DECEMBER 10, 2009 -- Cowboy Star bartender Garth Flood improvised his way to a close win in the first Preiss Imports Cocktail Competition, held Tuesday night at downtown’s El Dorado Cocktail Lounge.
Eight local bartenders battled though a NCAA basketball-style bracket to compete for the title. Each had to create cocktails on the fly, using pre-determined base liquors and adding their own choice of ingredients.
Flood says he didn’t necessarily begin the night with a firm game plan. “I really had no idea coming in,” he says. “I don’t have names for the drinks I made—it was all spur of the moment. I took the ingredients that were here and modified them.”
The bartenders’ concoctions were graded by a panel of five judges. “Garth took some risks and pulled out a win,” says judge Sarah Daoust, managing editor of 944 magazine. “All these bartenders seemed very focused, and took this very seriously.” Daoust says her favorite cocktail was a drink called an Orange Eyeball.
El Dorado Cocktail Lounge first opened its doors last November. It’s owned by twin brothers Marshall and Matt Stanton, their older brother Nate, and Ryan Koontz, lead singer of local band Dirty Sweet.
El Dorado is in a fairly undeveloped part of downtown, on Broadway between Tenth and Eleventh streets. For decades, the bar was, as Marshall Stanton describes it, a “nasty dive” called Hong Kong. The new management group cleaned it up. The exterior façade is still a little foreboding. But inside there are Western cowboy and Indian prints on the wall, mirrors behind the bar and a huge, white buffalo head mounted above a juke box (the buffalo’s name is Otis.)
When El Dorado first opened, the bartenders were mixing “craft” cocktails. There were 16 on a specialty menu, and all the muddling and mixing and extra production was taking too long. The menu now holds five special drinks that are less craft and more “classic,” says Stanton.
They’re classic, but with updated twists. Consider the El Dorado Old Fashioned. The traditional liquor in an old fashioned is bourbon whiskey. But while surfing the Web one day, Stanton found a brand of 12-year-old rum called El Dorado. And that became the base for the cocktail.
El Dorado’s specialty drink list was pared to 5 (but there’s also a “bartender’s choice” listed, so they will go off the menu for special requests). The classic cocktails are $9 at night and $5 during Happy Hour, which runs until 9 p.m. every night. Even when there’s not a cocktail contest underway.
