Leftover Booze? This Bar Has a Creative Solution For That.

I recently checked out Oddball, a new bar in New York’s Alphabet City that’s on a mission to “bring out-there flavors down to earth.” In a landscape where bars are serving weird cocktails with wild-sounding sub-ingredients, these drinks, while definitely weird (in a good way!), felt intentional and far from pretentious.

Today’s bartending tools enable cocktails to channel whatever you want them to: butter chicken, ancient traditions, literally the center of the galaxy. When drinks can realistically resemble anything, that can be exciting, but is it also limiting? Is there still room for a happy accident?

Enter: Oddball’s Blind Box Punch. To make it, the bar literally rolls the dice. I spoke with beverage director Logan Rodriguez about how it works, how it helps make use of some leftover booze and R&D scraps, and how it helps staff think on their feet. Read on for his thoughts, plus a hot take about rats in restaurants, an essay on unpaid restaurant work, and more. 

This is an excerpt from Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more stories like this.

Pre Shift: What is the Blind Box Punch, and how does it work?
We make a sheet and assign different aspects of the punch a number from 1 through 8. When I was at Forbidden Planet in the Union Square area, I saw that they had these three dice that were in the primary colors, similar to our color palette for Oddball. I got the dice because I thought it would be a cool tchotchke we could use on the backbar. But then I thought we could use them for drinks. We roll the dice, and that becomes our ingredients.

On the red die, we assign syrups, sweeteners, or sometimes acidified wines. Some examples are squash syrup, fermented honey, and grapefruit cordial. For the blue die, we do liqueurs. For that, I kind of take a minute, sit in the stock room, and ask myself what we need to use up. Then the yellow die is [the] base spirit. That is sometimes bottles that we love and bought, but don’t know what to do with, like Matchbook’s Shady Lady Rum, made with chai, banana, and saffron. The rule is that you have to use those ingredients, and you can add any other ingredients you’d like. 

For this most recent punch, we rolled pisco, homemade plum liqueur—which we have a disconcerting amount of from old stock—and carrot miso. Somehow we made it work! 

This is a fun creative challenge, but is there also a practical reason behind it?
For our backbar, we have a sense of curation and strictness about what we put on it. A lot of the brands are smaller, lesser-known. But our bar took over an existing space, and, behind the scenes, one of the problems we had to solve was that there were already some things that we weren’t exactly excited to carry in stock. There were a lot of bottles left over of unusual liqueurs and various spirits that I personally would not have sought out. So I wanted to try this fateful, serendipitous way [to use the old ingredients up].

Does chance show up in other aspects of the menu?
There is a B side to the Blind Box Punch, which is the R & Daiquiri [a rotating special Daiquiri that’s made with the waste and byproducts of other cocktails and dishes]. That waste could be botanical excess, fruit pulp, or recipes that didn’t end up working but we made a syrup or other ingredient for it and don’t want that to go to waste. I would never claim to be zero-waste, but we work with the kitchen and try to get each other to use whatever we don’t need. Having these drinks on the more experimental side of the menu means there’s less pressure to get it to be the best thing ever. It just has to be delicious and interesting. 

There are also always happy accidents in the process of R&Ding. Some of my favorite things on the menu are drinks that we were struggling to make feel balanced in the way we intended. 

I have this habit, for better or for worse, of doing last-minute swaps. Sometimes I’m like, “What if we did it this way instead? Or swapped two ingredients?” For two of the drinks on our menu right now, the Space Cadet and the Cloud Chamber, we swapped a core ingredient between them from their original recipes, and we ended up liking them both a lot more. I guess we let go of the ego and the planning and artistry and just kind of go, “Let’s just see what happens.” Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do. 

I imagine that it’s also a good exercise for the team to have to regularly be working with unfamiliar ingredients.
Yeah, and it really takes the pressure off. When I first started bartending, I was working at this bar, and we used to play this game during downtime where we would come up with the name of a cocktail and then task ourselves with making a drink that reflects it. There would be some challenge element, like “reverse-engineer this.” I remember one time, one of the bartenders was like, “Logan, I want you to make a drink called Grandma’s Den,” and I went for Scotch and creme de violette. Playing those games made me realize how fun it is to have those challenges.

I have also worked at bars where the manager has been like, “Alright, we need a mezcal drink, and it needs to have this ingredient and this ingredient in it.” Now that I’m running this program, I still crave a little bit of that mission sensibility, I think. What’s really nice about these things is that the task is also to save money and to not waste. I like the challenge of restriction, and this is a good way to do that. 

Responses have been edited and condensed.