The NYC Tour de Tarragon Cocktails
The herb is the flavor du jour, it seems. This is what happened when I tried to try all of the city’s tarragon-flavored drinks.
My love of tarragon is well-documented on social media.
A few years ago, I discovered tarragon-flavored sodas at some markets in Brooklyn that cater to immigrants from the former Soviet countries. It came as a surprise: The leafy green herb with a subtle anise-y flavor is somewhat underappreciated by American palates, and yet I’ve found at least eight different brands (and counting) of imported sodas offering that flavor.
I started doing taste tests between the various soda brands and documenting the results via Instagram stories. (They can be found in a highlight on my account, in case you’re curious; the “Sodas” one, obviously.) I received a ton of messages from friends and followers in response, largely in the vein of either “Tarragon soda? That’s a thing?!” or “Where can I find some?” (I only stopped doing those taste tests because many of the best and most commonly found brands were Russian, and I’m not really feeling great about giving that country even a few extra bucks right now, y’know?)
So imagine my delight as I’ve recently started seeing tarragon-flavored cocktails pop up around town at some of the city’s top bars. Like the tarragon sodas I love, but with the added fun of booze!
In the spirit of those soda taste tests, I assigned myself a stunt: I would sample as many different tarragon cocktails as I realistically could over the course of a single afternoon and evening, evaluating them as I would the sodas and choosing a winner at the end.
These are my (increasingly tipsy) notes.
Venue 1: Mace
Cocktail: “Tarragon” (Grey Goose La Poire vodka, St-Germain, tarragon, pear cider, prosecco)
I started my quest in the late afternoon at Mace, a bar in the West Village. I’d seen a post on Instagram a few weeks earlier about a cocktail simply called “Tarragon.” (For the uninitiated, the concept of this nearly decade-old bar is that each cocktail is based on a different herb/spice/leaf/etc.)
Tarragon, the cocktail, is served in a large wine glass over ice. The drink is the palest yellow-green hue, with a thick emerald-green substance painted around the inside lip of the glass, above the wash line of the liquid.
I took a sniff. The anise-y, herbaceous smell I was expecting hit my nose. Ahh! I took a sip. And what hit my palate instead was pronouncedly pear-forward, slightly effervescent and notably sweet.
Honestly, it tasted as if I’d poured a splash of tarragon soda into a glass, then filled the rest up with pear soda (the other soda flavor, coincidentally, that I’ve done several taste tests with), specifically an Azerbaijani soda I’d noted tasted “aged.” The cocktail wasn’t unpleasant, and was certainly refreshing, but it wasn’t the smack of tarragon flavor I was seeking.
Was the viscous green substance rimming the inside of the glass the source of the lovely tarragon scent? I swiped at it with my finger and took a lick. It simply tasted sweet. I gulped down the drink, thinking how lovely it might be as a summertime pounder.
Thus fortified, my drinking companion and I headed to our next stop.
Venue 2: Schmuck
Cocktail: “Elderflower & Tarragon” (St-Germain, tarragon distillate, caramelized yoghurt whey), served in the “Kitchen Table room” only
I’d noted during my previous visit to Schmuck, on the bar’s opening night, during my brief stop into the “Kitchen Table room” after my longer experience in the bar’s main room, that a cocktail called Elderflower & Tarragon was on offer in the smaller room. I made a mental note to return and try it.
From my prior experience, I knew I’d have to queue to get into the bar and was on line a half-hour before Schmuck opened. As it turns out, the Kitchen Table generally opens a bit after the main room does. We were offered bar stools in the main room in the meantime, where we had a round while we waited. Perhaps a half-hour later, we were ushered to seats in the tiny, busy, loud secondary room.
The Elderflower & Tarragon was served long over a clear ice spear, garnished with a sprig of the freshest mint. (Truly, the mint was gorgeous.) On the nose, the mint reigned, of course; on the palate, the elderflower took a back seat to the tarragon’s pointed, green, anise-y flavor. (Someone across the table had ordered the drink as well; I heard him commenting on the “licorice notes.” Yes, that would be the tarragon.) I was struck by the drink’s slight viscosity and looked at the menu again: Oh yes, that would be the yogurt whey.
The cocktail perfectly exemplified Schmuck’s style: pure, clean, glimmering liquid representations of the food it emulates or flavor it highlights.
We figured that as long as we were there, we might as well have another round of drinks and a couple of small plates of food. We couldn’t decide which drinks to order—we wanted to try too many!—so it turned into another round and a half, the two of us sharing three drinks.
“Should we just settle in here for the rest of the evening?” I asked my drinking partner.
“No,” he replied, with a slight grimace. “We have a mission.”
On to the next place!
Venue 3: Bar Contra
Cocktail: Acid Granny (NY Apple gin, Mexican tarragon, “acid Granny Smith,” orange syrup
I’d had the Acid Granny cocktail before, during my initial visit to Bar Contra last August, though I was no more sober by the time I tried it than I was this time around. I wanted to revisit it to remind myself of its flavor, though my hazy memories echoed the description on the menu at the time: “Bright green herbal pour of freshness.”
It’s a nitro-muddled cocktail—a technique pioneered by Dave Arnold, the leading scientist in the bar world, who’s in charge of the cocktail program at Bar Contra.
We were lucky to nab bar seats right away. I opened the menu and was pleased to note it appeared almost exactly the same as it was in the summer and online—except for one crucial omission.
“Oh no, they took the tarragon one off the menu!” I exclaimed.
“It’s too cold,” the bartender, who’d heard my cry, told me. Apparently wherever the bar sources its tarragon from can’t grow it over the winter. “Try the Viridian Sour,” he suggested, mentioning that it, too, employed nitro-muddling. We did. It was delicious, but it was not the tarragon cocktail I’d hoped to have.
“Oh well,” we said, and shrugged, vowing to return again in the spring. We ordered several plates of food, followed by a couple more rounds of drinks, before stumbling out, sated and happy, into the Lower East Side night.
The final total: seven and a half rounds of cocktails (only two of them incorporating tarragon) (one of those seven-plus cocktails, mine, was nonalcoholic, but having now added them up for the first time, I understand why I was feeling somewhat rough the next day); three small shots (we received one at each bar, despite knowing the bartender at only one; the other two came as a welcome mystery); eight delicious small plates of food. We failed in our stated quest (to try enough tarragon cocktails for a taste test), but failed successfully (which is to say, we had tons of delicious drinks and food, and a fantastic time).
The cocktail “winner”? Well, because I wasn’t able to retry the Bar Contra one, I’m going to name Schmuck’s Elderflower & Tarragon the provisional champion, and I’ll have to perhaps do a face-off once the weather warms and the tarragon pipeline to Contra begins to flow again.
What was even the point of this admittedly questionably conceived journey across Manhattan? And why am I writing about it? Valid questions, both.
Ultimately, it was to have fun, and to encourage you to do the same. It can be a blast to assign yourself ridiculous low-stakes quests. Make life a game. Explore. Find joy. Find drinks, find food. Make it fun. Find someone to join you who’ll make it even more fun. Auntie Mame-ify your life to the extent you can. Live.