- SEARCH OUR SITE -  ABOUT US - ADVERTISING - SUBSCRIPTION  - CONTACT US - BUSINESS INDEX - PHOTO LIBRARY  - OTHER MAGAZINES -

 

VOL. 12.2

ARCHIVES:

By Simon J. Hand
 

There was an audible intake of breath from the rest of the table as we awaited the latest diatribe. But it didn’t come. Shelly just sighed and looked out over the sea to where the last glimmers of the sun were slipping behind some low-lying cumulus.
 

Before setting out for a night around the island, we were at that moment contemplating the last sips of an excellent concoction blended by Chanwut Pansuwan, award-winning barman at the Dusit Laguna’s Horizon Lounge. Emerald Guava, he called the cocktail – a mingling of Jim Beam, blue and orange Currabu, guava, lychee and lemon juice. Sitting out on the deck, the dying rays of the day conspiring with the warm glow from within, I couldn’t help but think that maybe Shelly was onto something. So, to the barely controlled astonishment of Julia and Steve, I waved my guava-shell goblet in Shelly’s direction and said, “Huh?”

“Well, look at the situation,” Shelly bounced back. “Superb sunset. Exotic, elegant surroundings. It all makes these cocktails all the more…” Shelly at a loss for words. A new phenomenon. “Yeah, yeah,” Steve interjected, suddenly warming to the subject. “You wouldn’t want to be drinking something like this in the Pig and Whistle in Hackney or some voguey club in New York. It wouldn’t taste right. (Wouldn’t look right, either). You’d want a pint of stout or a Tom Collins or…” “The cocktail to suit the occasion,” Julia said, raising her guava and quickly summing up what was about to become a Steve ramble. Raising our guavas, we called out to Chanwut for refills.
 

By the time we reached Patong, our previously easy-going night out had developed into a Mission. Chanwut’s guava extravaganza had won him top honours at the National Thailand Bartender Contest earlier in the year, and it was obviously a cocktail inspired by his surroundings. But were there other places around the island that inspired similar synergies of libation and location? It was going to be a long night – made longer by Steve’s incessant humming of the theme from Mission Impossible.
 

We were sorely tested that evening. Far too many bars in Patong seem to think that creating a sickly confection in neon orange or electric blue, and then labelling it with some combination of “Phuket” or “paradise” and “sunrise” or “sunset”, gave them licence to serve anything they liked. In fact most of the cocktails, regardless of what they were called, tasted exactly the same. Mind you, the locations were also boring, so perhaps these cocktails were only appropriate.

After several false starts we finally stumbled up to Mango’s, a new bar overlooking Soi Bangla, the infamous lane of many ladies (and not-exactly-ladies), from a railed rooftop. The bar is all stylish neon decor, electric atmosphere and sharp sounds. “This is more like it,” Steve grunted, rubbing his hands together as he perused the cocktail list.

Though Mango’s choice of cocktails failed to match the promise of the d้cor – it was just a basic list of Mai Tais, Margaritas, Black Russians, Blue Hawaiians and so on (not to mention the seemingly ubiquitous Phuket Paradise) – we soon warmed to the solid satisfaction of a cocktail well-made by the dashing and dapper Mario. It was a close-run thing, but eventually everyone concurred that the Pina Colada took the gold over the interestingly named Tequila Sunlide (take a guess). Shelly’s PC sensibilities went on the warpath when our drinks arrived in glasses shaped like a woman’s torso, but we managed to convince her that, from the bar’s Olympian perspective on Bangla, these glasses were merely an ironic geste.

Julia was neglecting her Mai Tai, so drawn was she to the multi-coloured hurly-burly passing below. “You’re telling me that’s a man?” she exclaimed, pointing to a strikingly beautiful, feather head-dressed, besequined bikini’d katoey, elegantly stiletto-strutting down the road – not in the least out of place among the batik-printed, rubbernecking out-of-towners. “Why not?” slurred Shelly, her cockeyed grin about to wrap itself around the lip of her naked-lady glass. Steve took to launching peanuts at the balding heads of the Dieters and Marios below, but quit when he accidentally missed his target and the nut rattled into the depths of a Valkyrian cleavage. Fortunately, the owner of said cleavage didn’t seem to notice. “Oops,” Steve mumbled, suddenly taking new interest in his Tequila Sunlide.

Maybe it was all the drinks, but it seemed that the sub-Vegas glitz and overheated testosterone tinge of Patong was making us a little loopy. So we waved our goodbyes to Mario the cocktail king and made our way up the hill to Safari. The resident band, Eurasia, headed by Canadian guitar supremo Donny Pardell, were strutting their stuff through a set of rock ’n’ roll classics. We threw them requests while we awaited our drinks, and they never let us down – the Doors, the Stones, Pink Floyd … These guys knew it all.

To complement Safari’s over-the-top jungle theme, its cocktail menu includes oddities like Jungle Safari (no, really?) and Big Snake (oo-er!). Another twist to Safari’s cocktails – they’re served in beer glasses. Big beer glasses, making for big cocktails. “How’s your pint of Coco Loco?” Steve laughed at me over Donny’s power chords – even though it wasn’t really a pint glass, and not really funny either. Not that we were complaining. And it was generally agreed that, of the several different cocktails we tried, the Jamaican Rum Punch, a blend of Bacardi, Captain Morgan and Triple Sec, was superlative.

Our last stop, at Julia’s suggestion, was Gitano, in Phuket Town. At first we thought that Julia’s big-city girl persona was simply rebelling against all these bamboo and beachified places, craving the hip, pining for the trendy. Gitano, after all, is as hip and trendy as anything found in the big city. But Safari’s Jamaican Rum Punch had piqued Julia’s taste buds for more of those Latin flavours, and she knew that Gitano’s Miguel, a guy with very right-on tastes in art, music and cocktails, had a number of Cuban mixes on his menu.

Our only problem with Gitano’s cocktails was trying to pronounce Caipirinha, Caipirosca and Mojito without spitting on the waitress – a task made no easier for all our earlier tastings. Steve wisely chose the Café Mexicano and managed to avoid sounding silly. Then, while the rest of us supped cocktails and bounced to the cool acid jazz and Latin sounds, Shelly mounted a chair to peruse Gitano’s wonderfully perverse-yet-artful photography display. Julia was extolling the virtues of her Havana rum-based Caipirinha over those of my vodka-enhanced Caipirosca when Shelly nearly brought the evening to an unceremonious end by falling off her chair and sprawling across our table.

“I only wanted to say…” But the look on Steve’s face, as he attempted to sponge Hennessy and Kahlua-fueled coffee off his white shirt, reduced Shelly to giggles, which she attempted to hide behind her Mojito, which remained miraculously intact. Suffice it to say that we left Gitano – after another round of Cuban specialties – with no clear winner among the bar’s blends, but with every intention of coming back again and again, even if we never found the Phuket Cocktail of Cocktails.
As the cool night air did its best to revive us from our alcoholic haze, Julia declared that our mission, against all odds, had actually been entirely successful. Phuket not only had the cocktails but the locations to go with them, and wasn’t that exactly what we had set out to prove?

“If only all impossible missions were this much fun,” said Steve, as we headed off into the night with not a care for the morning-after-the-mission yet to come.