There’s a cocktail legend that claims Henry Ramos had a team of dozens of “shaker boys” at his Stag Saloon in New Orleans, and each shaker boy’s sole job was to shake the hell out of a New Orleans Fizz. Making the egg-white and cream cocktail required exceptional core strength, with each boy passing it to the next only when his arms could no longer shake, like some horrific, Orwellian Shake Weight commercial.
The result of this dystopian assembly line, however, is the pinnacle of the egg-white-fluff family of drinks–tall, creamy, texturally somewhere between meringue and a very thick fog.
Seeing a proper Ramos Gin Fizz mixed, served, and sipped is often otherworldly, in the way that any attention to and reverence for something trivial transports you to another world, where one unexpected thing matters more than anything else.
The way gamers live their avatars or swingers live their libidos, some bartenders–the real geeks behind the stick–sometimes appear to live their cocktails. Watch a bartender make a Ramos Gin Fizz. Is there a sigh of resignation when you order it, or do they have the swole, slavering hunger of a gym rat on arm day? More importantly, when it arrives, how far does your jaw drop?
