talking point. So a lot of places are now taking the effort invest in interesting crockery to make better photo ops. The taste remains the most important ingredient of course,” he reminds us.