The Tap Room's Matthew MacCartney Talks Wine, Beer Cocktails & Australian Hangover Cures

?Matthew MacCartney is one of a growing list of sommeliers currently dabbling in cocktails. As the head wine guy at Colicchio & Sons and its bar, the Tap Room, he also designed the list of mixed drinks. Now, guess which one he finds more fun? (The answer might surprise you.)

Tell us about the cocktails at the Tap Room and Colicchio & Sons?

I work the cocktails sort of the same way I work with the wines by the glass program: lighter and crisper to more robust. We have something like the Corpse Reviver, which was nice and crisp with a little fruit juice and the G'Vine gin, then something like the Rhumhattan, which is a rum Manhattan that's a little heavier.

What sort of drink trends are you excited about these days?

I would say our drinks are more taste-focused than trend-focused. I don't like things that are too sweet. I want to keep them more on the savory side. Something that makes you want to drink it, then go into a meal afterward. Not something that's so sweet it makes you shut down and is a meal in itself. Wine is the same way. Some of these thick, rich Shirazes and Cabernets, you don't even need fruit with them. I want to stay away from that. I want something with bright acidity and a little bit of dryness to it.

Your background is in wine. How did you get into cocktails?

I started definitely in wine. When I started Colicchio & Sons in March, they had an existing cocktail program and around spring and summer, we started to change it up.

Who do you think is more fun? Wine drinkers or cocktail folk?

I would have to say I have more fun with the wine crowd. Because that is my background, my go-to. Using my culinary skills and my palate, I have a good time creating cocktails and thinking about them and understanding flavors. I am by no means amixologist.

What is your favorite drink on the menu?

I would have to say the new one, Sin City, is very good. That is a cinnamon-infused cognac. One of our bartenders came up with it after I asked him to use a Calavados liqueur. You see the cinnamon in the cognac and it works really well together. I like the Harvest Cup as well. That's the one with the beer and bourbon. It's good for the season.

When you're not at your bar, what other bars do you like to frequent?

I like to go to certain wine bars like Terroir. And in terms of cocktails, Pegu. I have a huge appreciation for the dedicated cocktail bars like Louis 649. I've been to Death & Co. and Mayahuel. I think those guys are true artists.

What is your earliest drinking memory?

It was the first time tasting beer at the neighbor's house at a barbecue. Then, maybe with the same neighbor, sneaking into bars at 14. I probably will never have another Screwdriver or Vodka Cranberry again after those underage drinking nights. I could never imagine ordering one.

What is your best tipping story?

I'm not in the tip pool, so generate them in terms of the wine, but the staff is who benefits. I definitely remember nights where we sell a couple of $1000 bottles of wine and you have these amazing people that still tip 20 percent on top. That's fantastic. If you think about it, whether you're opening a $30 bottle or a $3,000 bottle of wine, it's still just popping a cork. It's pretty amazing for the staff on a night like that. About three months ago, we sold a bottle of 1986 Petrus for $3,600. They paid in cash and tipped quite well.

What is your go-to hangover cure?

Baraca is a good one. It's like Vitamin Water, but it settles you out. It's an Australian thing. And drink tons of water. Tons of water and neutral food. That's how I would take care of it. Cocktails, that's another gig. All that sugar. That can be really tough.

Is there anything coming up at Colicchio & Sons?

A beer dinner with Garrett Oliver [brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery] in February. Also, an Australian dinner with Australian food and wine based on Tom's trip to South Australia. That's going to be happening, I believe, in January.

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Amanda Hesser Talks Her Big Fat Recipe Book....and Turtles

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For six years, Amanda Hesser would come home from her day job as a food writer to another job -- testing 150 years worth of recipes for her 932-page magnum opus The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, just released by W.W. Norton & Company ($22). Hesser, who now runs food52[.com] with Merrill Stubbs, talked to Fork in the Road about what it's like to undertake such a big project. Come back tomorrow for part 2 of the interview.

How did you get the idea for this cookbook?
I worked at The New York Times for a long time, and I still write for them. The New York Times did a fantastic cookbook in 1961, it was by Craig Claiborne, and it was a big hit and it's still in print. But they really haven't done another since then, and there's been a food revolution, so I thought that it was time to revisit the Times recipe archives, and do an expansive collection of recipes from them.

Some of the archives are electronic, but were there still technical challenges in developing the recipes?
Any recipes that were in the archives before 1982, there was no cutting and pasting, I had to actually re-write them. It was definitely a labor-intensive process. I had to actually write them in a form that you would recognize, like an ingredient list with clear and recognizable instructions. Old recipes would give you a sketch of a recipe, they wouldn't necessarily give you a list of ingredients -- they would give you them in a paragraph, but they assumed you knew how to cook. A lot of the old recipes were really great, and I wanted to preserve them. I didn't want them to be buried forever.

So why has the format changed?
Essentially, it kind of got codified over time. The recipes happened to come from home cooks, mostly. So these are things readers sent in in paragraph form. It was very cool, because these are things home cooks were actually making, not what a food editor was saying you should be making. Even in the 1960s, the recipes are written in the classic form that you and I know, with numbered instructions, but they often didn't give enough details on what to look for, like when meat is done, because they assumed you would know when the meat is done. Now, there are lots of different levels of cooks. Some of them know a lot about cooking, and others are new to the kitchen, but want to cook and need a little more detail. So, current recipes reflect this. The biggest shift is in what people want to cook.

Explain...
We cook a great variety of kinds of foods now, because a lot of people have traveled, so you find Asian recipes, you find Spanish recipes, you find diet-specific recipes -- like gluten-free recipes. There was a period when there were low-salt recipes. I think that's the thing that has changed: We eat such a wide variety of cuisine. Also, there's always an interest in the new. We're always looking for a new trend. Because, we have become more educated diners, a lot of Americans are eating out more often, and eating quite sophisticated foods, we're kind of expecting a little bit more of that, at home. So we're expecting a lot of different textures and a lot of different flavors, and yet lot of the recipes are sort of paired down.

How so?
Fifty years ago, we would cook a stew, and we would probably put everything in the pan at once and cook it, and wind up with a more uniform texture, and it might be more one-dimensional in flavor. But today, we would brown the meat, which would give the meat a nice crust, which would give it more than one texture, and it would caramelize, giving another layer of flavor, then we would add the recipe ingredients sequentially, as to give a wider variety of textures...

What were some foods that used to be en vogue, but aren't so popular now?
Turtle -- it was kind of a specialty in the 19th century. You find a fair amount of sweetbreads recipes in the 19th century, and it's not that we don't eat them, but it tends to be more of a specialty at restaurants. Salsify, it's not a common vegetable. But it was something that you definitely saw in earlier decades in the recipe pages.

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Adour's Didier Elena Talks Katz's and Champagne (Though Not Together)

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Before coming to New York in June, Didier Elena spent five years in the calm, bubbly-producing region of northern France, where he worked as executive chef at Hotel Le Chateau des Crayères, which boasts two Michelin stars. Preceding his Chateau stint, he was under Alain Ducasse's tutelage in New York. The pair have collaborated almost two decades.

Elena now calls Adour home. Here, he waxes wine and contemplates his new role as executive chef at Ducasse's famed restaurant at the St. Regis Hotel.

It is true that you don't make dishes with more than three main ingredients?

Yes -- because when you cook with wine in mind, you don't want to ruin it with too many different flavors. You stick with tastes that are known, that you can recognize when you eat them, so you can appreciate the wine, too. It's a question of simplicity. Wine is best enjoyed when you go buy this principle.

Does fall bring any big shake ups to Adour's menu?

No. We're sticking to 'design with wine in mind' idea. Yes, everyone brings his own touches, his own imprints to a kitchen, but at the same time, we're working under Alain Ducasse's philosophy. Everyone shares their ideas, which brings the restaurant to life.

You've bounced between New York and France a bit. Biggest things you've taken away from your last stints in each place?

I learned so much those first five years in New York. I learned to have a different vision, a more globally oriented one. Then, when I returned to France, I learned about champagne, a name I was familiar with, but a region I did not know at all. You think that because you've had a few bottles of champagne that you know it, but there are really 4,000 people making the wine, 4,000 small producers. It's enormous, and there's a culture that surrounds champagne that's so interesting. I thought I knew champagne, but I didn't know it at all.

More on that...

First off, champagne is a wine where the carbonation enhances the flavors of the food it's eaten with. If you eat something while drinking champagne, it's a lot more expressive. The bubbles enhance taste tremendously. Also, there are very different types of champagne that have varied functions, depending upon whether they're made with the pinot meunier, the chardonnay, or the pinot noir grapes, production and time. Ultimately, this creates a world in which one champagne is distinct from another.

Are you bringing a new appreciation of champagne to Adour?

Not really -- it's similar. Here, nobody really thought it silly that there was an association between a dish and a champagne. It's not that people necessarily looked down on that distinction, more so the idea that champagne isn't just an aperitif. Maybe just the idea of when it's appropriate to drink champagne.

Any thoughts so far the Big Apple's food scene?

New York is a platform of global culture. Italian, Chinese, Japanese, French, American, everyone meets in New York. I think that's fabulous. Maybe the best Italian restaurants in the world are in New York. Maybe the best Chinese restaurants are in New York. This creates such an enormous richness -- I love that! It's one of the reasons I came back to live here. The melting pot makes it such a great city.

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Peels' Jim Kearns Talks Famous Tippers, the Rum Renaissance, and Why Rick's Café From Casablanca Is the Silver Screen's Best Bar

?Peels has gotten its fair share of praise this week. Most of that has been for the food -- or at least the infinitely cool environment in which the food is served -- and a few words were dedicated to the cocktails. The drinks list, designed by Yana Volfson, is eclectic and seasonal, and includes something called a Joey Ramone. Longtime Freemans and current Peels bartender Jim Kearns fills us in on what (he)'s shaking behind the bar.

What was the vision for the cocktail program at Peels?

It's Yana's program. There's a very diverse selection of drinks, different genres, a couple tiki or Caribbean-style drinks. There are a couple of drinks that have some nice floral notes to them. She's doing a lot with tea infusions and syrups, infusing jasmine and hibiscus for spring. Literally, people ask, "What's your favorite?" or "What don't you like?" and I say, "Well, I like all of them." There really isn't one that I don't like.

In what way is the vibe different from Freemans?

Freemans is a great cozy space, but it's also at the end of an alley and there aren't any windows. It's more of a dark, brooding kind of space, whereas Peels is a very open space. You come upstairs and you just feel good. There's light all around you and if it's nighttime you can see out on the Bowery. There are windows spanning the entire room. It's very light, very airy. It's nice to be able to work in a space where if you turn around you can give yourself a moment to clear your head and almost feel like you can get a breath of fresh air while looking at the window.

Are people using the bar as a bar or just as a pre-dinner waiting area?

People tend to use the bar as a bar. They will be there all night drinking and having a good time and they'll eat dinner or at least have some appetizers. I've worked at a lot of places where there's this resistance to the bar being a place where you can stay all night and enjoy an entire experience. What I've always found refreshing about working [Taavo Somer and William Tigertt's] bars is that you put a menu down in front of someone, they're more than likely going to order something to eat and you're going to be able to build a rapport with that guest. It makes your life easier and more enjoyable as a bartender.

What kind of places do you like to drink when you're not at your own bar?

Being a bartender and getting off work late, I end up going to a lot of dive bars. Or Irish bars, or somewhere where I know somebody, which could be a cocktail bar. [I like] somewhere where I can sit down and relax and have a cold beer and maybe a shot of whiskey, which I know sounds apathetic for a cocktail bartender, but it's like a chef who gets off work and the last thing he wants is what he's been cooking all day.

How did you get started behind the bar?

I lucked into a job bar-backing at Balthazar and moved up there and moved on. Then I got into the whole cocktail thing. I just had an interest in it, but I really didn't know where to learn more about it. Then, I lucked into a position training with Sasha Petraske, who owns Milk & Honey, Little Branch, etc. He really opened my eyes to the whole idea of making cocktails consistently with fresh product and that simpler can be better ... technique and intricacy and the idea of being a good host and providing proper service to everybody that comes to your bar. Basically all aspects of the job. It was a revelation working with him.

What are some of the trends in cocktails that you're excited about these days?

I think we all know the obvious most prevalent trend is rum and tiki. I think probably what's coming is a trend toward more savory, more culinary elements. I was actually talking to someone the other day who's pretty plugged into the whole cocktail scene across the country and that's what he was seeing a lot of. It's definitely one of my personal areas of interest. If I were to guess, that's the next big thing you'll see: spiced and salted drinks.

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Sara Moulton Talks Sexist French Chefs, Hip-Hop

?"It hasn't changed enough. No way. New York in particular back then was a bastion of male domination in terms of the restaurant industry and most things. New York was where Le Pavillon was. ... When I first went to New York, I had worked in restaurants for seven years, and I couldn't get a job. I wanted to learn. That was why I was so pissed off that when I went to Lutèce, The Four Seasons, all of those French restaurants, they wouldn't hire me." --Sara Moulton talks to Eater about her early bouts with kitchen sexism. She is also, it turns out, a fan of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC.

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