Chicago Barman Toby Maloney Celebrates 15 Years Of The Violet Hour With New Book "The Bartender's Manifesto"

Renowned Chicago barman Toby Maloney celebrates 15 years of iconic Wicker Park mixology spot The Violet Hour with the release of The Bartender's Manifesto.

Cocktail mecca The Violet Hour has dramatically changed the way Chicagoans imbibe.

Chicago mixology bars may be ubiquitous these days, but back in 2007, it was a very different story. Toby Maloney should know—as a founding partner of The Violet Hour (1520 N. Damen Ave.), he was integral in bringing one of the city’s most legendary and influential watering holes to life. As the bar celebrates its 15th anniversary, Maloney (along with writer Emma Janzen, and in partnership with the bartenders of The Violet Hour) spills some tips of the trade and shares around 100 recipes in the just-released tome The Bartender’s Manifesto: How to Think, Drink, and Create Cocktails Like a Pro (Penguin Random House). Here, we share a sneak peek of the book’s introduction—and recipes for two of the bar’s most in-demand drinks.

In the spring of 2007, I moved back to Chicago to open a cocktail bar across the street from Wicker Park, where at that time you were more likely to get mugged than get organic kale at a farmers’ market. I partnered with One Off Hospitality, a group that included Terry Alexander, Peter Garfield and Donnie Madia, that had some of my favorite bars and restaurants under their umbrella. There were many late nights assembling a place that would prove to be unlike any other in the city. A few days before opening, we went to one of the neighborhood’s finest dives, Phyllis’ Musical Inn, to vote on a name. We all tossed our ideas into a wet beer pitcher, pulled out streaky slips of paper, and read them out loud. ‘The Violet Hour’ won by a nose over ‘Mother’s Ruin.’

‘The Violet Hour’ comes from the T. S. Eliot poem ‘The Waste Land’ and from The Hour, a book by Bernard DeVoto. In his charming-yet-somewhat-curmudgeonly look at the art of imbibing, DeVoto described his perfect martini as 3.7 to 1, strained with a perforated, not coiled, strainer, and added that it must be consumed in an urban, not rural, setting. He was particular and persnickety, some of which we wanted to bring with us, some not so much. Either way, we did bring a very specific vision to the City of Broad Shoulders, and that pioneering cocktail bar ended up being exactly the seismic paradigm change we thought it would be.

Chicago hadn’t seen anything like it before. Together with inventive architect and interior designer Thomas Schlesser, we turned the space into a surreal wonderland, a dark utopia the color of a frozen lake with flickering candlelight and a huge back bar. And the curtains—the curtains! Made of thick, weighted velvet, they suggested an opulence and grandeur the city’s cocktail scene hadn’t offered in decades.

At first most people thought we were pretentious as all get out. Probably because we were ostentatious as f--k. During service, our staff wore ties, vests, or vintage dresses—unthinkable attire, considering the casual nature of Wicker Park. We didn’t allow cell phone conversations or take reservations. We didn’t sling light beer or neon ‘martinis’ in garish V-shaped glasses. We filled our back bar with spirits that were considered esoteric at the time, like Campari and Jamaican rum—not the usual suspects like Ketel One and Johnnie Walker. There were bowls of fresh berries, fragrant bouquets of mint, and a kaleidoscope of citrus on the bar instead of lowbrow plastic flip trays with nuclear-red cherries and green olives languishing in fetid brine. We wanted people to shake off familiar drinking routines and try something new, a task that sometimes felt like trying to push a boulder up a damn hill.

Secondly, we had rules—printed out, framed, and hung in the front vestibule and in the bathrooms. We got the idea from [NYC cocktail mecca] Milk & Honey, a place where the inimitable Sasha Petraske put the utmost importance on making sure everybody felt comfortable. We wanted to create a similarly welcoming atmosphere at The Violet Hour. What we wanted to create (and what Milk & Honey did so well) was, in a word, civilized.

By 2007, bars in New York City were well on the path to widespread cocktail acceptance, but here in Chicago, we were still on the front lines. There was this pervasive notion at the time that all bars were the same, where you settled in with your usual and guzzled it without much thought. I love a good dive bar, beer bar, wine bar, or punk rock bar. I like shots of Jäger washed down with a Schlitz, with Ministry loud on the juke. But I didn’t want those bars to be the only options the world had to offer. I wanted to create a place for cocktails, a place that added to the conversation instead of simply contributing to the existing hullabaloo.

Looking back, I don’t think we’ve changed all that much since the early days. We’re a little more laid-back with the rules, and our music may be a bit louder, but for the most part we’ve worked really hard to maintain that original magic. That passion. That inherent need to create an all-encompassing experience for the people who walk through our curtains. Even through a global pandemic, we managed to keep the home fires burning. Which is, I suppose, how you have this tome in your hands right now...

The Juliet & Romeo is one of the bar’s bestselling libations.

JULIET & ROMEO

“This is a disarmingly simple cocktail, an effortless patio pounder, but also something surprisingly complex that cocktail fans can easily geek out on when they start to think about how the rose-angostura pairing and the cucumber-salt duo work in tandem. For either group, this drink always sparks a pause, a cocked head, and a smile. For all these reasons, the Juliet has remained one of the best-selling cocktails since its introduction.” –Toby Maloney

MISE EN PLACE

GLASS: COUPE

ICE: NONE

GARNISH MINT LEAF, 1 DROP

ROSE WATER, 3 DROPS

ANGOSTURA BITTERS

METHOD: COUPE SHAKE

2 OZ. BEEFEATER GIN

¾ OZ. LIME JUICE

¾ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP

5 DROPS ANGOSTURA BITTERS

5 DROPS ROSE WATER

2 MINT SPRIGS

3 CUCUMBER SLICES, TO MUDDLE

PINCH OF SALT

The Violet Hour’s alluring interior.

Chill your coupe. Dip all three cucumber slices very gently into the salt or sprinkle them with the tiniest pinch. Drop in your shaker and muddle with abandon. Grab your mint sprigs and carefully press them into the mashed cucumber, just to work the two together. Dash your ango and pipe your rose water into the mix. Be judicious with the rose water, because it’s a bully. Jigger the simple syrup, lime, and gin. Grab your chilled coupe (and chilled sidecar, if your coupe holds less than 3 ounces) and place it just out of arm’s reach of whoever’s drinking it. Add five ice cubes and coupe shake. The cucumber and mint will act as a cushion for the ice, so you might have to shake a little longer than you would shake a drink with no [stuff] in it. Taste. There should be just enough salt to make the cucumber pop; this is not a salty, savory drink. Double strain into the coupe (pouring any excess into the sidecar), unless you like a few little bits of mint skylarking about. Pick a mint leaf that is shaped in a seaworthy way and gently drop it on the surface of the drink, so it floats. Put one drop of rose water on the leaf where the man in the boat would sit. Using your angostura dropper bottle, quickly put three drops on the surface of the drink but close to the mint leaf so it will lend the drink layers of complex aroma.

The Bitter Giuseppe

BITTER GIUSEPPE (CIRCA 2009)

“Sometimes a cocktail tells you what to do, rather than you telling it what to do. One night an Italian chef I knew came into the bar for a drink. I thought he’d like a Cynar Manhattan. I have no f---ing clue why—it doesn’t make sense now, because you’re just adding a sweet amaro to other sweet flavors, but regardless—I knew it needed something to balance out, and at the time I was playing around with Ti’ Punch a lot, with the small medallions of lime. I remember cutting a lemon in that style but with more girth, because it kept needing a touch more acidity. I just kept tasting and trying to correct my f--k-ups to the point where it would take a full quarter ounce of lemon and an aggressive six dashes of orange bitters for it all to come together. I wish I had a better story for this one, but I was blindly moving around trying to make it work and ended up just knocking it out of the park.” –Stephen Cole

Author and mixologist extraordinaire Toby Maloney

MISE EN PLACE

GLASS: DOUBLE OLD-FASHIONED ICE: CHUNK

GARNISH: LEMON PEEL, EXPRESSED AND INSERTED

METHOD: ROCKS STIR

2 OZ. CYNAR

1 OZ. CARPANO ANTICA FORMULA

VERMOUTH

¼ OZ. LEMON JUICE

6 DASHES ORANGE BITTERS

Fresh ingredients are key at The Violet Hour.

Add a large chunk of ice to your DOF glass. Add the bitters to a mixing glass—six dashes is a lot, but the large amount of bitters will add both proof and complexity, which is much needed in this situation. Add the lemon, then the vermouth, and finally the Cynar. Taste, concentrating on how the whisper of lemon is working with the bitterness of the amaro while drying out the vermouth. Add ice, enough to fill the mixing glass three-quarters of the way full, and rocks stir. Taste again before it gets too diluted—you want it to go into the glass on the hot side because it will thin out as it sits on ice. Strain into your DOF glass over the ice chunk. Express the lemon peel to grace the surface of the drink with sunny oils, then insert the peel, skin side facing inward, placed at 11 o’clock, as garnish.

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