From sweet to sour, with everything in between, chances are Antonio Naranjo has mixed it up and served it in a glass. As a master mixologist, he seeks to combine weird and wonderful flavors to create amazing cocktails.
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From salmon gin to chorizo whiskey, Antonio Naranjo sees no limits to the unusual flavor combinations that you can introduce into your cocktails. “I always try to go to the weird parts that people don’t know” he says. “If I need to make a cocktail weird, I turn to something like anchovies, or maybe salmon or maybe cheese“Something you don’t normally find in the bar.”
The Cuban mixologist has been playing with people’s palates for years, since he decided to become bartender after leaving Cuba at the age of 20. Their recipes go much further of classic cocktails, producing what he calls “disruptive drinks.”
Born into a family of artists, Naranjo says that his great-grandfather was one of the first bartenders from Cuba, pioneer of elegant tradition of the cocktails for which the country was known. Naranjo says he got into the world of cocktails because people assumed he knew how to make cocktails because of his ancestry.
“The first time I made drinks was in hospitality school,” he says. “When guests asked for a drink, I would make a cocktail, drink they always gave me that responsibility (to act as a bartender) because I am Cuban and they thought that I surely knew how (to make drinks). And I loved it.”
But the turning point for him, when he really started to get creative with cocktails, occurred while he was apprenticing under world-famous chefs Ferran and Albert Adrià. Naranjo says he spent six months in his Barcelona establishments Tickets and 41 Degrees, where Michelin-starred chefs inspired him to “mix meaningfully.”
“(The Ferrans) always told me: you have to ask yourself all the questions about why this color, why these flavorswhy this alcohol base,” he says. “And as soon as you have All the answers and the cocktail is mixed, then it is done.”
After his learning, Naranjo continued honing his skills at Himkok in Oslo, which consistently features on every annual list of the best bars in the world. And in 2017, he took the opportunity to open your own cocktail bar in the Barcelona neighborhood of El Born, which he called Dr. Stravinsky.
Creativity without limits
This small bar located on the corner of two pedestrian streets is so difficult to find that it has become an inside joke that people only come to Dr. Stravinsky accidentally. Naranjo redoubled the mystery by decorating the walls with unlabeled bottleswhich gives it the charm of an old-school apothecary.
“I think the idea of the bar was for people to feel naked when they entered, because there are bottles without labels and they don’t know what they’re going to drink,” he says. “They’re in our hands. That’s important because then we can play with customers in our own way.”
Dr. Stravinsky became a playground where Naranjo could unleash his creativity. He says he wanted his bar to be completely different to any cocktail bar the public had ever seen before. Stravinsky would not serve beer or lager or wine, he would not use industrial ingredients and everything would be done by hand.
The menu presented “a cosmos of flavors” to guide people when it came to choose your drinksdepending on the flavor profiles they preferred. Naranjo’s teams also began experimenting with maceration, fermentation, and microdistillation, adding unusual flavors like roots and earth to different liquors to produce complex cocktails.
“I think the most important thing when we opened Stravinsky was that we had the opportunity to do all the ideas I had in my head without limits,” says Naranjo. “I think that was the key for Stravinsky to be different: the possibility of being creative without limits.”
His gamble paid off. In a city saturated with bars, Dr. Stravinsky surprised everyone by becoming a overwhelming successwinning a series of prestigious awards cocktail bar. Two years after opening, it earned a spot on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2019 list, ranking 25th.
Layers of flavor
Prepare all the ingredients of your cocktails from scratch allows Naranjo to control every aspect of the final product, from how much sugar is added to how many spices are involved. He says he wanted to further explore how these layers of flavor They can change the cocktails with their new bar Especiarium, which opened after the Covid-19 lockdown in Barcelona.
“If you ask about a classic cocktail, most people will tell you that it has three ingredients,” explains Naranjo.
The menu that has been created in Especiarium gives prominence to the salty cocktails. Some emblematic drinks are their “Curryquiri,” which mixes rum with curry, lime, and simple syrup, or their “Risotto Martini,” made with vodka flavored with blue cheese. Their “Saltbae” cocktail is a unique twist on the Bloody Mary, with a theatrical performance which includes a mechanical arm in the pose made famous by Turkish influencer Nusret Gökçe.
Naranjo says that one of his long-term professional goals is to change the image that society has of waiters. “I think that all bartenders are cocktail chefs because we have the opportunity to mix flavors and textures” he says. “I see that people look at bartenders differently now. Ten years ago we fought for changing people’s mindset. We are creative people, not just party people. “We are people who create experiences.”
