With Hotels With Great Taste, we're pulling back the curtain for a peek at the “special sauce” that hotels use to create memorable, meaningful culinary experiences for their guests.
I see the hotel bar as a vestigial organ of the travel experience, a holdover from a bygone time when retiring to a wood-paneled room off the lobby and charging a Cabernet or a double scotch, neat, to your room was proof that you were really living.
Even as they have begun to shed this stodgy stereotype—spots housed in a Four Seasons and a Courtyard by Marriott are current James Beard Award semifinalists in the bar categories, for example—current and cool still aren’t my hotel bar watchwords.
That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised to find a bar project that’s both delicious and of the moment at the Rosewood hotel in Munich. Take the stairs down to Bar Montez, and you’ll be treated to one of the most inventive nonalcoholic drink programs I’ve come across anywhere in the world.
The bar’s moody lights, tufted chairs, Deco patterns, and gold accents would have fit right in with the speakeasy craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s. But, when I was there, the jazz trio in the center of the room (an almost nightly fixture) played in T-shirts and jumped decades in their song selection, transitioning from Gershwin to an Ed Sheeran instrumental. It felt warmly inviting, whether you consider yourself part of the mixology set or are more of a I’ll-just-have-a-vodka-soda type.
That “everyone’s welcome to be fancy here” vibe anchors the zero-proof drink program too. “Why did alcohol-free drinks get hidden away on a separate page of the menu for so many years?” muses bar manager Mario Sel, one of the minds behind the cocktails. “A drink without alcohol [made at a cocktail bar] should be just as normal as any other—without explanations, without special treatment, without labels.”
To that end, Sel began rolling out paired menu items—an alcoholic and NA version of the same drink. Unlike at other bars that attempt something similar, the two cocktails drink almost identically.
Juice made from fresh-pressed apples cooked with thyme and a bit of malic acid packs a gussied-up gin and soda called the Malicious with a big one-two punch of tartness and sweetness. The alcohol-free version uses a Bavarian NA spirit in place of Hendrick’s, but all the body and flavor of the gin-based cocktail remains intact.
The drink—and others I tasted—is successful because its recipe doesn’t just remove the alcohol and repackage the remaining ingredients; its makers worked thoughtfully to develop deep flavors that make the booze (or “booze” in the case of the alcohol-free version) feel secondary anyway.
Sel plans to launch a full menu of nine new drinks that follow this pattern of doppelgängers later this year, and he has already laid the groundwork with the Malicious and three others. A handful of stand-alone NA drinks currently round out the zero-proof offerings. For instance, in January, the Montez team debuted the clarified No Scrubs milk punch: hojicha, strawberry syrup, lime juice, and coconut milk.
Happily for those who do want alcohol, the team didn’t relegate their care and creativity to the booze-less drinks—the menu has hits from top to bottom: a thorough gin list with three dozen bottles from nine countries, a strong set of classic cocktails (don’t miss the Gibson made with a Riesling vermouth), and unexpected ingredient pairings that sound out there but really shine, e.g., peaches and scotch, gin and black tea.
As Sel puts it, his bar is “a place for people who drink, a place for people who don’t drink, and a place for people who just don’t feel like [drinking] today.” And impressively, none of those people—or anyone scanning the room—will be able to tell who’s who.
Rosewood Munich
