Hedonia

Contigo

(Photo by Anita of Married ...with Dinner)

We have a new favorite restaurant.

Full disclosure: Chef-owner Brett Emerson is a personal friend and fellow blogger. And his restaurant is two blocks from our home, in an area where there is a relative dearth of good restaurants. So, we have a vested interest in seeing Contigo succeed. But I can say, having grazed our way through the ever-changing menu four times in as many weeks, that we would be enamored of this restaurant under any circumstances. 

Loyal readers and friends know that DPaul and I spent a month in Spain back in 2001. We began our journey in Catalonia, first with a few days in Sitges to cleanse our palates, and then on to five days in the magnificent city of Barcelona. We had little experience with Spanish food, much less Catalan, and happily delved into it expecting it would be much like our trips through Italy.

Ha.

While Spain and Italy may face each other across a vast sea and have shared roots going back millennia, their similarities, certainly on the culinary front, are few. We adapted quickly to this new diet of oily fishes, crispy fried croquetas and, above all else, pork pork porkity pork pork pork. But by the end of our month were desperate to eat anything other than Spanish food.

In our first week home, we indulged in all the pleasures endemic to San Francisco. Burritos! Sushi! We traipsed through our regular haunts, reacquainting ourselves with the food addictions we had established here.

And then, on the fifth day or so, the craving struck. Evening came, and the tapas, they were not there. Has anyone noticed my glass has no sherry in it? Where, for the love of all that is good and beautiful in the world, is my jamòn? We were faced with a void that needed to be filled, and would not be satisfactorily for a long time to come.

Thin mint julep

This beyond-awesome illustration courtesy of graphic designer and cocktail blogger Dr. Bamboo.

Do I really need to break down where the inspiration for this cocktail came from? Fine, okay, I was eating Thin Mint cookies while drinking bourbon. Oh, like you haven't.

Anyway, this is a drink recipe that practically writes itself. After all, if my cocktail math is right:

• Mint + bourbon = mint julep = yum
• Mint + chocolate = Thin Mint cookie = yum
• Chocolate + bourbon = just plain old yum

So, applying the law of conservation or whatever, that's, like, yum cubed. I may be wrong on that, since they didn't teach cocktail math in my high school, which is just one more reason why I don't need to relive those years. 

My first attempt at building this recipe involved making my own chocolate liqueur, made with a mint-infused simple syrup, and muddling mint leaves in the glass. The end result was fine, if rather ... subtle. But sometimes subtle is highly overrated. I mean, this is a cocktail modeled after a Girl Scout cookie, fercryinoutloud. Do you think they sell hundreds of thousands of boxes of cookies with subliminal advertising and gentle hints? No, they cast their doe eyes on you and beat you over the head with their cuteness. Subtle ain't exactly the name of the game.

I knew this much; I wanted the drink to have a rich chocolate base and a clean peppermint high note. Casting artisanal ingredients and techniques out the window, I went straight for the peppermint schnapps -- which our local booze store doesn't even stock, it's so lowbrow. I also invested in some crème de cacao, but opted for the good stuff since that's something that might actually have an application in a future drink. (For the record, as far as I can tell, there is no "good stuff" when it comes to peppermint hooch.) Et voilà -- one of America's favorite cookies in cocktail form. Bottoms up!

So promise me this: When this gets picked up and becomes the hottest girl drink of 2009 and is sold prefab in bottles and poured directly from spigots and is converted into one of those frozen slushie cocktails served from a churning machine, remember that you read it here first. Scout's honor?