Absinthe Bar
Alcohol has a strong presence in our culture as a symbol of triumph and woe, the marriage and the wake, of artistic brilliance, unbridled rage, joie de vivre, sex, madness and death. Yet there are few alcohols that have the aura of painted pedigree as absinthe. You can hear the drops of iced water fainting from an absinthe fountain when you listen to the opening notes of Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No. 1" or see the mind-tilting charisma Van Gogh assigns to it in Still Life With Absinthe (1887). Parisian artists of the Belle Epoque are imagined to have treated the drink as a capricious demigod, blessing and cursing them at whim and leaving their minds unhinged and prone to insanity, depression and the ever-popular green fairy hallucination.
The not-so-romantic truth is that there's nothing hallucinatory about Absinthe despite a century of rumor to the contrary and that in moderation it's no different from any other drink. With most western countries realizing this and de-criminalizing its sale in the last decade, The Green Lady has been exhumed from the annals of the peaks and gutters of Bohemian excess and been revived as not only a good drink but one of the most fun to make.
Originally, in the French Method, you poured water over a cube of ice diluting absinthe - which is normally 120-150 proof and that was that. This tasted great but was sorta boring. The new-fangled Bohemian Method realized the only thing you could do to improve the drinking away of lost love and misunderstood artistic vision was to do so with fire. Nowadays (at the shudder of absinthe aficionados) you soak a sugar cube with absinthe, light it on fire, drop it into the absinthe – allowing the whole glass of absinthe to catch on fire – and extinguish it with water. Très cool.
“After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
-Oscar Wilde
The not-so-romantic truth is that there's nothing hallucinatory about Absinthe despite a century of rumor to the contrary and that in moderation it's no different from any other drink. With most western countries realizing this and de-criminalizing its sale in the last decade, The Green Lady has been exhumed from the annals of the peaks and gutters of Bohemian excess and been revived as not only a good drink but one of the most fun to make.
Originally, in the French Method, you poured water over a cube of ice diluting absinthe - which is normally 120-150 proof and that was that. This tasted great but was sorta boring. The new-fangled Bohemian Method realized the only thing you could do to improve the drinking away of lost love and misunderstood artistic vision was to do so with fire. Nowadays (at the shudder of absinthe aficionados) you soak a sugar cube with absinthe, light it on fire, drop it into the absinthe – allowing the whole glass of absinthe to catch on fire – and extinguish it with water. Très cool.
“After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
-Oscar Wilde
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| Bohemian Method Phnom Penh – April 2013 |
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| Ready Phnom Penh – April 2013 |
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