Classy beach restaurant has upped its classic cocktail game
When Delaney Twining was growing up, he didn’t envision himself behind the bar at his family’s restaurant, or anywhere in it really.
As a kid, he worked in the restaurant bussing, expediting and generally making himself useful during the short but hectic Fenwick Island summer season.
As a college graduate, though, he was working in Baltimore when his mother and father opened The Lobster Shanty in Fenwick, and he was asked to come back and work as the bar manager for David Twining’s Nantuckets.
While he actually relished the opportunity to take control of the then-recently renovated bar and make his mark on it, there also was something a little daunting about it. When you’re the owner’s son, being competent isn’t necessarily enough, you have to be more than that. It took him about four years behind the bar to get comfortable.
Nantuckets has everything you’d expect from a fine dining restaurant: white linens, soft but sufficient lighting and a menu that can challenge the palate as much as the diner prefers.
Fortunately, during his time in Baltimore, Twining fell in love not only with craft cocktails, but with cocktail history in general. He set out not only to remake the bar at Nantuckets, but to remake himself as the bar manager. He started out by getting certified as a sommelier and its craft beer equivalent.
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The certification processes helped hone his sense of taste and flavor combinations, and from there he set his eyes toward cocktails.
“From the beginning, I wanted to change the way we did things here,” he said. “My wine list is one of the best on the Shore, and I wanted to do that for the cocktail list as well.”
He started with simple things, and improving the quality of the liquor was at the top of the list.
As an example, Twining talked about the history of the martini. Traditionally, it was equal parts gin and dry vermouth. Over the decades, though, the amount of vermouth dwindled down to next to nothing. According to Twining, the reduction in vermouth had less to do with the quality of the gin and more to do with the quality of the vermouth.
“People used to use good vermouth in their martinis, so you could use more of it,” he said. “Now, if you use cheaper vermouth you don’t want to put much in good gin.”
It also was served in a coupe, which is a rounded cocktail glass. Increasingly, better bars are moving from the triangle martini glasses to the more traditional coupes those glasses replaced.
Tidbits like this helped influence his menu decisions and cocktail design choices. Pretty much every item on the cocktail menu is a drink he invented from scratch or one he has repurposed.
The Millhouse, for instance, is essentially a Manhattan, but instead of using cheap sweet vermouth, Twining uses 10-year-old Port for a sweetness and a richness that underpins the whiskey in a full-flavored way.
There are other, less-subtle ways he’s trying to effect a cocktail culture change among the Nantuckets patrons, moving away from flavored vodkas, for example, and gimmicky flavored whiskies like “Fireball.”
He understands that these flavors can be replicated for people who want them, but just as a good restaurant takes time to prepare dishes with better ingredients, Twining wants to take the time and make better drinks with better ingredients.
So he makes his own “shrub syrups,” which are handmade flavor additives that can increase flavor without adding too much sweetness. He also fresh-squeezes all the lime, lemon and orange juices used to make drinks, including the “Hemingway,” his take on the daiquiri.
“A lot of these drinks, the margarita, the pina colada, the daiquiri, weren’t created as frozen drinks,” he said. “But they were made with fresh juices, so we’ve gone back to that.”
Recently, he was making a creation of his own called “Whizz Bang,” which features El Buho mezcal, pineapple juice, ginger beer and a habanero shrub. Whiz Bang is a Harry Potter reference related to the fact that “El Buho” means “owl” in Spanish. A lot of the drinks have deep-cut names.
When putting together new drinks, he uses a flavor wheel approach, balancing sweet, sour, spicy and, as he says, “herbaceousness.” Getting the right amount of heat from the peppers led him to make a habanero shrub that would allow him to add the syrup but not increase the sweetness, which would have killed the drink.
The result is a cocktail that is heavy with flavor but not nearly as sweet as it looks, with a habanero bite that keeps the drinker a little bit thirsty.
Twining replaces the menu in spring and fall, adding new cocktails and removing those that didn’t work as he had hoped. It’s one of the privileges of working at a restaurant known for spectacular food.
“I’m lucky because I’m working in a place where the food is bringing people in, so I can be more adventurous with my pairings,” he said.