Aja Sax’s sharp take on the classic Manhattan is a study in cocktail simplicity.
Aja Sax
Cocktail: Red Rooster
$12 at The County General (936 Queen St. W. #WQW)
You might say bartending is a calling for Aja Sax. She knew what she wanted to do at the tender age of 12, when she determined that she was the only person mature and responsible enough to handle the cappuccino machine at a hippie wedding in New Mexico.
“There wasn’t much booze—it was more of a pot and mushroom party,” recalls Sax. “But by late afternoon, nobody was in any state to make themselves coffee. So I just focused on the task and made cappuccinos for, like, a hundred people.”
All grown up now, Sax has lost none of her focus—especially when she’s making drinks like the Red Rooster at The County General, where she is the manager and drink designer. The new restaurant is known for its emphasis on brown liquor, as well as its use of cutting-edge cocktail ingredients like pumpkin, fig and Riesling wine.
The Red Rooster is one of the simplest drinks on the menu—just a perfectly balanced, bitter–and–slightly sweet combo of bourbon, Averna and Aperol. It reflects Sax’s personal preference for clean, straight classics. But this doozy of a drink is made doozier by a powerfully good brandied cherry, one of the hundreds that Sax lovingly pitted and preserved this summer to get The County General’s thirsty customers through the winter. (The California native appreciates the need for a little cold-weather help.)
Sax, who says she works more from instinct than from recipes and old bar books, nevertheless has to credit that timeless standard, the Manhattan, for the Red Rooster’s “good bones.” “It’s a twist on a classic,” she says, “which kind of describes what we’re doing here. You could say we’re a sandwich shop with a bar, but we’re way, way more than that.”
