When Austin Hennelly joined Los Angeles’ Kato as bar manager in 2022, he had been tinkering with nonalcoholic cocktails for some time, particularly since he stopped drinking earlier in the pandemic. The Taiwanese American restaurant also went through a transformation that year, moving up from small digs at a strip mall to a 4,000-square-foot fine dining space. There was now room to offer an alcohol-free pairing to accompany chef and co-owner Jon Yao’s boundary-pushing tasting menu, which reinterprets nostalgic Asian flavors.
“A large contingent of guests already didn’t drink alcohol, so [the restaurant] knew that a robust nonalcoholic program was something that they wanted to offer,” says Hennelly, who previously worked at L.A.’s Majordomo and New York’s Booker and Dax, Amor y Amargo and Maison Premiere.
At Kato, Hennelly offers more than a dozen original cocktails, including five nonalcoholic creations, featured alongside an extensive wine selection and what Hennelly believes to be the largest alcohol-free wine, beer and ready-to-drink cocktails list of any bar in the country. His drinks often feature ingredients found in Taiwanese cooking, such as salted egg yolk or five-spice, making them a natural complement to Yao’s dishes. While the cocktail menu is ever-evolving, Hennelly’s nonalcoholic Garden Tonic is a constant. The drink epitomizes the ethos of the bar and restaurant, not only in its execution of high-level techniques and use of Asian ingredients sourced from partnering farms, but also in its singular approach to the N/A format.
“The easiest way to make a bad alcohol-free cocktail is to try and make a classic cocktail without alcohol because you’re already operating at a deficit,” says Hennelly. “It’s very easy to make a delicious vegetarian meal, but it’s very hard to make a delicious vegetarian beef Wellington, so just don’t do it.” When Hennelly concocts a nonalcoholic cocktail, he instead starts with an ingredient or N/A product and then builds upon that, with a focus on structure, flavors and textures.
The seed of the idea for the Garden Tonic grew out of Hennelly’s desire to make a drink using a base of bitter melon and cucumber. He found that the cucumber’s cool and refreshing flavor counterbalanced bitter melon’s aggressive sharpness. His star ingredient is Korean cucumber, sourced from Girl & Dug Farm in San Marcos, California, a fruit with a super concentrated flavor. As for the bitter melon, it’s laborious to prep, as peeling the bumpy skin and coring and de-seeding the spongy insides requires patience, especially since it yields little juice. But it’s worth it to Hennelly, who twists the flavors into a shape resembling a Gin & Tonic. “The bitter melon does the job of tonic water and the cucumber gives an herbaceous flavor that’s just short of the juniper flavor that a nice vegetal gin would have,” he says.
To enable maximum carbonation, Hennelly clarifies the juice to remove any solids, which can interfere with bubbles. To do so, he adds the enzyme Pectinex and wine fining agents before running the juice through a Spinzall centrifuge. The clarified juice is then steeped with bai mu dan white tea to soften the intensely bitter and grassy flavors before it’s strained. A small measure of Hamilton Petite Canne Sugar Cane Syrup from Martinique is added for sweetness and body, then the mixture is acid-adjusted with a solution of citric, malic and succinic acids, which make up the acid profile of lime juice. Vegetable glycerin is also mixed in to give the drink some viscosity that would typically be provided by alcohol.
It’s then time to force-carbonate the drink, a technique Hennelly learned at Booker and Dax, where he cut his teeth. “I learned how to make force-carbonated cocktails before I could make a Negroni,” he says. One-liter bottles are filled to 80 percent capacity, air is squeezed out, and then a carbonator cap is attached. The bottles are pressurized with carbon dioxide gas (CO2) and then sit under pressure overnight in the refrigerator to ensure the carbonation is strong.
When served à la carte, the Garden Tonic is poured into a chilled vintage Collins glass over an ice spear imported from Kuramoto Ice in Kanazawa, Japan. “The ice has the lowest parts per million of solids or minerals of any commercially available ice and their product always arrives in perfect condition, better cut and more aesthetically pleasing than any of the domestic ice producers that I’ve encountered,” says Hennelly. The garnish is a simple lime wedge, with its rind beautifully carved with a citrus zester into crisscrossing patterns, an aesthetically appealing flourish that also makes the drink more aromatic.
Texturally, the first sip is aggressively carbonated, similar to the sharp bubbles of a freshly cracked Topo Chico. “It should be invigorating,” says Hennelly. The bubbles bring up some of the vegetal aromatics and minerality of the bitter melon and cucumber. “It really disarms people who might be skeptical of the whole enterprise of alcohol-free cocktails, because I don’t think that most people have had one this sophisticated,” he explains. “They tend to then trust whatever’s coming next. They’re more likely to say, ‘OK, I’m in your hands.’”
