I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Horseradish Highball

The Horse Apple, a cocktail created by Giuseppe González at the now-closed New York icon Suffolk Arms, didn’t really conform to any classic template. “I would call it a misfit,” says Jesse Hedberg, owner of Providence’s Club Frills. Hedberg had tried the cocktail—a mix of your spirit of choice and Granny Smith apple juice with horseradish grated on top—years ago. “That drink always affected me in its simplicity and how strange it was. It was really delicious.”

Years later, when he was gearing up to open his own bar, Hedberg knew he wanted to pay homage to the oddball recipe—with a twist. Club Frills belongs to the wave of laidback, ironic bars with a vibe that we’ve described in the past as “studied nonchalance.” Cheeky flavors and a retro, divey aesthetic (complete with a claw machine in the back corner) disguise how much work goes into the cocktails. Take, for example, the High Horse, Hedberg’s riff. In his take, the Granny Smith apple juice gets retooled with some acid-adjusting, and the horseradish is transformed into an aromatic hydrosol (a water-based distillate). The base is Żubrówka’s bison grass vodka, a nod to the Eastern European flavor profile of the drink, and Club Frills force carbonates the whole thing into a highball. 

Much like Hedberg with the Horse Apple, I keep thinking about this version of the drink: the tangy smack of apple, the nose-tingling bite of horseradish, the duo combining into a wild ride of a cocktail. I thought it was unlike anything I’d ever had before. My Jewish boyfriend, meanwhile, took one sip and said it tasted like a seder, like when a little bit of the charoset mingles with the horseradish on your plate. (Hedberg, too, told me “apple and horseradish is a very classic combo.” News to me!) Novel or nostalgic, we both agreed it was our favorite thing we’d drank in a long time.

Unless you have fancy distillation equipment and a library of acid powders, to get the real High Horse, you’ll need to head to Providence. But Hedberg has given me a home-friendly recipe if you can’t make it just yet. As an alternative to the hydrosol, this version goes full circle and, like González’s drink, gets a finishing grating of horseradish. “It’s an ode to the original,” he says.