If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
Sitting at the prettiest bar in the city of Oaxaca, my neighbor received a drink from the bartender that glowed green. It was not the vaguely disturbing dayglow honeydew of Midori, but like an emerald lit from within. When my similarly luminescent drink arrived, I took notes, part out of habit and part because it was so intriguing. Just as I wrote the not-exactly-complimentary words "like a difficult friend on a good day," the bartender who created the drink appeared over my shoulder to ask what I was writing about.
The drink shares its name with the bar, Selva, a Spanish word which translates to “jungle.” Not only does it contain mezcal, Oaxaca's best-known spirit, but also the hoja santa leaf from the plant so peculiar and powerful, it's also known as pepperleaf and root-beer plant. The herb imparts flavors of pepper, eucalyptus, tarragon, licorice, mint, and anise. On their own, both of these ingredients are difficult to mix, and together they're what the menu aptly refers to as a “jungle in a glass.”
The Mexican state of Oaxaca seems to have a disproportionate amount of these ingredients that are particularly tricky to incorporate into cocktails, so I started talking to booze-industry people in the region to find out how they wrangle them.
"I like to investigate how one crazy ingredient can work with another crazy ingredient without creating chaos," says Alexandra Purcaru, Selva's snoopy cofounder and beverage director.
She cites, for example, raspberries and nori as a favorite unexpected combination, but prefers using local-made specialties like mezcal and rum and letting the spirits’ terroir do the work. Mezcal, for example, might grow in soil so iron-rich that the dirt takes on a reddish hue, or it could be rooted in something much more sedimentary, creating such wildly different finished products that it makes the spirit a bit of a moving target when creating a cocktail.
For a previous bar menu, Purcaru incorporated lumpy huitlacoche—the product of a fungus that attacks corn, turning ears gray and giving the kernels notes of licorice, truffle, and mushroom—into an old-fashioned style cocktail featuring Maiz Nation, a whisky made with local corn.
On another evening my wife Elisabeth and old friend Rob and I ordered three of Selva's trickiest cocktails. First came the Selva: the hoya santa leaf, a young mezcal, lemon, agave syrup, poblano chili liquor, and juniper bitters, a little laundry list of ingredients that might not play well with others.
Medicinal, wild, and bright green, the Selva is unique and beautiful enough to have earned itself a slot in the recent bar book, Signature Cocktails. I said it reminded me of an unstable energy source in a Marvel movie, to which Elisabeth immediately added, “or flubber.”
At the bar, the hoja santa is treated like a controlled substance. The leaf is destemmed, weighed, and trimmed down until it measures nine grams, then it’s rolled into a cigarette shape and stored in a special tray. The ingredients are combined and liquefied in a NutriBullet personal mixer, then given a hard shake followed by a triple strain.
"This drink destroys the NutriBullet," a bartender quipped while making one, noting the fibrous quality of the leaf. “We use it because it's quiet-ish, but we go through them fast.”
Next, we turned our attention to the Morada cocktail with rums from MK and Paranubes and lime, along with jasmine that infused into the drink as we sipped. Paranubes is a personal favorite because it's so peculiar, a white Oaxacan rum that's almost Caribbean in style, with far-out tasting notes of roasted pineapple, cinnamon, clove, pickle brine (!), and sugarcane juice. At the bar, Purcaru aged the MK Rum with roast plantain skin, which imparts a desirable tart astringency. The drink was like an extra-tropical margarita cousin with inherent salinity.
For the Passiflora cocktail, on the other hand, she mixes passion fruit, Lillet Blanc, and Valdeflores rum that’s been fat-washed with coconut oil. (The latter meaning the spirit sat with the oil in it before being chilled so the fat can be removed, in this case leaving a delicious tropical vibe.) Most notably, she uses curry powder in the drink to bring out the tobacco notes of an aged version of Paranubes’ rum.
Perhaps it's understandable that opinions in our little crowd were split by a drink containing curry, but it was undeniably interesting. "It's like soup," said Elisabeth as Rob and I started wondering about heartburn while still enjoying it, peculiar but coherent and pleasingly tropical.
There is a lot of daring in these cocktails, and also a lot to figure out. Those funky-saline flavors of Paranubes change as the rum ages, but it turns out that it goes well with the artichoke liqueur Cynar, or the sweet orgeat syrup usually made with almonds and orange-flower water, where it can bring out ripe fruit notes.
Incorporating mezcal into cocktails is no easier, simply because there are so many different types of agave that the liquor can be made from. Mixing mezcal into a cocktail can make the drink floral, smoky, and even minty. Mess it up, though, and producers get upset, occasionally preferring you just consume their product straight, saying something along the lines of once my mezcal is mixed with other ingredients, it is no longer my mezcal.
Even the most purist producer might make an exception for Juan Lara's ginger and pennyroyal cocktail. Lara manages the bar at Oaxaca's high-end Criollo restaurant. He set one of these in front of me as we talked in Criollo’s huge outdoor dining area, where rabbits and chickens roamed free, and the drink was distractingly, dangerously good. Pleasing notes of honey mingled with smoky notes of the mezcal, and half of the rim was coated with an extra-fine ground combination of salt and dried flying ant, a seasonal delicacy here which lends a funky herbaceous flavor to the festivities.
The ants turn out to have been the drink's inspiration. In season in July and August, they pack a big punch, even in limited quantities. Ginger, on the other hand, is strong, so there's just a bit of that, balanced out by the minty pennyroyal. In the glass with a bit of lemon juice, the ingredients harmonize in what tasted like a delicious new kind of fruit.
"We balance the bitterness of the flying ant with the smokiness of mezcal," Lara says, pointing out that it’s a bicuishe mezcal, a favorite variety of mine, with everything rounded out by that bit of honey.
Since mezcal can vary so much from bottle to bottle, why use it in the first place? "Mezcal is because we're from here," he says, gently implying, why wouldn't you?
As intellectual and conceptual as the drinks at Selva are, this one at Criollo goes down easy. Either way, the difficult ingredients—bold botanicals, mercurial spirits, desiccated insects—are embraced, turning them into something very memorable.
“Hoja santa is not a difficult ingredient, it is just an interesting ingredient,” says Purcaru back at Selva. “It’s a question of finding the balance I'm looking for.” If she encounters a mezcal that she can't think of just the right use for, her solution is classic: She drinks it neat.
