Last week I went to Lost Lake for the House of Angostura’s U.S. Cocktail Challenge Chicago regionals—a competition to determine who advances to the U.S. finals in New Orleans next week at Tales of the Cocktail. “Regional” appears to be a relative term: while one of the bartenders was a Chicagoan, the others hailed from Nevada, Wyoming, and Washington state, respectively. I’ll admit to rooting for the Chicago bartender—Elizabeth Mickiewicz, who works at Drumbar—but it wasn’t hometown bias that made me prefer her cocktail to the others. The judges did too, declaring her the winner (the judges were Angostura brand ambassador David Delaney Jr., Lost Lake’s Paul McGee, and Amy Cavanaugh of Time Out Chicago).
- Elizabeth Mickiewicz making her cocktails
I tried mixing up the Flamingo Fizz myself this week, and was impressed at how smooth and easy to drink it was. I’ll include the recipe at the end of the post, but in addition to the Angostura bitters it uses Cointreau, lemon juice, honey syrup, egg white (it’s supposed to be infused with rose water but I didn’t do that), and grapefruit soda. I’d never realized how beautifully the flavor of Angostura goes with orange, and the egg white smoothed out any harshness that the insane amount of bitters might have contributed. It was a little on the sweet side, but a slightly drier grapefruit soda—or using half soda, half seltzer—would fix that.
Julia Thiel
Flamingo Fizz, homemade version
Trinidad Cobbler
As far as rituals before she competes, Mickiewicz says she always takes a shot beforehand—”to calm my nerves a little,” she says. “Me and my roommates took a shot of the seven-year [rum] before this one.”
