The Bar That Changed Everything (Except Itself)

Fifteen years on, the Chicago bar that made molecular mixology famous has left an enduring legacy — and it has nothing to do with the rotovap

The Vault, behind the high-end baccarat tables at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino

Fifteen years ago I flew to Chicago to write a story about a soon-to-open bar called The Aviary. It was an offshoot of the Michelin-starred restaurant Alinea, headed by chef Grant Achatz, who had been dubbed in headlines as “The Magician of Molecular Cuisine.” Achatz had asked Craig Schoettler, who had been making small, edible versions of classic cocktails for Alinea, to head up the new bar program.

Schoettler invited me to come by Alinea on an evening it was otherwise closed to sample some drinks he’d been tinkering with for the new menu. I anticipated a bout of heavy alcohol consumption, so I fortified myself with an astoundingly large and sloppy hamburger at a diner just before arrival. This I now think of as My Hamburger of Regret.

For this was not to be a quiet night with Schoettler involving small sips of test cocktails in a dark restaurant. It turned out to be a trial run for the menu of Achatz’s forthcoming restaurant called Next. I was seated with about a dozen of Achatz’s friends and colleagues for an eight-course meal modeled after what you might have dined on in Paris in 1906, with recipes from Escoffier. This included one course that involved a roasted duck and what looked to be a medieval torture device.

Of course, cocktails were also involved — eight of them, and none would have been familiar to Escoffier. These included drinks made with spring blossoms infused via a tabletop coffee vacuum, a tiki drink made with perfect, tiny flavored ice spheres the size of BBs, a martini aged three ways, and an old-fashioned served inside a softball-sized ice sphere. The last drink I was instructed to liberate from its icy imprisonment with a mini-slingshot that shattered the ice. (This was still under development; the process had earlier employed a small silver mallet, but this sometimes resulted in shards of glass in the drink, which was deemed non-optimal.)

I marveled at the work being done there, but at the close of the evening — and at the close of my article — I wondered where it would all lead, and if this “might just be the future of the high-end cocktail.”

Craig Schoettler oversees what you drink at nearly 500 Las Vegas venues run by MGM Resorts International

So was it? Last week I caught up with Schoettler to talk about that. He’s been in Las Vegas for over a decade and is currently executive director of beverage at MGM Resorts International, overseeing drinks at some 500 venues spread across multiple casinos.

The occasion for our call was an Alinea and Aviary anniversary tour running through May in Las Vegas. Alinea is celebrating its 20th anniversary by offering a pop-up at Michael Mina Bellagio ($595 per person). The Aviary is marking its 15th with a pop-up at The Vault, a speakeasy hidden behind Bellagio’s high-end baccarat tables and self-described as “an ultra-exclusive cocktail club featuring some of the most rare and sought-after spirits, wines, and liquors on Earth.” A three-cocktail tasting, which includes some food, runs $175; drinks can also be ordered à la carte for $40 each.

Schoettler left The Aviary for Las Vegas more than a decade ago, starting at the ARIA Resort and Casino. He found the city’s vast scale required some adjustment after the intimacy of The Aviary. When he arrived, he told his vice president that he thought he could get a new cocktail menu launched within a couple of weeks. The VP stared at him, then said, “You’re not going to know where all the bathrooms are in two weeks.”

“Looking back, he was 1,000 percent right,” Schoettler said. Every venue serves a different purpose — from casino bars to sportsbooks — and each had to be tailored to wildly different groups of people. Even within a single property, variety was essential. “If there are five casino bars and their menus are all identical, then you’ve been in the same place five times,” he said.

That exposure to such a broad cross-section of customers from all over — ranging from backward-baseball-cap-wearing bros looking for something large and potent to high spenders striving to impress — has given him a vantage point to see what’s changed over the past decade and a half.

Among his observations: customers are more health-conscious everywhere, and demand for low- and no-ABV cocktails is especially evident among younger drinkers. “Which is great,” he said, “because it makes us think more creatively about how do we give you a non-alc cocktail but still make it feel like you’re drinking a cocktail and not just, hey, here’s a soda.”

He also noted that customers who still prefer alcohol are now far more educated about spirits and cocktails than when he started as an Alinea intern in Chicago. “That keeps us on our toes and making sure we’re staying up with the trends.”

A night out with cocktails has also become more about an elevated experience, he says. The drink is still the occasion, but less likely to be the destination. The Aviary was in the vanguard with technique and high-tech equipment 15 years ago, but that hasn’t necessarily spread to other bars — molecular mixology has been eclipsed, and where it persists it’s a niche enterprise.

Beyond the tech, though, The Aviary always emphasized making cocktails an adventure, and that ethos has persisted and spread.

“Not everybody can have a rotovap,” Schoettler said. “Not everybody can have a recirculating chiller. Not everybody can have some of the fancy tools they use at Aviary and Alinea. But it’s more about thinking: how does it strike an emotional chord? How does that become memorable?”

One of the drinks I very much enjoyed 15 years ago was what they called The Blueberry, served in a decanter created by Alinea’s on-call designer, Martin Kastner. The flat-sided carafe — called a Porthole — held not only a drink of rye whiskey, vermouth, and verjus, but a sort of still life of herbs, spices, dried citrus peels, and tea leaves. It looked like something that would be at home on an Edwardian sideboard.

The Porthole has been an Aviary mainstay since opening 15 years ago.

It came with glasses the size of thimbles, a way of subtly controlling the rate of consumption and turning the drink into a minor escapade. Each time I poured, the infusions had subtly altered the flavors, making each sip different from the last. I don’t remember every taste, but I do remember the experience. (Called The Porthole, it’s currently being offered on The Vault’s pop-up menu with an infusion of lemon, blueberry and chai.)

I think of that drink now when a bartender sets down a cocktail with crystal clear ice lightly infused with vanilla or some such, explaining that the drink has a flavor “arc” — that it will change delicately over time as the ice slowly melts into it.

That’s The Aviary’s real legacy: not the gadgetry, but the ambition behind it. The idea that a cocktail could be a journey rather than just a drink.

“You’re here for a reason, and that reason is that you should have fun, right?” Schoettler said. “And if we lose that, then we’ve lost the whole purpose of the word hospitality.”