Our House Bar
214 Ossington Ave., Toronto
647-341-4477
When it comes to cocktails, we've seen the rise of molecular mixology and then a Mad Men-inspired return to the classics. Now - if Toronto's achingly hip Ossington Street corridor is any gauge - we're in the midst of what might be called drinking's delinquency phase: an embrace of cocktails with no redeeming social or culinary value that exist simply to help you make bad decisions.
"The first time I drank these, I woke up so hung over I didn't want to get out of bed all day," says Anthony Siniscalco, the owner of Our House, Ossington's newest bar and the man responsible for Our Orange Drank, a beverage without aspirations.
Siniscalco discovered the self-made concoction on an impromptu trip to Florida after a night of heavy drinking. "It was a Sunday and I knew nothing would be open in Boca Raton," he recalls. "So I picked up a bottle of vodka at duty free and, when I got to the house, realized I didn't have anything to mix it with. When I opened the fridge, I saw this big orange jug staring back at me. It looked like liquid plutonium."
The main ingredient in the Our House incarnation is Compliments brand Orange Drink, which is somewhere between Tang and window cleaner on the juice scale. Aside from its jaunty, almost luminous colour, the beverage offers little in the way of benefits aside from a nearly limitless shelf life. It does, however, contain 9 per cent of your daily carbohydrate needs, corn starch and tartrazine. The flavour on its own isn't especially pleasing, but mix it with a healthy dose of vodka and the alcohol renders it downright palatable. Shake it over ice for a while and it actually tastes pretty good. Dangerously so.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Our Orange Drank
Ingredients
1.5 ounces Smirnoff vodka
1 ounce Compliments Orange Drink
Method
Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a martini glass (to make it look classy).