Welcome to The Final Phrase, a month-to-month column about craft cocktails. Meg van Huygen talks about her cocktail faves—each alcoholic and never—their histories and their elements, to lure you to Seattle’s dive bars and cocktail lounges that deserve your consideration.
Regardless of having lived in Seattle my entire life, I do know mortifyingly little about Shoreline. There’s nice meals in Shoreline, in fact, however I don’t drive, and taking the bus out there may be often an excessive amount of of a chore. Particularly when it’s shitting rain and there aren’t any sidewalks. Neglect it.
Until the legendary Chef Zephyr Paquette lands a brand new gig there, that’s. And oh yeah, until there usually are not one however two new gentle rail stations in Shoreline that opened final summer season! Hmm, okay. Proper. I suppose I completely do go to Shoreline now.
Alongside the southern border of Shoreline, throughout the road from the low cost Crest Cinema and sprawling easterward, is the darling Ridgecrest neighborhood, the place the Ridgecrest Public Home has been the neighborhood’s go-to evening spot for the final 20 years.
When house owners Megan Kogut and Jarred Swalwell opened Drumlin subsequent door in 2020, it was primarily a family-friendly pub model of the bar: They served beer, wine, and cider with subdued snacks like tuna melts and pretzel knots with beer cheese, and the area with standard with mother and father and children. Then the pandemic lockdown struck quickly after Drumlin’s debut, and when it reopened, the meals was being provided by vans exterior. Then the pub abruptly closed once more in September 2024, an indication on the door promising that the hiatus was momentary. The grand re-opening lastly arrived in February 2025. The meals vans, nonetheless, have been scrapped to make room for Paquette, who’s helped restyle Drumlin as a chef-driven, farmer-focused bar-bistro.
“I instructed them, ‘No matter you need,’” Paquette says she responded when she was requested to affix the workforce. “Need me to be the chef? The GM? The bar supervisor? It’s as much as you guys.” Formally, she’s Drumlin’s chef, however whereas the store’s nonetheless in reopen mode, she’s doing a little bit of the whole lot.
Drumlin’s identify refers to a small hill within the Irish language—as a result of Ridgecrest, get it?—and the latest launch has extra of a dinner-date vibe than its pubby earlier incarnation. The store’s operating on desk service now, and there’s no children allowed. The menu’s leveled up as effectively—the pretzel knots (from Lake Metropolis bakery Kaffeeklatsch) and beer cheese have caught round, however new additions embody cacio e pepe risotto with burrata and tomato mud, lamb albondigas, beluga lentils with kale and Italian sausage and bacon, and a spectacular roasted carrot dish that we’re gonna speak about in a minute. Most significantly for this column’s functions, Drumlin is now geared up with a full bar.
Zephyr Paquette’s been cooking in Seattle for effectively over 20 years now. At the moment, as ever, she’s recognized for using a robust field-to-plate, farmers-market culinary philosophy to cheffery, utilizing native producers, natural meals, and a punk-rock DIY ethos. Intently affiliated with the late, nice Chef Tamara Murphy and her eating places (Terra Plata, Brasa, Elliott Bay Café) through the years, Paquette’s additionally an alum of Dandelion, Lecosho, Marjorie, and Cafe Flora, amongst manifold others, and she or he ran two of her personal joints as effectively, Le Petit Paquet and Skelly and the Bean. She was a longtime participant in Murphy’s brainchild competition Burning Beast, “the world’s greatest feast in a subject,” and a grad of the distinguished Quillisascut Farm Faculty in rural Stevens County, the place college students study to lift livestock, make cheese, harvest from the gardens, and primarily create meals from the bottom up. That is only a fraction of Paquette’s resume, since you don’t have an hour and a half to learn the entire thing. Suffice it to say that when Chef Zeph is on the wheel, I’m showin’ up.
This farm-to-plate credo exhibits up in Drumlin’s bar program, in fact. Concentrating on rejiggered traditional cocktails, the drink listing contains spirits sourced from small-batch distilleries, and largely native ones. There are solely a pair unique crafties on there, and the one I’m besotted with is the Ladies’s Work. This babe comes with a particular twist: Alongside being scrumptious and modern and delightful, it’s additionally particularly constructed from merchandise that’re owned and produced by ladies.
In Ladies’s Work, Paquette combines Libélula blended tequila, Flor de Azar, ginger liqueur, honey, and her personal housemade lemon soda. On the rim is honey powder and bee pollen—each sourced from Wet Day Bees, simply across the nook from Drumlin. The drink is served in a rounded-but-triangular Collins glass after which strewn with yellow marigold petals. She’s a shimmering imaginative and prescient, all in gold.
I are inclined to draw back once I see tequila on a cocktail listing—it makes me braindead in an embarrassing, not-fun means. You can even safely assume the drink it’s in is gonna be thick and syrupy ’trigger that’s everybody’s favourite option to fashion the stuff. Both you see a variation on a marg, a fruity sugar bomb loaded up with grenadine, or some sort of smoky masculine highball with fuckin’ cedar sawdust and barbecue powder. Tequila makes individuals act corny, man. Perhaps simply Individuals.
This cocktail, although, is the obverse of that. Ladies’s Work is beautiful and lightweight, citrusy and natural, with the tequila starring because the floral centerpiece. Honey-sweet however alpha femme. An accessible, chilled-out tequila cocktail, ultimately. “Yeah, everyone’s bought a tequila story,” Paquette laughs once I confess my prejudices. “You’re undoubtedly not the primary particular person to say this.”
“I am secretly happy with Lady’s Work,” Paquette provides, “particularly because it was an exquisite accident. Libélula introduced me in for a tasting, and whereas I used to be there, my good friend Amy Beth (Nolte), who co-owns Wet Day Bees together with her husband Peter, bought again to me about shopping for honey powder. After which Peter was like “Does she know in regards to the bee pollen?” So she instructed me about that, and I used to be like “WAIT, let’s simply take all of them and make an all-female cocktail!” And so we constructed it with different woman-produced liquors we had, and I used to be like ‘Oh my god,’ on the coincidental fantastic thing about the way it all tasted collectively.”
Based mostly in Jalisco, Mexico, Libélula Tequila is owned and produced by the Lopez household, led by their matriarch Carmen Villareal Treviño. One in all a small handful of dwelling maestras tequileras, Treviño took the wheel at Casa San Matias Tequila again in 1986, whereupon she turned the primary girl to each personal and function a tequila distillery. At the moment, she guides her grownup youngsters on the identical path through Libélula, whose craft distillery, Destiladora Bonanza, is positioned on the identical property as Casa San Matias. A joven (blended) tequila, it’s grassy, citrusy, and peppery, with just a bit richness from the oak-aged reposado.
“That is truly our effectively,” Paquette explains. “It’s 80% blanco, with 20% reposado in it, so it’s bought actual gumption to it.”
Flor de Azar is a premium triple sec, and the identify’s a Spanish slang time period for the orange blossom (actually the “flower of luck,” therefore the four-leaf clover on the bottle). Though triple sec is often simply orangey, this liqueur throws in limes, pomelos, and mandarins, alongside each candy and bitter oranges. Agave syrup is used rather than cane sugar, and the citrus fruit is grown on a household farm in Veracruz, Mexico. It’s made by Mexico Metropolis-based distillery Flor de Luna, owned by Hillhamn Salome, who based the distillery when she was solely 18 years previous and now produces the liqueur on a workforce with 5 different ladies. It tastes like triple sec besides extra so. Brighter and fruitier. Triple sec instances two.
Paquette makes the lemon soda herself, and the honey-pollen rim is manufactured by neighborhood bees, per above, by means of the Ridgecrest neighborhood’s personal flowers. (Don’t fear, most main pollinator bees inside a hive are feminine.)
I did uncover a attainable outlier hiding within the recipe: The ginger liqueur is made by Portland’s New Deal Distillery, which is owned by Tom Burkleaux, an individual who COULD be a non-femme and is described by he/him pronouns on the corporate’s web site. (Who am I to imagine, although?) That stated, the workers at New Deal appears to be overwhelmingly composed of girls, and there is only a trace of the ginger liqueur within the drink anyhow. Created from spicy natural ginger, the liqueur’s a spot of potential masculinity to even out the superfemme sound, however which lays low within the cocktail’s multitrack general.
And about these carrots. So I had some disappointing carrots at a press occasion at [redacted] a pair months in the past, whereby the menu description referred to as them “roasted carrots,” and the carrots delivered to me had been pure orange with zero caramelization. They had been nonetheless crunchy within the center. These had been in actual fact parboiled carrots that had by no means seen the within of an oven, and I used to be offended about it. I felt tricked. Not often does free meals ever make me mad.
“You need these carrots,” Paquette promised once I instructed her my unhappy story after which requested about her carrot aspect. “I stand confidently by these roasted carrots. These are those.”
She was proper to do that. Hers are slathered in olive oil and roasted for reals, so that they’re all wrinkly and knurled like a witch’s fingers, and she or he serves them on a lake of maple goat-milk yogurt, accented by pomegranate molasses, salty feta, and toasted pepitas. Carrots themselves? Excellent and roasty and nice, however I needed to stay my entire hand within the plate and simply scoop up each drop of the sweet-and-salty yogurt sauce. I needed to pour it into my coat pockets. This dish immediately wiped the dangerous, free carrots from my reminiscence—an actual Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts second. Remedy carrots.
As excited as I’m to know that Drumlin even exists, and about Ladies’s Work specifically, I’m much more stoked to know that Drumlin’s latest season has an innovator like Paquette to assist house owners Kogut and Swalwell notice their long-held, COVID-delayed plans for the area. I’m stoked for candy little Ridgecrest too—the climate’s simply beginning to get good, they usually’re opening up the back and front patios at Drumlin. Stay music acts are being scheduled subsequent, for his or her massive indoor stage. You possibly can see the way it’s all gonna come collectively. Rattling, y’all bought me light-railing out to Shoreline now.
