Trend Watch: Italian Liqueurs

“If God was a wicked hot chick and lactated into a bottle, the label would read Amaro Nonino.”-Keith Bartoloni, Hazlewood.
If you’ve been following the Five Questions series here on Sauced, then you know that Seattle’s bartenders are currently all atwitter ( I don’t mean that they are actually writing twitter messages, or “twittering.” Though they probably are. Is anyone doing anything besides twittering right now? I bet you are twittering as you read this, aren’t you? You’re right now twittering “reading a blog that is calling me out on twittering.” Oh my God, people. The apocalypse is upon us.) over Italian liqueurs. Anna Wallace, Keith Bartoloni, James MacWilliams, Patric Gabre-Kidan …all of them are all about mixing liqueurs into cocktails.
If you consider yourself something of a bargoer in the know but feel a little underschooled in the subject of campari and limoncello and so forth, check out the liqueur flights at Tidbit Bistro. (Seattle Met included a short piece about those flights in our April issue, read it here.)
Or, try some in a mixed drink. Any good tender will have a few liquery mixers up his/her sleeve, but here are a few delicacies about town: at Barolo, try an Nonino Amaro with Amarena cherries. David Nelson, at Belltown’s Spur, will make you a Foreigner: Amaro Ramazzotti Strega with rye whisky, blood orange bitters, and a flaming orange peel. On the new menu at Canlis, MacWilliams has a drink called Our Lady of Thermidor that calls for “a dash of Campari,” and Serafina’s bar menu has plenty of Campari cocktails as well.
And here’s where I cutely end the post with the word “cheers” in Italian. Salute!