Magnolia Got Your Tongue?

Leaving the Brakes Bar in June, I clapped the door shut behind me. I wasn’t dying to return to the Baton Rouge summer, where it was still somehow afternoon, but I feared what sunlight would do to the windowless cocktail lounge in which I’d just passed an hour or so.

There’d be one beautiful effect, at least: glimmers, rainbows, and refractions through the vintage decanters along mixologist Alan Walter's bartop. But other elements thrive in the dim room: lurid photos of waterfalls, votives glowing in an antique rollerskate, two white ceramic cats, and a framed photo of someone who is not Lou Ferrigno or Andre the Giant but like them. (Apologies, I was just barely born in the ‘80s. I am still so young!) “I like themes of family and reuse,” said Walter.

Walter built a following among choosy noses of New Orleans’s cocktail scene during stints at the restaurant Iris and, more recently, Loa, inside the International House Hotel. For a drinker tired of mass-market swill or stale classics, along came a bartender capable of startling your palate with the likes of pine liqueur and dandelion root.

The Hammond native is a recent transplant to Baton Rouge, referred by his brother-in-law Michael diResto to the restaurateurs at City Group Hospitality. “I joke that they didn’t know what to do with me, so they put me out back,” said Walter. He’s taken up shop in the Brakes, which stands behind City Group’s shiny Spoke & Hub restaurant along Government Street and formerly served as an office space. He calls it “a neighborhood honky-tonk cocktail parlor.” On my second visit there, as guitarist Victor Vignes and fiddler Carrie Deyo harmonized on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at the corner booth, I swooned over an aperitif of mastika (a sweet Mediterranean liqueur derived from resin), white wine, sparkling water, green olives, and a tuft of oregano. Walter snips his herbs from open vases on the bar, a neighborly hedge between him and his patrons.

"Alan has really opened a portal to something special at the Brakes, where you are getting more than a drink or a song. You are getting something peculiar, homey, upscale, tailored to lock into your pleasure centers.” —Alex Cook

“My first visit [to the Brakes Bar], I was enthralled,” said writer, musician, and longtime Country Roads contributor Alex Cook, “I accidentally said aloud, ‘I want to play here.’ The bartender at the time overheard me and said: come next Sunday, and I’ve been playing there almost every week since. Alan has really opened a portal to something special at the Brakes, where you are getting more than a drink or a song. You are getting something peculiar, homey, upscale, tailored to lock into your pleasure centers.”

For Clarke Gernon, the custom experience has been collaborating with Walter on a revival of the Ramos Gin Fizz, a chilled, creamy, and voluminous marvel from the turn of the century that’ll make little apples of your bartender’s biceps in the twelve minutes’ shaking it takes to achieve proper emulsion. Gernon, architect at the local firm Remson Haley Herpin and former President of the Baton Rouge Blues Festival, admits a passion for “the untold stories of Baton Rouge.” In one of his habitual riflings through local archives, Gernon learned that the Fizz, famous to New Orleans, could actually claim its origins in downtown Baton Rouge, where Henry Carl Ramos—known as a New Orleans legend and the drink’s founder—operated the Capitol Saloon from 1880 to 1888, before his New Orleans succes. Gernon discovered that French Vice Counsel and liquor store owner Philippe Machet, who ran his business a few doors down from Capitol Saloon, passed Ramos a recipe he’d concocted to market some of his wares–egg, cream, gin, citrus–deeming the saloon owner better suited to serve up the drink as demand grew. “In addition to being an untold Baton Rouge story, it’s also a wildly popular cocktail of a different time that has not had a resurgence,” said Gernon.

[Read Lucie Monk Carter's interview with bartender Brea Frederick here.]

“Ramos has an ambivalent reputation in New Orleans. It’s not going through a hip phase. It’s very time consuming and takes up all your shakers. And it is an extra step for a bar to have fresh cream, to have fresh eggs, fresh lemon, fresh lime. But that's no excuse not to make a great drink,” said Walter.

In making his own version, Walter knew where respect was due. “It’s almost like walking around a beautiful piece of art. How would I do anything differently here? I realized this is a drink that [could] wear a crown of something on its head and still be its total self.”

Walter went with a floral wreath, infusing magnolia blossoms in the grape-based G’vine gin. Early efforts were bitter, sloppy, soapy, or just not true to the scent. I had the pleasure of tasting the successful product, in its full fizzy form–like a cold cloud, not a fleck of ice.  Walter made twenty-four bottles of the infusion, before the summer’s heat folded his source of magnolia blooms.

“It’s almost like walking around a beautiful piece of art. How would I do anything differently here? I realized this is a drink that [could] wear a crown of something on its head and still be its total self.” —Alan Walter

Thankfully, he has other vegetation at his fingertips. My husband opted for the kumquat-satsuma old fashioned after paging through the album in which Walter keeps his menu, with individual drink options pasted onto Playboy Bunny playing cards and tucked into plastic sleeves. “Lay of the Land” is one category, described as “farm fresh, spiritous libations lending themselves to every occasion and any time of day.”

[Look back at Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's preview of Spoke 'n' Hub in our January 2022 issue here.]

“In winter, we did a margarita that had longleaf pine needles. I wanted that feeling of walking in the woods in the South,” said Walter. That took nothing more than grinding the needles with a very powerful blender right into the syrup, keeping that resin, no cooking, no nothing.”

Gernon praises Walter’s approach to blending spirits–an art, not a science, that accesses a broader Louisiana than classic New Orleans cocktails. “We’re a very agriculturally-oriented state,” said Gernon, who grew up around his family’s Christmas tree farm, Shady Pond, in Pearl River.

“I think people are fascinated with the idea of tasting their environments,” added Walter. 

Visit The Brakes Bar at Spoke & Hub in Baton Rouge, open Tuesday–Saturday 3 pm–11 pm and Sunday from 2 pm–8 pm. spokeandhubbr.com/brakes-bar.