When is an old fashioned not an old fashioned? When you order it from Ponte Beverage Director and Sommelier Tyler Wolff, who uses dark kokuto sugar and walnut bitters and amaro instead of simple syrup for a nutty, smoky, caramelly evolution of the classic cocktail staple.
Wolff, this year’s MICHELIN Guide Florida Exceptional Cocktails Award Winner, is behind the Tampa spot’s radical drink menu, split down the middle with parallel classic and modern preparations of the bartender’s canon.
Yes, he can make you an excellent cosmo, but he can also make you one that sings, with lavender vodka and white cranberry juice, tweaks just clever enough to keep the drink feeling familiar and boundary-pushing at the same time.
“Everybody's comfortable with the cosmo, everybody's comfortable with the margarita, everybody's comfortable with an old fashioned. What are some things that we can focus on to keep things similar stylistically, but at the same time, allow people to try something new?” Wolff says.
In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Wolff talks designing an iconoclastic drink list, his path through the restaurant world, and how he worked foie gras into one of Ponte’s most popular cocktails.
What was the idea behind a menu with modern spins on classic cocktails?
We're guest-forward. Providing for the guests is the most important thing for us—they’re why we keep our lights on and why we’ve become an important restaurant. It’s great to have a bartender make a cool cocktail, something that's super eclectic, all of the above. But at the end of the day, is that going to be something that the guest is going to order? When we talk about making differences between classic and modern cocktails, we want to change small things along the way without making a completely different drink. Maintaining the identity of what a cosmo is originally, or an old fashioned, or a Manhattan, or a margarita—keeping that identity, but at the end of the day, making a twist.
What’s an emblematic option from your menu?
One of the ones that I always like to highlight is probably our staple, the old fashioned. Obviously, everybody's very comfortable with an old fashioned—it’s a super old cocktail that's been done mostly the same way—with some differences—throughout the years. For our take on it, we use a Suntory Toki whiskey, which is a Japanese whiskey. It brings a different style, a small presence of smokiness to the cocktail without having to have the cocktail smoked in any way. Where you often see people using demerara sugar, we use kokuto sugar, which is a dark black, very strong, concentrated brown sugar that you can find in Asian markets. We also use black walnut bitters to bring out some more nutty flavors and to emphasize the little bit of nuttiness that you get from the sugar itself. Our twist on the drink is that instead of adding a simple syrup—because the cocktail is so simple anyway—we add Montenegro, which is an amaro that’s a little bit more on the higher-sugar-content side of amaro. We just use a small portion of that to fill the spot of simple syrup while also adding another layer of flavor. It becomes a very complex cocktail with all the small, nuanced pieces to it, which just takes an old fashioned up a notch.
How did you get your start in cocktails?
I've worked for Chef Chris Ponte (the Chef/owner of Ponte) for 13 years. I started working at Cafe Ponte and it's been a great ride. I started bussing tables, worked up to server, eventually becoming a bartender and manager.
When I started working at Cafe Ponte, learning about cocktails and wine had the largest learning curve. As I focused on studying, I realized that balance is at the core of what makes a beverage high quality. Creating that balance is what makes a wine or a cocktail special. My first real experience making cocktails for a menu was when we opened Olivia. We spent time as a team making an Italian-inspired menu from scratch. Learning about Italian cocktails inspired me and I started diving more into how cultures have their own classics and make cocktails their own.
I’ve been grateful to be a part of three restaurant openings: On Swann, Olivia, and now Ponte. Curating the beverage programs has become part of my focus and one of the most rewarding parts of working in restaurants for me.
How has your taste changed over time?
As with everyone, I started by ordering mostly drinks where you couldn't taste the spirit, but rather a lot of the other flavors. Eventually, learning about the effort distillers put into spirits, I began to appreciate all of the flavors that different spirits bring. Now, I like to enjoy something someone else created or something I've never had.
Foie gras in a cocktail? Explain.
We see a lot of people nowadays doing milk punches or fat washing, or they're making their own bitters or different unique touches. With us being a more elevated style of dining, we wanted to figure out how to infuse some specialty ingredients into our cocktails. So we take the foie gras, a small portion rendered down to a complete fat, and then overnight, let it blend with the WhistlePig rye. It’s a small fat wash process, you're just mixing the two liquids. And then when you freeze it, the foie gras fat separates from the spirit, but it adds texture and imparts the flavor of the foie gras. When we blend everything else with it, we're looking to add other flavors, such as Averna, a little bit of chocolate, and then a kick of vermouth.
It's a mixture between an old fashioned and a Manhattan, kind of a play on both of those styles and ingredients, while adding the element of foie gras. That flavor comes down on the back end. You pick it up in the aromatics and the nose, where most of your sense of taste comes from, and then you go ahead and get the rest of the flavor on the back end. It's one of those that you taste for a minute or two after your first initial sip.
Hero image: Tyler Wolff
