The newest Bloody Mary in Brooklyn is a thoughtfully stripped-down affair. Photo: Max Flatow
We are few, we are passionate. We are the drinkers of evening Bloody Marys. We are used to be being scoffed at; we are used to even our compliments coming with a breeze of backhand. “My grandmother always had Bloodies at night,” says Nick Perkins, the co-owner of the restaurant group whose new oyster bar, Zig Zag, just opened in Brooklyn. Of course, age brings wisdom. “She’s the reason I love oysters,” Perkins explains. “She was from New Orleans, and she always ordered them both whenever they were on the menu.”
If I ordered oysters every time they were on a menu, I would eat nothing else, but I do order a Bloody whenever it is available. Every August, like clockwork, the tomatogyrics begin, and since the BLT has been amply advocated for, let me offer this modest bit of evangelism instead: The Bloody Mary is a perfect and appetizing evening drink. It makes no sense at brunch, where it has been marooned.
“You and I are very much aligned on that,” says Nialls Fallon, Perkins’s co-owner in Zig Zag and the group’s other restaurants and the man managing their bar programs. “If it’s light enough and bright enough, it can really complement food.”
The brunch Bloody has swelled to insupportable proportions: overcomplicated, sludgily thick, and trimmed with as many baubles as a Christmas tree. “It’s kind of like a meal in and of itself, which was always kind of bewildering to me,” Fallon says. “Brunch tends to be a very heavy meal, either sweet or meaty or a combination of all those things, and to pile on top of that this very heavy drink?”
With seafood, however? At Zig Zag, I had a platter of small Massachusetts Moon Shoal oysters the shape of long, narrow fingernails, served only with lemon and a bottle of hot sauce — no mignonette. All the more reason for that unloved but lovable cocktail: a lemony, umami-rich, perky, snappy, albeit pared-down Bloody Mary. Drawing on the simpler Bloodys of his Florida dive-bar youth, Fallon stripped Zig Zag’s to its barest essentials before building back up. The base is Sacramento tomato juice, lightly diluted; like ketchup, a Bloody base is the rare ingredient not improved by being homemade. Worcestershire and Tabasco went in; horseradish went out. Lemon twice, in the mix and again when the cocktail is built. Earthier white pepper subs in for the usual black pepper, and a secret dash of paprika adds a warm, rusty note. There’s no celery stick, though there is celery salt. The only garnish is a spear of two pimento-stuffed olives for a bracing brininess.
It can be made with vodka or without, which is how I took mine. It worked just as well with half a pound of peel-and-eat shrimp, their shells stained with paprika, as it did with crab dip and crackers, cutting through the cheesy fat. Or it was delightful with boiled potatoes with horseradish vinaigrette. “The Bloody Mary is kind of singular in the way it really has a lot of the flavor profiles that the food has,” Fallon says.
See the light. Join our movement. Restore the Bloody to its rightful place in the nighttime; it is, after all, closer to gazpacho than to a martini. What it is not, Fallon tells me, is “our top seller by any stretch of the imagination — but there are people who really love it or appreciate it, and we see you.”
