How to make a perfect Red Coral

Left L.A. around five yesterday afternoon so with the three hour time difference by the time I got to the Ko´a Kea hotel along Po´ipu Beach in Kauai it was almost midnight, West Coast time, but only around nine in Hawaii. So I was kind of hungry, but not really. I thought maybe I’d just sit at the hotel’s restaurant bar, the Red Salt, and have a couple of pupus and maybe a glass of wine and then trundle off to bed.

So I’m looking at the cocktail menu, searching for the wines by the glass, when I come across a page listing the house specialties. Now I’m a sucker for interesting cocktails. In fact, when I travel, I only bring home two types of souvenirs: sea salt and cocktail recipes. I probably have at least twenty unique sea salts. But I have well over two hundred one-of-a-kind cocktail recipes. I figure some day I’ll put them all in a book and call it something like Drinks I Have Known. You know the classic Sinatra tune, “My Way”? Well, to paraphrase Ol’ Blue Eyes, Bad cocktails, I’ve had a few/But then again, too few to mention.

Anyway, the bartender, who looks a bit like Karl Malden back when he was doing “The Streets of San Francisco,” comes over and the first thing he does is what the classic old-timey bartenders always used to do which is to take a clean cloth and wipe the bar in front of me until it’s spotless. I like this. I also really like, in general, bartenders, like this guy, who look like they may have been mixing martinis back in the Mad Men era. You just have to figure that a guy who has really made a career out of mixing drinks but would laugh if you ever called him a mixologist probably could make a pretty damn fine cocktail, and I love damn fine cocktails.

(Sidenote: One of these days, maybe soon, I’m going to tell you how to make the perfect Manhattan—not a perfect Manhattan, which is made with equal parts dry and sweet vermouth, but the perfect Manhattan, which is made with equal parts Dubonet and sweet vermouth. You’d think that it would be impossible to screw up this cocktail since it has only three ingredients and is simple to make, but I’ve ordered them at a hundred different bars over the years and have only had maybe one or two really good ones, the best being at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. But that’s a different story.)

So the bartender, whose name is Jim, finishes buffing up the bar, puts a single white cloth cocktail napkin carefully in front of me, and asks me what I’d like.

“You got something special?” I ask.

“Yes, sir,” he says without a moment’s hesitation. “A Red Coral.”

Great name, right? I mean, I have no idea what it is, but it just sounds great. Red Coral. Sometimes the drink makes the name. I mean, not to regress, but would a Manhattan taste as fine if it had been called Queens or Bronx? No, sir. No one would ever order a Bronx straight up.

Of course, I order the Red Coral. And Jim makes it right in front of me, another thing I really like. I don’t trust bartenders who go down to the end of the bar and use a bunch of bottles and mixes I can’t see down by the ice sink. It’s just not right. If you’re using good quality ingredients, make the damn drink in front of your customer. That’s what I say.

Another thing I really like: Jim free pours. No guns measuring out a perfect one-ounce shot of some crappy unnamed booze. He tips a bottle up and I silently give it the “one-and-a-two-and-a-three” count, which gives you a good shot-and-a-half pour. Pours everything into a classic steel cocktail shaker, mixes it up good, puts a strainer on it, and pours the frothy red mixture into a good-sized martini glass until the liquid almost starts weeping over the rim of the glass. Damn fine pour.

The drink is a marvel. Boozy (it’s got three different types of Stoli vodka in it) and sweet-tart (the fruit component is a little pomegranate juice with just a touch of grenadine for sweetness). And in the Red Salt bar, with its clean white-and-black décor, the color of the drink just seems right. Like a crimson bikini on a white sand beach.

The only problem I had with it was that it went down so smoothly that, after eight or nine hours of travel and very little food, I was toast before my pupus came. Still, it was worth it. And, fortunately, it was a short walk beneath a full moon to my room.

Ko´a Kea Red Coral

In a cocktail shaker with chipped ice, add:

– 1 1/2 ounces of Stoli vanilla vodka

– 1/2 ounce Stoli cranberry vodka

– 1/2 ounce Stoli raspberry vodka

– 3/4 ounce pomegranate juice

– a splash of grenadine

Shake it up good in the cocktail shaker and strain into a martini glass. The drink will be frothy at first—almost like a smoothie—but then slowly settles into a deep crimson