Austin Hennelly, the 35-year-old bar director at Kato, a Taiwanese restaurant in Los Angeles, likens tasting bitter melon to “happening the drop of a curler coaster.” Sipping the fruit’s juice — which is the star ingredient in his Backyard Tonic, a mocktail he considers the very best drink on Kato’s menu — is, he says, “a bit bit disagreeable and possibly a bit bit scary, but it surely’s exhilarating, and then you definitely simply need to do it once more.”
Bitter melon, which is definitely a member of the gourd household, has lengthy been a staple of Asian, African and Caribbean cuisines. The Chinese language selection is a luminous cactus inexperienced with rounded ends and furrows. The Indian model is darker and coated in jagged spikes. Each varieties are virtually all the time eaten cooked and have the agency chew of sautéed bell pepper with a grassy style that provides strategy to a supremely bitter, medicinal tang — like a pain-relief tablet that’s misplaced its coating. Now, mixologists are harnessing that excessive taste so as to add punch and steadiness to cocktails.
On the Chinese language-Irish lounge Jade & Clover in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Bitter Candy is a more energizing tackle the Jungle Fowl, a Tiki basic, with bitter melon changing Campari. “I juice it — pores and skin, seeds and all,” says bartender Gelo Honrade, 40, who blends the slurry with pineapple and orange juices and Mekhong rum. The outcome: a candy begin adopted by a end harking back to cold-pressed kale. Like that of a Negroni, its pungent tail calls for one other sip to seek out the candy hit once more.
At COA, a cocktail bar in Hong Kong specializing in agave spirits, founder Jay Khan, 38, opts for the much less frequent, barely mellower white bitter melon in his Bitter Melon Collins. “We need to steadiness attention-grabbing and approachable,” he says. At Rangoon, a Burmese restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the chef Myo Moe, 51, muddles slices of Chinese language bitter melon in her Satt Kha, a spicy twist on a vodka mule that’s the best-selling drink on the menu. And at Watson in Vancouver, the bar supervisor, Jordan Coelho, 29, makes his personal model of Campari out of dried bitter melon and goji berries for his rum-based riff on a Negroni, the Valley of Concern, which arrives underneath a cloud of smoked oak.
Natives of Okinawa, a Japanese island between the East China and Philippine Seas, are significantly enamored with bitter melon, or, because it’s known as there, goya. Some credit score the lengthy lives of the locals to the bumpy gourd, which can have therapeutic properties, together with, some research have urged, the power to guard in opposition to most cancers and diabetes; there’s even a vacation devoted to the fruit. It was a 2019 journey to Okinawa that impressed the Italian spirit makers Benedetta Santinelli, 28, and Simone Rachetta, 47, to create Amaro Yuntaku, which is infused with bitter melon as a substitute of the digestif’s typical mix of herbs, roots and aromatics. Manufactured in a distillery in Lazio, Italy, from Japanese elements, it’s at the moment solely obtainable in Europe, however the founders plan to increase distribution to the US later this 12 months. Santinelli explains that the identify comes from the Okinawan phrase for “chatting,” which is shouted on the finish of a meal to cue the waiter to deliver drinks. “When the drinks come,” she says, “then you definitely begin the occasion.”
