My favorite piece of food writing comes from Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream—and it’s not actually food writing; it’s drink writing. The novel’s second part, “Cuba,” is largely set in Havana at the Floridita on a gusty day where Hemingway’s washed-up protagonist Thomas Hudson is mainlining “double frozen daiquiris with no sugar… the great ones that Constante made” and shooting the shit with various local characters who come and go.
In one passage, he describes the sensation of drinking the daiquiri. They “had no taste of alcohol and felt, as you drank them, the way downhill glacial skiing feels running through powder snow and, after the sixth and eighth, felt like downhill glacial skiing feels when you are running unroped.”
In the passage I love most, he describes what the daiquiri looks like. “As he lifted it, heavy and the glass frost-rimmed, he looked at the clear part below the frappéd top and it reminded him of the sea. The frappéd part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over marl bottom. That was almost the exact color.”
I love that description in part because I spent years working on the water in Key West, where Hemingway also lived, in that same Caribbean basin that Thomas Hudson traverses throughout the novel, and so I feel I know exactly what he’s talking about and also the deep pleasure derived from both drinking and sailing. As much as I have followed Hemingway’s ghost from Key West to Paris, Madrid and Bimini, occasionally emulating his drinking style, I’d never actually encountered a daiquiri that matched his description (granted, I have not made it to Havana ) until I visited the sleek new Bar Kabawa.
The latest venture from Momofuku, Bar Kabawa is the rum bar counterpart to Kabawa, the Caribbean restaurant next door, both helmed by chef Paul Carmichael. They opened this winter on a pristine alleyway in the East Village, garnering plenty of buzz before the New York Times’s interim food critics released the annual 100 Best Restaurants in New York City list in June where Kabawa debuted at number 4, cementing its status as a must-visit hotspot.
At Bar Kabawa, the drink menu is dominated by rums from around the world, daiquiris and “Rum Rum Yum Yum” cocktails. When my eyes landed on the Floridita #3 daiquiri, made with Probitas Rum, grapefruit juice and Maraschino, I knew I had to order it and attempt to conjure Hemingway.
The drink arrives as a fluffy mountain of freshly shaved ice in a large coupe alongside a pretty cut-glass, beaker-like sidecar containing the cocktail. The waiter then pours it over the ice, which immediately melts into the most delicate slushy—downhill glacial skiing and fresh powder straight down your gullet. With that metaphor immediately springing to mind, I soon noticed the pale, silt-like color of the cocktail with the shaved ice creating a frappé-like upper layer, and I realized this was exactly what Hemingway was talking about in Islands in the Stream—this was his shallow water drink!
I had always imagined a sort of icy light blue Caribbean turquoise shade, even though that color doesn’t quite match the drink’s ingredients. But when I saw Bar Kabawa’s daiquiri, it all made sense. This daiquiri was the exact color of shallow water as a boat cut through. It was thrilling to finally see what Hemingway had described—and also flash to the shallow sand flats of Key West’s backcountry that I’d skimmed over countless times—reflected back to me in my drink.
It was potent, perfectly balanced and beyond delightful. As my friend and I drank our daiquiris, bullshitting about Hemingway, rum, Key West and life, little did we realize that the gentleman stationed at the bar in front of us—who prepared our exquisite fried and baked patties by hand (short rib, conch, bone marrow; pepperpot duck and foie; eggplant, tomato, raclette) and brûleéd our “Solomon Gundy” smoked fish dip—was Kabawa’s chef Paul Carmichael, himself.
Such. Silly. Girls.
We had so much fun at the bar with him that we immediately booked a table at Kabawa for dinner the following week. When I arrived and scanned the cocktail menu, I nearly fell out of my chair. The Martini Kabawa is an icebox variety made with gin and coconut water, which ripples back to another drink from Islands in the Stream. During the novel’s first part, “Bimini,” Hudson guzzles a local concoction known as the “Green Isaac’s Special.” It’s made of gin and green coconut water poured over chipped ice with “just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose color” that Hudson says “tastes as good as a drawing sail feels.”
Kabawa’s is not exactly the same, but close enough. It’s a drink I’ve made myself thanks to its simplicity, but I’d never actually seen it on a cocktail menu—and not for lack of looking. I’d searched for it at Bar Hemingway at the Paris Ritz to no avail.
With my crisp, charged Kabawa Martini in hand, we delighted in the three-course prix fixe menu to a soundtrack of reggae, dancehall and reggaeton that makes you want to shimmy. Highlights included the pepper shrimp, made with raw Royal Reds doused with sorrel, scotch bonnet, and thyme; cassava dumplings stewed in creole sauce; and a juicy skirt steak with onions and green olives.
In Islands in the Stream, after Hudson observes his daiquiri’s resemblance to shallow water, he pines, “I wish they had a drink the color of sea water when you have a depth of eight hundred fathoms and there is a dead calm with the sun straight up and down and the sea full of plankton.”
I have always wanted to take that description to an intelligent mixologist and see what they could come up with. Perhaps after a Père Labat 59° ‘ti punch or two, I’ll muster the courage to make such an inquiry of chef Paul and his Bar Kabawa crew.
