This cocktail started out almost entirely with scrap/larder ingredients from the booze closet. Some aji infused tequila, kumquat liqueur, and this really odd tequila we soaked in the leftovers from making kumquat shrub. The kumquat stuff still provided that odd numbing quality akin to grapefruit oil and was amped up a bit by the sichuan peppercorn bitters. The good problem here was we got rid of a bunch of stuff, but the cocktail was so popular we got rid of it all too quickly…Hence Cholo Shogun 2.0.

I’ve got to float my own boat here. Some of our regulars that are fastened to certain drinks like espressotinis and cosmopolitans now enjoy themselves a Cholo Shogun. The combination of dragonfruit and passionfruit is undeniable, and it always has been. I first ran into this marriage of flavor and color at Rustic back in 2015 when the current bar manager, The Ranfer, had a drink on the menu called Dragon Lady, but I’m pretty sure he used vodka. Tsk, tsk. Odd considering he was a vodka hater himself. He was putting the passionfruit directly into the dragonfruit puree if I remember correctly…or maybe that was the next line of bar manager at Rustic, The Dawg…Things are a little fuzzy at the moment…It’s been so damn long. This is the longest I’ve ever held a job. The second longest was at Five Spice Cafe in my hometown, Burlington, VT. I was there for five years I think? Yeah, from 2000 to 2005. Anyway, everything else in between was brief and I was fired from a large percentage of them.

God, I worked at this truly awful place, Church, in Boston. Half restaurant, half live music nightclub. I got the job from my friend Caleb, who now lives here in LA and is a tattoo artist. His dad is a regular at Rustic. Yeah, you can’t write this shit. Anywho, the first day Caleb trained me, he showed me the bread station and right down below on the bottom shelf in the kitchen where the bread was kept was a mass of rat turds. Just piles of them in the corner behind the shelf and on the shelf itself (shelf itself?). Horrifying.

As we set everything up, the chef was boasting to me about his food and I just looked at the guy like he was a complete and total idiot. Like hey bro, clean your fucking kitchen this is deplorable.

I was grossed out from the get go. That night, holding back the vomit, I scrubbed the whole bread station with hot soapy, bleachy water and pulled it out form the wall and swept and scrubbed the back corner. When I came back the next day to inspect it, the rat droppings had returned.

The dish pit at Church was located in the basement and to get down there you had to follow a precarious set of steep, slick stairs. The bus tub was located at the top of these stairs and all the waitresses claimed they were “too weak” to carry the bus tub down there. That left me, Caleb, and the busser, this Russian guy named Alex. In the midst of the weeds I would be summoned by the general manager, this coke snorting nerd, to go take the overflowing heavy ass tub full of dishes down the stairs. All I could imagine as I did it was falling face forward and all the broken plates and old food crashing around me.

The rat infested basement of the place was massive and connected around to the green room where the bands would hang before going up another set of stairs to the night club part of the building that was kept sectioned off from the restaurant proper by a door. During my training, Caleb had shown me where they kept all the bottles of booze for the acts and so on particularly busy nights, after the bus tub stress, I would sneak off and hammer down a shot. Caleb and I would trade off throughout a shift and it became a fun game of who could get to the bus tubs first in order to go and get a good ripper off the bottle of Ron Zacapa 23 we had stolen and hidden in the dusty rafters.

The money at Church was fantastic but service was intolerable. The clientele was mostly kids from Boston University who showed up in giant parties and then split everything eight ways twelve ways, etc. Thank Buddha for the old auto-grad. The food was pretty good, but I never ate any of it out of fear I would get some strange, uncureable virus from proximity to all the rat shit. I would eat beforehand and the chef, when he came out with a new dish for us all to try would ask me, “Why don’t you ever try the food here? Don’t you want to be able to sell it?” “I have a lot of weird food allergies,” I would always tell him. “What kind?” he would ask. “We can work around it.” “It has to do with restaurant food.” “So you never go out to eat?” “No.” Of course, he ended up seeing me out with my girlfriend one night and the next day at work asked me how it all was. “What did you eat over at ?” and so on. The guy truly hated my guts.

I haven’t thought about that place in a very long time. I think the chef and the GM were in cahoots because for some reason I kept getting called out in pre-shift meetings about the food ingredients in each dish, more so than anyone else, and the GM kept giving me odd tasks like changing light bulbs. He once asked me to clean a dirty toilet and I told him no. I knew my days were numbered. I simply refused to eat the food in the place and got grossed out by watching the guests and the employees when I saw them shoveling it all in. The last straw came when the GM was coked out of his mind, just being an absolute dick to everyone, and two kids from BU gave me a shitty tip. The snitch bartender had been eavesdropping and heard every word of my conversation with these two punks, mostly me berating them for being cheap asses. The next day I had a big meeting with the chef and the GM about it and I quit to their faces before they could fire me. On the way out I gave the bartender the what for. I went right up to the bar while he was cutting garnishes.

“Hey dude,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I hope you enjoy your life being one the fucking rats that infest every corner of this place.”

“What you said to those guys was out of line.”

“Shit in your hat, dude.” I looked right at him and that was it. Not my finest hour but one where, at the spur of the moment, I had come up with a decent zinger.

The other bartender looked at me, covered her mouth, and laughed. I just walked out and went home. Yet again I had to tell my poor girlfriend I had lost another job…

Church went out of business less than a year later. The chef left, the GM got fired and the whole thing melted down. It was the only place where, when I met the owner, he said nothing to me and walked by me when I stuck my hand out as if I were the smallest insect on earth and not worth his time. Hey, the world is full of turds.

Cholo Shogun

1.5 oz. Tequila

1 oz. Mandoquat Punch

.75 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. Fresh Dragon Fruit Puree

.25 oz. Macadamia Amazake Syrup

.25 oz. Passionfruit Syrup

2 Dashes Sichuan Peppercorn Bitters