From sweet to sour, passing through all tastes in between, it is very likely that Antonio Naranjo mixed it and served it in a glass. As a master mixologist, he seeks to combine strange and wonderful flavors to create incredible cocktails.
From salmon gin to whiskey with chorizo, Antonio Naranjo sees no limits to the unusual flavor combinations that you can enter in their cocktails. “I always try to go to weird parts that people don’t know” he says. “If I need to make a cocktail weird, I turn to something like anchovies, or maybe salmon or maybe cheese. Something you don’t normally find at the bar.”
The Cuban mixologist has been playing with people’s palates for years, since he decided to become barman after leaving Cuba at the age of 20. Their recipes go much further of classic cocktails, producing what he calls “disruptive drinks.”
Born into a family of artists, Naranjo says that his great-grandfather was one of the first bartenders of Cubapioneer of elegant tradition of the cocktails for which the country was known. Naranjo says he got into the world of cocktails because people assumed he knew how to make cocktails because of his ancestry.
“The first time I made drinks was in college. hospitality school” he says. “When the guests asked for a drink they always gave me that responsibility (to act as a bartender) because I am Cuban and they thought that I surely knew how (to make drinks). And I loved it.”
But the turning point for him, when he really started to get creative with cocktails, occurred while he was apprenticing under world-famous chefs Ferran and Albert Adrià. Naranjo says that he spent six months in his Barcelona establishments Tickets and 41 Degrees, where the chefs, awarded with Michelin starsinspired him to “mix with meaning.”
“(The Ferrans) always told me: you have to ask yourself all the questions about why this color, why these flavorswhy this alcohol base,” he says. “And as soon as you have All the answers and the cocktail is mixed, then it is done.”
After his learningNaranjo continued honing his skills at Himkok in Oslo, which consistently features in every annual list of the best bars in the world. And in 2017, she took the opportunity to open your own cocktail bar in the Barcelona neighborhood of El Born, which he called Dr. Stravinsky.
Creativity without limits
This small bar located on the corner of two pedestrian streets is so difficult to find that it has become an inside joke that people only come to Dr. Stravinsky accidentally. Naranjo redoubled the mystery by decorating the walls with unlabeled bottleswhich gives it the charm of an old-school apothecary.
“I think the idea of the bar was for people to feel naked when they entered, because there are bottles without labels and they don’t know what they’re going to drink,” he says. “They’re in our hands. That’s important because then we can play with customers in our own way.”
Dr. Stravinsky became a playground where Naranjo could unleash his creativity. He says he wanted his bar to be completely different to any cocktail bar the public had seen before. Stravinsky would not serve beer or beer or wineI would not use industrial ingredients and everything would be done by hand.
The menu presented “a cosmos of flavors” to guide people when it comes to choose your drinks, depending on the flavor profiles they preferred. The Naranjo teams also began experimenting with maceration, fermentation and microdistillationadding unusual flavors such as roots and earth to different liquors to produce complex cocktails.
“I think the most important thing when we opened Stravinsky was that we had the opportunity to do all the ideas that I had in my head without limits,” says Naranjo. “I think that was the key for Stravinsky to be different: the possibility of being creative without limits.”
His bet paid off. In a city saturated with bars, Dr. Stravinsky surprised everyone by becoming a overwhelming successwinning a series of prestigious awards of cocktails. Two years after opening, it earned a spot on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2019 list, ranking 25th.
Layers of flavor
Prepare all the ingredients of your cocktails from scratch allows Naranjo to control all aspects of the final product, from how much sugar is added even how many spices are involved. He says that he wanted to further explore how these layers of flavor can change up the cocktails with their new Espiciarium bar, which opened after the confinement due to Covid-19 in Barcelona.
“If you ask about a classic cocktail, most people will tell you that it has three ingredients,” explains Naranjo.
The menu that he has created in Especiarium gives prominence to the salty cocktails. Some emblematic drinks They are their “Curryquiri”, which mixes rum with curry, lime and simple syrup, or their “Risotto Martini”, made with vodka flavored with blue cheese. Their “Saltbae” cocktail is a unique twist on the Bloody Mary, with a theatrical performance which includes a mechanical arm in the pose made famous by Turkish influencer Nusret Gökçe.
Naranjo affirms that one of his long-term professional goals It is to change the image that society has of waiters. “I think all bartenders are cocktail chefs because we have the opportunity to mix flavors and textures” he says. “I see that people look at bartenders differently now. Ten years ago we fought for change people’s mentality. We are creative people, not just party people. “We are people who create experiences.”
