Bar Calico Celebrates Georgia O’Keeffe With Masterful Cocktails, Spirited Sotol Tasting Flights

A large deer skull with antlers and a bouquet of Southwestern wildflowers are suspended in the clouds above a mountainous desert landscape. The reverse scale of the colossal skull and flowers eclipsing the distant, desolate landscape bends our gaze from realism to Surrealism, challenging our perception of reality and nature.

We imagine ourselves on this otherworldly journey through Georgia O’Keeffe’s gaze as we taste a flight of sotol, an eponymous spirit made in Northern Mexico (traditionally in Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango), as well as parts of the Southwestern United States, from a variety of plant also called sotol, or the “desert spoon” (Dasylirion wheeleri, a species of flowering plant in the asparagus family). The ornamental evergreen succulent forming a symmetrical rosette comprised of hundreds of long, narrow, silvery blue-green leaves tipped with white fiber, has sustained people of the region for centuries, utilized for food, medicine, religious ceremonies, and to craft fermented and distilled beverages.

Our clever and skilled bartender Alberto Nieto led us on an adventurous voyage through the new menu at Bar Calico created by head bartender Alex Dominguez in homage to O’Keeffe. My husband, Michael Maiello, and I let Nieto be our spirit guide as we navigated the carefully curated selections at the elegant lounge tucked into Freehand New York, a boutique hotel in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, which features commissioned artwork by Bard College students and alumni and decor inspired by New York and New Mexico landscapes. Art and culture history is embedded in the walls of the former the George Washington Hotel, where British-American poet W. H. Auden and novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist Christopher Isherwood lived in the 1930s, and decades later where Keith Haring resided while studying painting at nearby School of Visual Arts (SVA). Other notable residents in the 1990s included Dee Dee Ramone, bassist and a founding member of the punk rock band Ramones, playwright Jeffrey Stanley, and comedian Judah Friedlander.

Our favorite pechuga-style sotol produced in Chihuahua by Maestro Sotolero José “Chito” Fernandez Flores evoked the dreamy, mystical feel of O’Keeffe’s Summer Days (1936). After open-air fermented for seven to nine days in pine wood tanks (tinas), the sotol is distilled three times in traditional copper pot stills. A raw cut of venison (deer) is hung in the pot still’s upper chamber during the third distillation, along with botanicals including star anise, orange, raisin, apple, and walnuts. Preferring game meats over more typical proteins consumed in the U.S. and funky spirits with a kick, my husband and I embraced the use of venison that lends a hint of game to the earthy elixir, which also gets its taste from wild harvested Dasylirion wheeleri roasted in a traditional pit oven using willow and oak firewood.

“Sotol is more sustainable than tequila because you only need to dig into the heart of it,” Neito explained. “With agave, you have to harvest the whole plant.”

We were equally intrigued by the pechuga-style sotol produced in Chihuahua by Maestro Sotolero Don Gerardo Ruelas that introduces fresh rattlesnake meat at about three grams per liter of sotol during the third distillation. I closed my eyes to conjure an O’Keeffe painting depicting a rattlesnake and instead found myself reciting a poem by singer-songwriter and poet Patti Smith, which begins:

great lady painter

what she do now

she goes out with a stick

and kills snakes

“The rattlesnake has more of a story,” said Nieto. “It hits you differently.”

Keep an open mind, as the tasting notes will surprise you, mingling citrus, quince, and pine resin tempered by the delicate sweetness of roasted piñas (pineapple) and hints of vanilla born from oak age aging. An array of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami tickles the tongue before leaving us with a lingering mineral finish. I was reminded of O’Keeffe’s Crab’s Claw Ginger Hawaii (1939), a rare commission the artist accepted for a print ad promoting Dole pineapple juice. Her brazen decision to create an image without a picture of a pineapple was wildly successful, as is the hint of piña in this complex concoction.

Nieto paired the sotols with tangy house pickled nopal cactus, musky roasted walnuts, and plump tart apricots, further elevating our palates. We suggest you build your way to the sotol tasting by first experiencing some perfectly-balanced cocktails that stir stories of O’Keeffe’s creative process and experiences in New Mexico, which she first visited in 1917. She returned to paint in New Mexico nearly every year beginning in 1929, first in Taos, and then in and around Alcalde, Abiquiu, and Ghost Ranch, with occasional excursions to remote locales.

I kicked off the illuminating and intoxicating evening with The O’Keeffe Sour, a sophisticated upgrade of the classic, artfully blending Lairds apple brandy, Mizu Barley Sochu (a single-distilled Japanese spirit made from barley and rice), black apricot tea, maple, lemon, and egg white. The drink celebrates the artist’s years living in New York during the 1920s, a time of prosperity and new opportunities, when the city was home to many of the most influential artists, writers, and musicians.

Literary references abound with a hat tip to Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist Roberto Bolaño. Named for his 1998 novel, Los detectives salvajes, or The Savage Detectives, as translated into English by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. Cardenxe de la Sierra (sotol) and tepache (a fermented drink made in Mexico using the peels from the pineapple). The effervescent cocktail helps us navigate the search for a 1920s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two 1970s poets, the Chilean Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego) and the Mexican Ulises Lima, based on Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (born José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda), who, with Bolaño, co-founded the poetic Infrarrealist Movement in 1975.

Your palate will dance along as you let the cocktails conjure O’Keeffe masterpieces. The zesty Tomatillo Margarita, with Herradura, Ancho Verde, tomatillo, tajin, and salt, is a triumph of condiment as cocktail, drawing us into the lush, fertile, verdant greens that sweep across many of her landscapes and figurative closeups of green plants.

Eastern Poppies, a potent mix of Harridan Vodka, Averna (a popular Italian bitter liqueur classified as an amaro), and sweet vermouth, is a direct tribute to the 1927 oil painting of the same name, which is also called Red Poppies. We look into the glass as if we’re examining the closeup of two Papaver orientale flowers that fill the canvas.

Indulge in the harmony of bitterness and sweetness with cocktails examining the complicated relationship between O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, beginning with their first encounter at ages at 29 and 52, respectively. They met in 1916 when Stieglitz exhibited a series of O’Keeffe’s abstract charcoal drawings he received from her friend Anita Pollitzer, at the influential 291 gallery he operated at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York between 1905 and 1917. O’Keeffe quickly became his photographic muse. Their passion is reflected in his photos, her corporeal abstractions of nature, and their letters to each other.

The Honey Moon and the Lingering Love underscore the elaborate details of the couple’s love life and artistic careers. Both begin with Rosaluna, an all-natural, handmade agave spirit distilled in the heartland of mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Nocheluna, harvested from 100 percent wild sotol, balanced with minerality and herbal notes of citrus, cacao and mint, and diverge to insert flavors representing the unique characteristics of both renowned artists.

You don’t need a background in art history to appreciate the beauty and bite of these special cocktails and tasting flights. Just let yourself surrender to the master mixology of Dominguez, Nieto, and other talented bartenders. Elvis Escobar, the assistant general manager of Bar Calico, and his expert staff will ensure your senses are delighted.

Augment your tasting with Latin American snacks from Comodo, also nestled in Freehand New York. The luscious mushroom croquetas boasting oyster and trumpet mushrooms seasoned with onion, and habanero aioli, and the sublime boquerones, immersed in sunflower oil, with salsa matcha amd chili, deepened our appreciation of myriad unique flavors.

Don’t be bashful, Nieto and Escobar will joyfully give you the background you need to understand the nuances of sotols, mezcals, and other spirits that may be unfamiliar, but will soon be part of your liquor lexicon.

Be brave, like O’Keeffe, and taste it all. Or in her words:”I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.”