Cocktails with Richard Kovacs at B@1

I remember as a kid I saw the movie cocktail with Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown and Elisabeth Shue. I don`t think I got the full impact of that movie till years later when I grew up, but I do remember having a crush on tom cruise and loving all the party atmosphere that this film showed. Until a year ago I was enjoying the immense pleasure of working behind a bar making cocktails.

In my opinion there are two different categories of cocktail making, mixology and flair bartending.

The first is the pure art of mixing drinks, where as the later is more for show. The art of entertaining. Both categories have their merits, but in the end I remain a purist. To me mixology is where the chef meets the barman, add to that hundreds of people in front of you begging you to make them drinks after drinks, the music pumping, the occasional flirt from a sexy young lady, and you’re a rock star. Life for a barman can be good, and before you know it you’re feeling like tom cruise in cocktail.

Yesterday I went to London and visited my favourite cocktail bar, The B@1 Soho. B@1 is a chain of cocktail bars that open their doors for the first time in may 1998 in Battersea Rise London. 13 years and 9 more bars later, B@1 is a brand name well known in London and still growing. I remember the first time I set foot in the b@1 Soho, what a welcome I got it was fantastic, so much so that next weekend I brought a few friends with me, and boy did we have a blast, but that’s a whole different story.

Let me introduce you to young Richard Kovacs. Richard does both classic mixology and flair bartending. He was studying to become a computer engineer and started bartending only as a means of earning extra cash to enter BMX competition (if you don’t know what BMX is follow link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMX)

What Richard likes about his job at the B@1 is the chance of creating new drinks, meeting new people and like anyone in the bartending industry making people happy.

Today Richard is showing us how to make a planter’s punch.

Planter’s Punch:

1.25oz of black seal gosling’s rum

0.25oz grenadine syrup

0.5oz lime juice

3oz orange juice

Fill your serving glass with ice and set aside. In a cocktail shaker add rum, lime juice, grenadine and orange juice. Shake then pour over ice. Decorate with a slice of orange. Enjoy.

(Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_cocktails)

We will be visiting B@1 regularly to see what young Richard Kovacs and his other team mates have in store for us.

 Enjoy the video and don`t forget to comment.