This Cocktail Bar In Mexico Serves Complex Sips With Local Ingredients – Robb Report

The trend has been around long enough that you’ve probably had a farm-to-table cocktail, and maybe even had a good one. But you’ve never really experienced the ultimate in a “locally sourced” mixed drink until you’ve booked a ticket to Rosewood Mayakoba’s mangrove jungle and its new outdoor cocktail bar. , Zapote. Laid out by La Metropolitana, the Mexican design firm that perfected Noma, in Copenhagen, it’s a warm, laid-back workshop where bartenders source Yucatán ingredients from the on-site garden and use them in drink recipes. as meticulously complex as French cuisine.

Each cocktail is named after its main regional ingredient. The Mamey, after the amaretto flavored fruit that grows on zapotes, uses rums flavored for 24 hours with pineapple, lime, mamey, mamey seeds, sugar and spices. “Then we add milk,” says chef Juan Pablo Loza, director of culinary operations at Rosewood Mayakoba, who spent six years designing and building Zapote. “You’ll never taste it, but it clarifies the liquid. Then we let it drain for 12 hours in a coffee filter and, finally, serve it over pineapple and mamey ice cubes”, ensuring that the drink becomes more flavorful, rather than watered down, as the frozen pieces melt. Even traditional cocktails like the Negroni have a regional twist; rather than aging the drink in oak or clay barrels, Loza prepares the gin, vermouth and Campari in glass and infuses the cocktail with chunks of zapote wood.

If you have the chance, take a seat at one of the handmade volcanic stone tables, munch on homemade jicama and pickled local radishes, order a Mayayo (artisan gin Katún from Yucatán, sour orange, guava and lemon leaves) and tell them julesajo’ob (that’s Yucatecan Maya for “cheers”) from us.