At Golden Rule in San Francisco, a White Negroni Gets the ‘Hubba Bubba’ Treatment
Golden Rule, the latest project from Bay Area restaurant group Back Home Hospitality (best known for Che Fico), is a neighborhood spot at heart and a sports bar by virtue of its location. It’s part of Thrive City, the complex surrounding Chase Center where both the Golden State Warriors and Valkyries play basketball. When the group’s bar director Danielle Peters-Clossey started planning out the menu, she knew it needed to feature homages to the sport, so she thought back to her childhood and flavors she associated with athletics. That’s how the MIP, a cocktail that features a homemade Hubba Bubba mist, came to be.
“If I were to say I put words on a vision board, the highlights would be fun, playful, bright, and interactive,” Peters-Clossey says. The whole bar is a “throwback and nod to the Bay Area,” where she grew up attending Giants games at Candlestick Park and watched the inaugural season of the Sacramento Monarchs. That theme is picked up in the design by John de la Cruz, who drew the bar’s color palette from the Warrior’s 1962 jerseys worn in the team’s first year in the area.
The menu continues the tribute, with beer and wine offerings that are all locally made, and cocktails with names that include The Bay and Draymond (as in notorious Warrior Draymond Green). But the most playful of all is the MIP, which stands for Most Improved Player, an award most recently won in the WNBA by Veronica Burton, Peters-Clossey’s favorite Valkyrie.
The drink is an amalgamation of multiple things she loves, starting with her passion for her hometown teams. She also played sports herself and collected cards, both of which mean she chewed a lot of gum, specifically strawberry-watermelon Hubba Bubba. The last piece of the puzzle is the White Negroni. Peters-Clossey took these things and asked herself, “How can I ‘improve’ on all of them.”
Credit: Douglas Friedman
The result is a “bright, fresh” take that brings notes of melon, mint, and cucumber. The base is a mix of Fords Gin and Catedral de Mi Padre Espadín mezcal. It’s accented with Chareau Aloe Liqueur, which brings those verdant flavors; Carpano Bianco vermouth with poppy, floral notes; Salers gentian apéritif; and just a touch of Awayuki Japanese white strawberry gin, which helps the fruitiness really come through.
To finish, the team uses an atomizer to spray the homemade Hubba Bubba tincture atop the glass. That’s created by macerating the gum in an overproof, neutral spirit for 48 hours, then proofing it down and adding a bit of saline and acid. While balancing the overall cocktail took some tinkering, Peters-Clossey nailed this key element basically on her first batch. “I opened the container and was immediately like, ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’ I didn’t even have to put my nose down in it,” she recounts.
The last touch, which truly takes the cocktail over the top, is a thin slice of the iconic pink and green gum. The drink is served with a WNBA card from last season as a gift for the guest. All together, the MIP is an expressive, balanced cocktail with bitter notes that tame the sweetness.
On paper, the description is alluring, but it’s not immediately clear what the quaff will taste like. This leads to what Peters-Clossey calls one of her favorite reactions when the drink is served to a guest. It arrives and is immediately visually fun, but the best part for her is when a guest takes the first sniff followed by the first sip. “You’re instantly like, ‘something is very familiar about this,’ and then you take a sip and it’s bright and spirituous,” something people don’t seem to expect, she says. Overall, it’s “a good marker for what we were trying to do in general” with the combo of interactivity, playfulness, and balance.
It’s also led to some fun conversations among the staff, who almost all hail from a different part of the world. The team has chatted about the sports they played as children and what flavor of colorful gum they favored. It’s something they’ve bonded over while working at a bar that has an indelible bond to the city it serves, and just as in sports, team chemistry is one of the things that makes Golden Rule a winner.
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