Maybe it’s obvious from the menu, but here’s something to know about Spotted Duck Restaurant: There is a license to serve only beer and wine, not liquor. That might sound like a constraint, but to a chef like Jerry Regester, it’s an invitation to experiment. “It forces you to become more creative and think outside the box,” he says.
He incorporates sake for an extra bite, and also an added lemony tone to his Yuzu Rose Shandy. “You want it to still taste alcoholic,” Regester explains.
A seasonal sake cocktail, the Autumn Apple, features cinnamon sake, apple cider and ginger shrub. A permanent menu fixture is the Imperial Sour Plum with ume plum sake and berliner weisse tart cherry beer. Regester found that the sour beer on tap wasn’t selling as fast as, say, an IPA. “I just sat here one night, goofing around,” he recalls. To balance the tartness of the sour beer, he tried the sweet plum sake, and voila: “It’s just really good in there – it fit.”
To perfect the drink he eventually made a syrup infused with plum powder, adding to the complex fruitiness.
The idea is to make drinks that are interesting and unique. “I don’t do things everyone’s expecting,” Regester explains. “I’m not going to put Manhattan in parentheses. The expectation is the bite of the alcohol you can’t get when you have a beer and wine license.”
Instead, it’s something else entirely, a depth and flavor profile he’s invented that you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
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