Park City Area Restaurant Association’s Savor the Cocktail contest is nearing the halfway point, and a few drinks are already rising above the rest.
In the top spots as of Tuesday are Hearth and Hill’s “Dragon Ball Z,” Cena Ristorante & Lounge’s “Cena Old Fashion” and reigning champion Handle’s “Gin & Juice.”
There are 19 mixologists across the association’s members entered into this year’s contest, an annual event that started more than 20 years ago. The contest runs all of July, and the online-format voting will end at 5 p.m. on July 31.
A spicy new competitor
In its first year in the contest, just trailing the leaders, is Palomino’s “Mountain Town Martini” created by Beverage Director Ashley Smith.
Palomino is the newest bar in town, a modern, cocktail-forward space that opened on Main Street in January.
“When you come in here, you’re expecting to get cool, fun drinks that have character to them,” Smith said. “It’s just a cool spot that I feel like Park City needed and has a vibe that I don’t think that a lot of other places have.”
Getting traction in the midst of spring construction was hard for business, Smith said, and now that the work is paused for the summer, the July Savor the Cocktail contest arrived at the perfect time to welcome people in.
Eager to demonstrate what the bar can do, Smith was ambitious and experimental with her drink.
The rules require sourcing at least two ingredients locally, so Smith walked down Main and found two neighboring businesses to incorporate: Alpine Distilling and Mountain Town Olive Oil.
An olive oil martini was something she’d always wanted to try, but Utah liquor laws made it challenging.
“It’s just a little hard in Utah because most of the time if you do an olive oil martini, it’s usually a fat-washed cocktail,” said Smith.
Fat-washing is a mixology technique where the chosen spirit is infused in a chosen fat source to integrate the flavors and aromas, then re-bottled. But re-bottling is illegal in Utah, said Smith, a Reno native who learned to adjust to the state’s limitations when she moved here 14 years ago.
Instead, the drink had to be made by adding the olive oil directly to the shaker. Rather than go for a classic olive oil, Smith decided to incorporate the spice of Mountain Town’s Baklouti Green Chili Olive Oil.
Then it came down to “knowing what flavors go well with other flavors, and pineapple and chili work really, really well together,” she said. “I probably remade this cocktail like 40 times.”
The final product is a blend of the olive oil, Alpine Gin, green Chartreuse, St. Germain, pineapple juice, lime juice and simple syrup — a tart and spicy, smooth and creamy creation with a balance that lets the olive oil shine, both the balm and the burn. Like a bite into a tajin-dusted pineapple, it burns so good.
And the garnish, a jalapeño cotton candy, is where Smith’s originality really sings.
“Dehydrated jalapeños, turn it into a dust, mix it with sugar and make cotton candy out of it,” she said of the process.
Perhaps it was too ambitious, Smith said with a sigh — making cotton candy in-house for the drink has been its own headache. But the wow factor is certainly there.
The drink can be ordered through July 31 at Palomino, open every day at 4:30 p.m. and now open Saturday and Sunday for brunch at 11:30 a.m.
“(The contest) reignited this passion in me of, ‘This is the coolest town and there’s the coolest people running it, and there’s really small businesses that can get overlooked sometimes,'” she said. “It really started something in me, like, you’ve got to support each other.”
Two drinks, one mixologist
Four years ago, the Savor the Cocktail contest expanded their month-long competition to include mocktails, a separate category also eligible for the $500 first-place prize and bragging rights.
Since then, though, not many mixologists try their hand at crafting a mocktail: This year, only two are in the running — Handle’s “Juice” and Hearth and Hill’s “Spirit Bomb.”
Handle’s mixologist, Reagan Chung, won the contest last year in both cocktail and mocktail categories, and Hearth and Hill’s mixologist Scott Stebbings is hoping to unseat him with his dragon fruit creation.
This is Stebbings’ first year entering a drink in the contest, though Hearth and Hill have participated in past years, submitting both a cocktail and a mocktail named for the Japanese anime series “Dragon Ball Z,” one of his favorites.
The names, “Dragon Ball Z” and “Spirit Bomb,” are a nod to the drink’s use of dragon fruit, as well as paying homage to the recent death in March of series creator Akira Toriyama, Stebbings said.
Using dragon fruit was the first piece of the puzzle for Stebbings two drinks.
“I love dragon fruit. I do think it’s a really cool fruit, just like the look of it, because it looks like something that’s almost poisonous in a way,” he said. “Being a cactus fruit is not something you can really expect, … and I really liked the color, because it looks really nice for the summer.”
His decision to enter a mocktail along with his cocktail was in part inspired by the restaurant’s family-based clientele.
“We have a lot of kids that come in,” he said. “It’s just important to have something like that on the menu anyway because not everyone wants to or can drink and shouldn’t feel forced to be left out. … Any way to make people feel included, I think, is the important thing.”
The drink is a pink dragon fruit sparkling lemonade, made with lemongrass simple syrup, lemon juice, dragon fruit simple syrup, soda water and orange blossom water. The two locally sourced ingredients were Telegraph Bee Co. Wasatch Range Honey and Mountain Town Olive Oil Lime Fresco Salt, made into a saline solution with a touch of salt to balance the sweet.
At $6, it’s a fun, house-made refresher with a Barbie-pink color, easy to make even at home, said Stebbings.
It’s currently in the lead, 4% ahead of Chung’s “Juice” mocktail in the contest, but anything can change over the second half of the month.
And “Dragon Ball Z,” Stebbings’ cocktail, is also beating Chung’s “Gin & Juice” in the cocktail portion.
The rum-based drink just has four ingredients: Park City Proverbial Spirits’ rum, Licor 43, dragon fruit simple syrup and lime juice. The second local ingredient, Atticus Teas “In Cold Blood” loose leaf tea, is frozen in the ice cube.
“Doing anything manipulating the ice is always fun,” he said.
When it came to creating the drink, he landed on rum as the best pairing for the dragon fruit, starting with essentially a margarita and stripping away or replacing different elements. The goal for him is always simplicity.
“I like making drinks that are very easy to make. Anyone can make it, the only hard part would just be the dragon fruit,” he said. “I don’t like complicated things; I think it’s unnecessary. And I feel like it makes it more creative but less creative at the same time. It’s a nice balance.”
The end result is a candy-sweet summer sipper with wide appeal and sporting an edible flower and lime wheel garnish. It’s sweet enough to be nostalgic, recalling memories of watching “Dragon Ball Z” while munching on a packet of skittles.
Both Stebbings drinks are available for purchase at Hearth and Hill through the end of this month, open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Vote for Smith and Stebbings’ creations, or any of the other cocktails and mocktails, on parkcityrestaurants.com/specials-events/cocktail-contest and parkcityrestaurants.com/specials-events/mocktail-contest, respectively. Each person with a valid email address can vote once on each drink, and voting ends July 31 at 5 p.m.