Drink anyone?

From the desk of Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief

While enjoying a cocktail or two at the Groucho Bar of the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, where we’re staying while printing Guinness World Records 2008 edition, I challenged the bar staff to create the world’s most expensive cocktail. The rules are fairly straightforward:

1. The value of the cocktail must lie inherently in the key ingredients. This means no diamond rings in the bottom of flute glasses, or white-gold cocktail sticks holding a diamond-filled olive.
2. The cocktail must be commercially available, at least until stocks last.
3. The name of the cocktail must be printed on a menu (and not just a one-off).

At some point last year, I found myself in the Windows on the World bar atop the Park Lane Hilton, where the Lord Bowmore cocktail was sold for £799 (then $1,431). (The service charge of 12% to bring it to your table added up to over £95 ($180)!! It contained 50 ml (1.75 fl oz) of 40-year-old Bowmore malt whisky and 15 ml (0.5 fl oz) of pure, dark melted chocolate. But the following day, when I called back to confirm the cocktail’s record-breaking status, it had been taken off the menu, never to be seen again!

So, for the past few years, the official most expensive cocktail was the Hemingway Sidecar sold at the Hemingway Bar at the Hotel Ritz, Paris. There, bar manager Colin Peter Field (dubbed the "world’s greatest bartender" by Forbes, a title I’d be more than happy to bestow on GWR’s behalf, if only it were truly quantifiable) created a version of the classic Sidecar cocktail using an 1865 pre-phylloxera Cognac.

"I may as well serve a cocktail on top of a mink coat and call it my $20,000 sidecar," says Duncan Halden, Gordon Ramsay’s bar manager at the London in New York. He serves up a $550 Sidecar upon request that, he says, "out-luxes" Colin’s version at the Ritz. It features Hennessey Ellipse super premium cognac - poured from a decanter specially designed by Tomas Bastide, a designer at Baccarat - and Grand Marnier 150. But who cares who designed the decanter… and if it’s not on the menu…?

So, what will the Hotel Arts need to compete with? In the forthcoming 2008 edition, we’ve listed a cocktail – on the menu and worth its price – that beats the Hemingway Sidecar. I’ll say nothing more than the fact that it’s a Mai Tai made with 17-year-old Jamaican rum and that it sells for a whopping £750 (currently about $1,483). The gauntlet is down – now, just let’s hope that, should the Groucho Bar at the Hotel Arts rise to the challenge, I get a chance to taste it! Cheers…

CRAIG GLENDAY’S HEMINGWAY SIDECAR (with apologies to Colin Peter Field):
5 parts Cognac (the most expensive you can afford)
3 parts Cointreau
2 parts freshly squeezed lemon juice
Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds with ice and add all the ingredients. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds (and no less) and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a glace cherry in the bottom of the glass and, if you're trying to impress, an orange slice on the rim.

-CG