At a current Saturday evening at Café Mars, a self-described “uncommon Italian restaurant” in Brooklyn, I had a drink that’s caught with me like an earworm: the Mad World. Devised by Jake Riley, the restaurant’s head bartender, it’s a nonalcoholic mixture of Ghia aperitif, carrot juice, lime juice, soda water and a syrup infused with a berbere spice mix. They had been impressed by a sausage and beans dish from the restaurant’s opening menu. “However the taste profile was coming from a type of North African route,” says Riley, “impressed by how there’s Italian colonial affect in Eritrea and Ethiopia.” 

Within the restaurant’s multihued neon lighting, the drink shines with a rusty glow. The primary sip reveals the sweetness of carrot towards the savory backdrop of the myriad spices that make up Café Mars’ berbere mix, together with coriander, cumin, cardamom, paprika, salt and ginger, which additionally tempers the bitterness introduced by Ghia’s botanical, gentian and rhubarb taste. The salt brings the drink’s substances into a delicate, but sure focus. “I’m all the time hoping to have a nonalcoholic cocktail past lemonade,” says Riley. In order that they deployed the carrot and berbere spice to spherical it out with “a little bit of earthiness.”

Elements alone are sometimes sufficient to supply a memorable drink, however the Mad World has one other trick up its sleeve, a musical hook. Riley shares my feeling that the toughest a part of arising with a brand new cocktail is naming it. In the future earlier than service, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” was enjoying, which reminded them of Donnie Darko, the 2001 movie that includes a stripped-down cowl of the tune. They considered the “goth bunny” within the film, and related all of it again to the carrot-infused drink. For week after my go to to Café Mars, the tune bounced round in my head—identical to the drink.

Essentially the most thrilling factor about our present wave of nonalcoholic creativity is that it represents an opportunity to reinvent what “cocktail” means. As a result of nonalcoholic cocktails lack the very apparent and irreplaceable presence of ethanol, we have to take a unique path with a purpose to obtain a memorable, scrumptious drink. The Mad World has components of a Bloody Mary, with maybe some touches of a Garibaldi thrown in. This drink feels as acquainted to me because it does novel.