Spooky spirits: Bars scare up Halloween cocktails
Aging out of trick-or-treating is sad, but being 21 or older has its own rewards come Halloween. Plenty of bars celebrate Oct. 31 by filling their space with decorations or hosting costume parties, but some put the spooky spirit into their drink menus, serving up cocktails that offer all of the holiday's pleasures: pumpkins, candy and scares.
Kyle Mark, the bar manager at Chill Martini & Wine Bar in Lake Villa, said he spent two weeks developing a menu of themed cocktails that you can enjoy between now and the bar's costume contest on Nov. 1.
“The hardest part is thinking of the name,” he said. “You need a good name first and it's got to taste good. As long as it's themed that's all that matters.”
Once he'd come up with the name Mummy Drool, he experimented until settling on a mix of vanilla ice cream, triple sec, Bailey's and white chocolate liqueur with grenadine drizzled down the side to look like blood. The bar is serving the frozen concoction along with pumpkin martinis and two cocktails inspired by trick-or-treating candy. The Almond Joy combines chocolate vodka, Malibu, cream and Frangelico while the Milky Way incorporates cream, Kahlua and chocolate and vanilla vodka.
“It's to bring the adults back to when they were kids,” Mark said.
Rack House Kitchen and Tavern in Arlington Heights is celebrating its first Halloween with costume contests Friday and Saturday and a pumpkin carving contest Tuesday. No matter when you go, you can add some weird to your night by ordering a Brain Shot, a mix of peach schnapps, Irish cream and a dash of grenadine.
“It actually looks like a little brain in a shot glass,” general manager Will Anderson said.
If you want a shot without the gross-out factor, you can try the Pumpkin Pie Boilermaker, a shot of Fireball cinnamon whiskey dropped into a pumpkin lager. The bar is also taking advantage of fall flavors by serving up a pumpkin pie martini made with vanilla vodka, RumChata, pumpkin pie filling and cinnamon, and the caramel apple martini with apple-cinnamon-infused vodka, caramel and butterscotch schnapps. All of the drinks have a high alcohol content.
“What you have to look for is something that's not only going to taste good but warm you up,” Anderson said. “Being Halloween, you're always going to be outside between Halloween parties. It's the last hoorah for outside.”
One of the creepiest Halloween cocktails around is the Bloody Eye at the Martini Room in Elgin. The bar's owner developed it last year for the annual Nightmare on Chicago Street, a bash that transforms the city's downtown area into ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. The base of the drink is the Martini Room's Bloody Pomegranate martini, a blend of blood orange vodka, pomegranate juice and triple sec that's not too sweet. The real draw here is the garnish, a lychee fruit and blueberry skewered together to make for a startlingly realistic-looking — and edible — eyeball.
“We could buy fake eyes made from plastic, but this is creative,” said owner Ursula Borodzinska. “The longer the lychee soaks in the cocktail, the redder it becomes.”
The drink proved so popular last year that the bar has been serving it throughout October along with a pumpkin pie martini garnished with a graham cracker-and-cinnamon rim and mixed using pumpkin liqueur, butterscotch schnapps, vodka, half and half and Licor 43, a Spanish spirit blended with herbs and spices. You'll also be able to get the Bloody Eye at the bar's tent at Saturday's fest.
“It's really creepy and cool-looking,” said bartender David Olinger.