[:en]In the cocktails of 2019, a lot of research and a lot...liquid cuisine![:]

[:en]The dialogue between cuisine and mixology has never been as close as in the past year, and everything suggests that the collaboration will continue to consolidate in 2019 with a "new" trend with a fascinating identity. The much talked about "food pairing" has been abandoned, or almost abandoned, that is, that philosophy which wanted to propose pairings between haute cuisine dishes and cocktails - which in the country of wine was already born with a certain deficit and has confirmed, over time, all the difficulties of premises - 2018 saw a new concept appear on the mixo-catering scene: that of liquid cuisine. We could define it, in a certain sense, as an evolution of food pairing, an idea that connects cocktails and gastronomic dishes and, above all, the bartender and the chef as never before. Far from being a simple re-proposal of haute cuisine recipes in a liquid key, liquid cuisine is instead the result of a constant search for the "gourmet" aspect of the mix, obtained through techniques that aim to transform the ingredients in new ways and above all to combine them together to obtain preparations never seen before in a glass. Like a "Bloody Mary" to the nth degree, the gastronomic cocktail is in fact a new way of drinking, the result of a series of trends and studies that start from "low alcohol", sometimes touching on the concept of eco-sustainability of the drink and arriving to that care and attention to the customer that will probably be the real trend of the year that has just begun.

Let's explain better. “Low alcohol” is simply a useful label to describe a trend that arose between the end of 2017 and 2018, namely that of moderating the alcohol content of the mix to allow not only the tasting of multiple cocktails without the risk of inebriation , but also a decidedly clearer perception of the aromas, perfumes and, why not, also of the preparation techniques that are the basis of every bartender's work. Eco-sustainability, or more simply "reuse", is none other than one of the key concepts of liquid cuisine but not only, the idea that a product used for gastronomic recipes can be reused for a cocktail, therefore making it possible not only a targeted fight against waste (if lime juice is used in the kitchen, why should the peel be thrown away when it can be transformed in a thousand ways and used for as many preparations?) but also a very close dialogue between what we find on the plate and what which instead is served to us in the glass. Finally comes the attention to the customer, understood not only as a welcome but also and above all as involvement of the same in every act of creating the drink. It means bringing quality, awareness and relationships between bartenders and cocktail bar goers to a significantly higher level. It means that the bartender is no longer a mere mixer of liquids and the customer is no longer a simple customer eager to drink as much as possible without caring about what is served to him. It means that the knowledge and preparation of the bartender, combined with the awareness and expectations of the customer, create something that is now essential: drinking well.

Now, let's clarify: in Italy people have been drinking well for many years and in certain places they were drinking well even when no one was interested, but that's how it is. And, let's point out again, it's not that liquid cuisine is the only way to drink well, this must be clear. Liquid cuisine, however, is a "new" way of drinking well, the idea that something until now conceived only in a solid state can actually take on new forms thanks to study, technique and raw materials. It essentially means letting yourself be guided to discover a sensorial world that is still largely unexplored, a quality which, if we think about it, nowadays can hardly be applied to anything other than medicine and common sense.[:]