Cocktail Tips and Recipes from Award-Winning Bartender Johnny Berry, Jr.
By MARIO BOUCHER
Johnny Berry, Jr., master of spirits and beverage director at Whiskey Kitchen, has been serving drinks to residents and listening to stories for more than two decades.
Like the one about a couple who chose Valentine’s Day for their first date. “They had no structured plan for dinner. They were just hopping around,” said Berry, who helped fill some gaps in their conversation. Fast-forward a year and a half later, and the couple remembered their first date at Whiskey Kitchen and were planning their rehearsal dinner there. Berry was now part of their story—and this occurrence is not uncommon. “You see people after work, you see people on weekends, you see them when they’re celebrating, and you see them when they’re down,” he says. “When you bartend in an area for a while, you are part of the community.”
Berry joined Whiskey Kitchen before it opened its doors in August 2016. “I was here before the whiskey was in the building,” he is fond of saying. Founded by Michael Thor and Jeff Mickel, Whiskey Kitchen serves Southern cuisine, craft cocktails and more than 600 whiskeys.
A multiple award-winning bartender, Berry was struck by a sign advertising the new business. “I was walking by the space and was enamored by the name ‘Whiskey Kitchen.’ The sign said, ‘Whiskey Kitchen: a chef’s ballroom,’ and that intrigued me,” he says.
Berry has been making drinks at Whiskey Kitchen ever since, matching flavors, textures and unique techniques to design cocktails.
Johnny’s Tips for Getting Started
He suggests that anyone just beginning to make cocktails should use recipes and measure everything. “When you start improvising, of course you can arrive at something great, but until you practice at it and have an idea of what direction to take, you can also make a lot of beginner’s mistakes,” he said.
That goes for making even simple recipes such as a Manhattan. Berry advises following directions and using quality ingredients before attempting any variations. “As far as creativity goes, once you can make that signature cocktail—once you can make that Manhattan or margarita—then you can start to play around with it,” he said.
One of Berry’s favorite cocktails is scofflaw, a summer whiskey. It is part of the vast repertoire he uses on weekends serving drinks while engaging customers.
Johnny’s Scofflaw Recipe
The word “scofflaw” became prominent in 1924 during a contest that asked people to coin a term to describe a lawless drinker. Whiskey Kitchen uses old world spirits, which means utilizing an old name in rye whiskey—Berry uses Old Overholt—in the drink. Whiskey Kitchen also uses homemade ingredients, such as grenadine made with pomegranate molasses, which is vastly different from most store-bought grenadine (mostly, these are “ just sugar and red dye,” says Berry). Use fresh lemon juice, and French dry vermouth (Berry recommends Dolin). All of this plays well together to make an enlightened summer whiskey drink.
Ingredients
- 2 ounces of bourbon or rye whiskey
- 1 ounce of dry vermouth
- ¼ ounce of lemon juice, freshly squeezed
- ½ ounce of grenadine
- Several dashes of orange bitters
Directions
- Add the whiskey, dry vermouth, lemon juice, grenadine and orange bitters into a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled.
- Strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass. If you feel fancy, garnish it with a lemon zest.
Johnny’s Paper Plane Recipe
A paper plane is another refreshing whiskey drink. Developed around 2007 by Sasha Petraske and Sam Ross of Milk & Honey for The Violet Hour in Chicago (which was owned by their former colleague, Toby Maloney), it’s a riff on the Last Word (which is itself a riff on the Corpse Reviver #2).
The cocktail is made of equal parts bourbon, aperol, amaro and lemon juice. The cocktail’s name is a reference to the M.I.A. track “Paper Planes”, which was apparently a guilty pleasure of Petraske’s.
The paper plane is one of the 89 cocktails on the IBA official list of recognized cocktails. (This list was first published in 1961 and is extremely discriminating in which cocktails it includes.)
The Whiskey Kitchen paper plane ingredients
- ¾ of an ounce of Old Overholt or Rittenhouse rye whiskey
- ¾ of an ounce of Montenegro (Italian amaro)
- ¾ of an ounce of Aperol (of the infamous Aperol Spritz!)
- ¾ of an ounce of fresh lemon juice
Directions
Add all ingredients to the cocktail shaker and shake. Strain into coupe or martini glass.
To learn more about Whiskey Kitchen’s food and its 600+ whiskeys, check out our September/October Chef’s Table Whiskey Kitchen article—which includes their boiled peanuts recipe! A salty snack always tastes good with a cocktail.
