The Poet’s Dream Is Ready for the Spotlight

There are several iconic cocktails—from the Bobby Burns to the Singapore Sling to the Vieux Carré—that call on Bénédictine. But despite the cocktail revival’s best efforts, there are dozens more that have remained in obscurity. Shawn Lickliter, owner of the newly opened Vandell in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood, is perhaps the perfect practitioner to steward long-lost drinks made with the liqueur back into the spotlight. 

A devotee of the ingredient’s “honeyed leather notes” since working with vintage expressions of it years ago at the now-shuttered Manzke, Lickliter has been enamored with Bénédictine for nearly a decade. He first encountered it at Normandie Club, where bartenders Alex Day and Devon Tarby were making the Poet’s Dream, a stirred cocktail, based on the Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937). That version of the recipe features a 2:1 ratio of dry gin to dry vermouth, supported by small amounts of Bénédictine and orange bitters. (Another version of the Poet’s Dream, made with an equal-parts ratio, appeared right around the same time in Gale & Marco’s The How and When, published in New Orleans.) Lickliter loved the drink, and he has carried it with him through various jobs ever since, tweaking it many times over to find his optimal spec. Now, at Vandell, his latest Poet’s Dream is a thoughtful, layered take on the one that he first met all those years ago.

To build his ideal recipe, he started with the gin. Though Fords is the standard at Vandell, Lickliter found that this drink shone ever more brightly with No. 3 Gin, a London dry from England’s oldest wine merchants, the Berry Brothers, which Lickliter describes as “super clean.” The gin keeps the non-juniper botanicals to a minimum, while offering a touch of grapefruit.

There’s a wildcard ingredient in this drink: pisco. “Gin can be a bully sometimes when you’re adding in a liqueur like Bénédictine,” he says. By splitting the base spirit, “you’re kind of backing down the juniper, but you’re also lifting the Bénédictine.” The pisco he uses is Capurro Quebranta, a smooth, herbal expression that brings notes of stone fruit and pear.