The petite Outer Sunset cocktail bar offers dedication to service as well as first-class cocktails
Over the course of the last several months, I’ve come to meet and know many of those I like to refer to affectionately as “cocktail nerds.” These are the beverage directors, bar managers and owners who pour themselves into creating the drinks we consume, the ones who lovingly ferment strange ingredients to make new flavor profiles, who smoke wood chips in glass beakers, who painstakingly take weeks, or even months, to design their menus.
I’ve thought there’s no way someone could top Julio Bermejo, the beverage director at Tommy’s who, after I said I thought I had what I needed after an hour of talking about margaritas, told me we weren’t done yet. Then he proceeded to offer me some eight more tequilas to better understand their terroir. Or Josh Harris, the owner of Trick Dog, whose team reinvents the bar every six months, down to the last detail, from the cocktails to the equipment to the glassware. Who refuses to revisit any past hits because “the beauty” of what they do “is that it doesn't linger,” as he previously told The Examiner. But meeting with Carlos Yturria, who runs the cocktail program at downtown bar Treasury and the Mission's Beehive, at his latest venture, White Cap in the Outer Sunset, I was close to putting him at the top of the list. Yturria, who can talk a mile a minute once he gets going, said got his start in bartending in the late ’90s when he moved to San Francisco with “$200 and a motorcycle” and had a chance meeting with Harry Denton, the legendary bar manager at the Starlite Lounge. Despite his lack of experience, Denton put Yturria behind the bar, where he quickly “fell in love with service.” Over the next several years, Yturria would oscillate between projects, from restaurants to bar construction — like the marble bar at A16 in the Ferry Building or the bars at local chain Pacific Catch — but he would always come back to his love of service. “It's about the bartender-guest relationship,” he said. “That's number one … then we run a clean bar, and then we sell cocktails.” White Cap, which was opened by Matt Lopez at 46th and Taraval in 2017, within five minutes of the beach, has this ethos at its core. The small space is warm and inviting, with ocean-blue seating, a fireplace to counteract the Outer Sunset gloom, and a relatively simple bar. Yturria, whose specialty cocktail-ice business currently takes up the majority of his time, came in on a recent weekday to show me what he means by how service can make or break a patron’s cocktail experience, culminating in a half-hour-long tutorial on what makes the perfect martini. Now, I love a martini. I’ve made them multiple times within this column, and have learned to appreciate them in different forms, even with gin, with which I have a complicated relationship. But even though a martini is relatively simple, with only two ingredients at its core — either vodka or gin, and vermouth — it can be hard to make one that is truly great, and far easier to make one that is, well, just OK. For Yturria, a bartender making a martini is like a chef making scrambled eggs; while it’s not necessarily complicated, it is foundational, requiring mastery before moving on to other recipes. Ex // Top Stories Supes give initial OK to massive Bayview industrial plan Logistics real estate giant Prologis’ project would have more enclosed space than Salesforce Tower Phoenix Hotel kicks off impending closure with 'love letter' to Tenderloin The hotel hosted a free party on Thursday, bringing the community together before the doors are shuttered at the start of the new year. UCSF cancer patients’ artwork featured in SFMOMA show Art for Recovery Program, which provides a creative outlet for those with cancer and those living with HIV/AIDS, partners with museum to present exhibition “I'm going to hit you over the head with the martini, and it'll change the way you make everything else and the way you approach the rest of service,” he said. To start making a martini Yturria’s way, the garnishes have to be prepped first, because even the smallest break in rhythm during the process of making the drink can throw off its whole composition. What if the cocktail is all ready to go, but you fumble with the garnish and have to prep a new one or, worse, have to run to the back to get something for it? These are the small crises that occur to Yturria. To prevent such disaster, two olives are first skewered onto a toothpick, whimsically decorated with a wooden lemon slice. Then, this is where the service comes in — you don’t just reach for any gin or any vodka. You have to ask questions. How was the customer’s day? Do they prefer botanicals? Florals? Once that part is taken care of, then comes the chilling. If you have time, chill everything. Fill up a glass tumbler with ice, your glass with ice, stick your bar spoon, your strainer, whatever you might need, into the ice. As much ice as you can cram in. This might seem excessive, but these extra steps can alter a drink’s temperature by as much as 10 degrees, depending on other factors, he said. Then, the ice is dumped. Two ounces of gin, in this case St. George Terroir, and one ounce of vermouth, here infused with a bit of seaweed, are added to the glass tumbler, which is then stuffed with more fresh ice. This is stirred with a long bar spoon, until the edges of the ice soften slightly. Then comes a step I had not yet encountered. For an extra level of flavor, Yturria told me to take a lemon peel, the pith facing in, and squeeze it as the concoction is strained into the glass, emitting lemon oil next to the liquid, to better “fold it in,” rather than floating the peel or expressing the oil on top of the drink or on the sides, as one might do with an old fashioned. Topped with our prepared garnish, the cocktail was complete, except for one thing. The final move, which Yturria had me practice, is the “push,” or the moment when you slide the finished cocktail across the counter towards the customer. Accompanied by a smile, this move is the final “seal” in the cocktail service, which he emphasized was just as important as any other part of the process. While I’ve drunk many martinis before, professionally and otherwise, this tasted like the most “San Francisco” martini I’d ever had. It’s difficult to capture in words, which is not something any person who writes for a living wants to admit. The best way I can describe it is that it tastes like what I imagine the breeze at Ocean Beach would taste like … bitingly cold, a bit briny, with botanicals and citrus wafting over from the gardens at Golden Gate Park. At the end of the day, it was a damn good martini. Of course, that wasn’t the only drink that Yturria showed me how to make that afternoon. I also tried a delightful and refreshing melon matcha cocktail and a very specific dacquiri, but for someone who started this column to understand what separates a good cocktail from a great cocktail, I kept coming back to the martini. I’m not sure yet if I’m qualified to answer my initial question, but after walking through Yturria’s careful, demanding procedure for what is arguably one of the simplest cocktails to make, I felt a little bit closer.
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