“The old joke is that Arizona is just a bunch of sand dunes like [in] Lawrence of Arabia,” says Chadwick Price, co-owner of Bar 1912 in Phoenix. “[It’s] funny, but quite far from the truth.” Often misunderstood, Arizona in the popular imagination is barren and dry, not the kind of place you might imagine is botanically vibrant.
But Arizona, in fact, has the third highest number of biomes in the U.S. It’s home to grasslands, tundra, chaparral, coniferous forest, woodlands and desert, and it’s the only state to contain four separate desert regions, each with its own environment, flora and fauna. Phoenix, at the northern end of the Sonoran Desert, is particularly known for its rich biodiversity, including “many leguminous trees and columnar cacti,” says Price. The preconceived idea of Arizona couldn’t be further from the truth.
With a menu titled “The 6 Ecosystems of Arizona,” Bar 1912 hopes to squash these misconceptions. Each drink is named after one of the aforementioned biomes, offering guests a way to experience the whole state straight from the comfort of the modern cocktail hideaway’s bar stools.
The pinnacle of the menu is the Desert Martini, a symphony of flavors that have been foraged, extracted and preserved from an array of locally grown botanicals like cactus paddle and Buddha’s hand citrus. Price was inspired by a foraging trip with wild food expert and preservationist Pascal Baudar, who uses ancestral preservation methods to capture a sense of place, showcasing the elements of ecosystems together. “The idea that every environment has its own unique influence is so simple, yet so profound,” says Price. He decided to take a similar, “what grows together, goes together” approach when developing the Desert Martini.
Price and his team started by making different extracts, which included ingredients like Buddha’s hand citrus, palo verde beans (which are slightly sweet and taste like young garden peas), ocotillo blossom (from a spindly cactus-like shrub) and creosote blossom (a terpene-rich flower that mimics the scent of the desert after it rains). By blending the extracts with vodka, the team created what they dubbed an Arizona wild botanical gin.
Blaise Faber, Price’s business partner, has been making vermouth for years and developed the bar’s house cactus vermouth. The terroir-driven ingredient is made from plants like tomatillo husk, fresh and dehydrated cactus paddles, hoja santa and dehydrated Tohono O’odham squash seed (a slightly sweet, ancient squash with deep roots in the Tohono O’odham Nation). Faber blends these extracts with desert honey—made by bees that feed off the pollen from the same plants used in the vermouth and gin—with a dry, high-acid white wine and a fortifying dose of mezcal.
Instead of the orange bitters typical of a Martini, the Desert Martini calls on creosote and citrus bitters made from the blossoms, black orange, black lime, blood orange and Buddha’s hand extracts. “Creosote is what you smell when it rains in the Southwest desert,” explains Price, “and citrus blossoms are wildly abundant all across the urban Southwest.”
It’s not often that a Martini is so expressive of a specific place. But the Desert Martini is like a liquid terrarium, a reminder that Arizona isn’t just “a bunch of sand dunes.” Even its presentation underscores the idea: To serve the drink, the bar pours each of the layered components into a mixing glass and stirs them together before straining into a chilled carafe. An accompanying coupe is then sprayed with the creosote and citrus bitters, garnished with two skewered olives and a pickled onion. “The empty glass delivered first embodies the dryness and thirstiness of being in the desert,” says Price. When the bartender fills the coupe to the brim, it “reminds us that the Sonoran Desert is the wettest desert on the planet, teeming with flora, fauna and beautiful flavors.”
