“Girl with a Pearl Earring.” “Mona Lisa.” “The Starry Night.” These are some of the world’s most renowned paintings, and they’re also the inspiration for Art Bar’s latest cocktail menu.
The menu, launched on New Year’s Eve inside the Downtown Grand bar, features art-themed drinks like the Burning Giraffe, named after Salvador Dalí’s surrealist 1937 painting. Michael Chambers, the property’s food and beverage director, says he wanted to stick with the bar’s theme while offering something accessible and unique. “We wanted to put something together that wasn’t too over the top. It’s just enough to be different.”
Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” served as the foundation for bartender Brian Hannis’ elixir, his take on a Moscow Mule. Swapping vodka for Jägermeister, Hannis adds amaretto, muddled raspberries and mint to traditional ginger beer, making a sweet, crisp cocktail that’s perfect for round one. And while the painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer doesn’t evoke the tropics, the Pearl Earring cocktail does, with Malibu and Myers’s rum, vanilla-infused orange juice and pomegranate syrup. It’s a cocktail as curious as the painting it’s named after.
Still thirsty? The eye-catching No. 5 is named after Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting. Served deconstructed with a Blue Curaçao ice sphere and jalapeño in one glass and Karma tequila, lime juice and sweet and sour in the other, it just might be the most avant-garde drink on the menu—something Pollock himself might fancy.
Art Bar Downtown Grand, 702-719-5100. Daily, 3-11 p.m.
