The Red Bull Vodka Gets a High-Brow Makeover at Chelsea’s Hello Hello

The American cocktail scene is currently awash with drinks engineered to evoke nostalgia, with bartenders applying newfangled techniques to make high-brow, boozy versions of the beverages many drinkers grew up on. NYC’s Lullaby recently debuted Girl Cola — a vodka drink designed to taste like cherry cola. Nearby, Romeo’s is offering a cocktail called Purple Drank, which tastes just like grape soda. And in Albuquerque, N.M., Happy Accidents Bar has not one, but two clarified cocktails made with breakfast cereal milk.

Nostalgia, though, isn’t limited to childhood memories. As we grow older, many of the cocktails we enjoyed in our early 20s become snapshots of the past. A Four Loko fanatic today can easily become a dry Martini lover tomorrow — but that’s not to say that a drinker would be opposed to giving a bespoke, modernized version of the Loko a try. In fact, there’s a good chance that they’ll taste that drink on mere curiosity alone. That’s why Chelsea’s new bar and cafe Hello Hello put a house-made Red Bull Vodka on its opening menu.

It’s a highball many encounter at college parties and nightclubs — a “wake me up, then f*ck me up” drink akin to an Espresso Martini or an Irish Coffee. But unlike those drinks, the Red Bull Vodka is arguably all function over form, and the team at Hello Hello saw that as an opportunity to flip the script.

“The Red Bull Vodka is a drink loved by many and we wanted to give it the nerd treatment and help enhance the flavors in Red Bull, and give our guest something familiar but slightly elevated,” Hello Hello co-owner and managing partner Luis Hernandez says. “We’ve now heard it described by a guest as a Red Bull Vodka with a top hat.”

The team didn’t want to lose sight of the two ingredients that made the original drink famous in the first place, so Hello Hello’s version contains Ketel One Vodka and Red Bull, but expands on the two-part template with more ingredients and a few modern bartending techniques.

“All of the flavors in our Red Bull Vodka, like grapefruit, green apple, and cucumber, are all from tasting Red Bull and adding deeper layers to flavors already in there,” Hernandez says.

To complete the package, the team adds clarified Granny Smith apple and cucumber juice, chamomile syrup, grapefruit acid, saline, and Perrier to the mix. The juices are clarified and then stabilized with sodium metabisulfite. To make the grapefruit acid, the bartenders mix the citrus’s peels with citric, ascorbic, and succinic acid, and then let them rest overnight before collecting the extracted oils and mixing them with water. All the ingredients are then mixed together, carbonated for three days at 52 PSI, and served at 15 PSI into branded glass mugs over clear ice spears — a presentation Hernandez says was inspired by classic Japanese whisky highballs.

“By building on the flavors in Red Bull, we are able to give you a familiar drink with softer edges,” Hernandez says. “[A traditional] Red Bull Vodka is heavily dependent on mixing it properly and the right ratio or it can be too sweet, and sharp. The way we mix and carbonate [it], makes finer bubbles to enhance the aromatics and allows the flavors to truly mix together for a much more uniform drink.”

As Hernandez explains, familiarity is just part one of the cocktail’s appeal. The other half is delivering on elevated flavor, texture, and overall presentation. Since Hello Hello’s Red Bull Vodka checks all the boxes, it not only conjures nostalgia without gimmickry, but also dispels the intimidation factor some feel when walking into a craft cocktail bar.

“Our concept is ‘High Dive,’” Hernandez says. “‘High’ is how we want to drink and ‘Dive’ is where we want to drink. We want to give people all of the nerdy things they love to try in an unpretentious way.”

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