Anyone reading this who currently lives in LA must be thinking about the little shake up we had last night. Over here, the damn dog started barking first, woke me up at 2 a.m., and seconds later our building wobbled around like a spastic slinky. More barking. Confusion. Other dogs on the street going wild. What the hell is going on, I thought, maybe North Korea finally decided to nuke us? My son slept through the whole thing of course, but I lay awake for hours gazing into the abyss of my sleepmask, thinking of what the hell I was doing in a place like Los Angeles and just how ridiculous a place it is. Drought. Mudslides. Fires. A free standing army of homeless zombies. Earthquakes. Shit. Oosh. The fear. I started thinking about being on an overpass and the damn thing rattling all over the place like a pit bull shaking a cat. Mother Nature really does not give a shit about us.

A few years back, during service, there was a big one and the hanging lights in the dining room swayed like a ship in a storm and for a moment I thought all the bottles behind the bar would crash to the ground. It stopped without any real damage occurring but for years afterward I would be walking down the street and feel a phantom shaking much like Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie Vertigo.

The idea for this cocktail partially started because Angel was drinking over at Death & Company and sent me a partial shot of the menu over there. One of their recent menu additions, “Fast Company” caught my eye. Mez, gin, raspberry brandy, lime, cinnamon, mole. Hmm. Mez and gin? It sort of makes sense, I guess. Death & Co. are masters of combining various liquors to produce world class cocktails. Over at Rustic, our style is a little different. We have less inventory and less time to screw around, but what we do is use seasonal ingredients. Being smaller is sometimes better.

I put a smidgen of gin and mez in a little glass and tasted it. The smoke and the juniper actually worked well. Strange, real strange, but I kept sipping it and wondering what the hell. Why not?

The other piece of this came from two sources: One, the kitchen had some passionfruit they didn’t want. I swear that half our cocktails are spawned just from receiving unwanted produce. Two, we had some leftover juniper syrup from New Year’s Eve.

I did a non-alcoholic gin and tonic for the New Year’s menu. Pretty easy and delicious. A quarter ounce of juniper syrup, a half ounce of fresh lime juice, tonic water. Done. Tasted just like the real thing so much it caused some sort of light placebo effect, reminded me of a party in high school when some chick got white girl wasted drinking O’Doul’s.

I challenged Angel on this one and he hit it out of the park with the first try. I think he’d been itching to get a cocktail on the menu because it had been awhile. He cranked one out, it tasted great, we tweaked one ingredient (Campari to Aperol) and then voila, the Guardian Angel.

In these troubled times we all need a guardian angel, and thankfully I’ve got two of them. Denise and Angel. Normally, working with people much younger than me is just annoying, but these two actually make my job, and therefore my life, easier. Forever thankful, grateful, etc. for them.

The real test, is not if people order the cocktail, but if they finish it quickly and order another. The punters will blindly go for mezcal, that part is a no brainer, it’s Santa Monica after all. Fortunately, people not only like this one but order several. It’s got a one two dick punch for sure. Strong flavors, heavy amount of booze due to the rhum agricole being 110 proof. But it’s got that tiki quality to it from the passionfruit, and of course, rum, rhum, whatever.

Guardian Angel

1.5 oz. Mezcal

1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. Passionfruit Syrup

.5 oz. Rhum Agricole

.25 oz. Juniper Syrup

.25 oz. Aperol

Shake, strain into an awaiting rocks glass containing a BFR. Sip, enjoy, say ah.