The eminently crushable Soft Spoken

“I don’t often notice my surroundings, but I like wood,” says my daughter as we take a seat at the bar inside Part Time Lover. “It makes it feel like a place where people actually live, as opposed to places where everything is stone or marble…”

“Like a tomb, where people get put when they die,” I finish, and she smiles just a little. I’m glad for the smile, and for the comment about wood — the smile because the night has been bittersweet, a send-off as she heads to Denver for her first real job after college; the comment because this place is pretty well wrapped in woody warmth.

My daughter mostly drinks hard cider, but here, she orders a Soft Spoken. “Our drinks are basically riffs on classic cocktails,” explains bartender Nicholas Welsh over the thumping music and lively chatter. “There are like 25 cocktail families, and they drill us on them really hard here. In the old days, there would be a guy watching you, and he’d have a bar spoon.” If you slipped up, “he’d rap you on the knuckles — like the nuns. Guys today have it a lot easier, but they still drill you.”

When it comes to invention, “basically, we take a drink and start choosing what elements we want to swap in and out to give it a different flavor profile. My co-worker Tony Bautista created Soft Spoken to have something crushable and tasty for summertime. It’s from the Collins family” — a sour cocktail featuring a base spirit, lemon juice, sugar, and carbonated water, served over ice in a tall glass. “It’s modeled after Michael McIlroy’s Rome with a View from Milk & Honey in New York City” — lime replaces lemon, dry vermouth and Campari serve as the base — “and Christian Siglin’s Carlsbad Cooler from Noble Experiment here in San Diego.” Bautista’s drink keeps the lime and dry vermouth, but blends the Campari with the more floral aperitif Aperol and the strawberry-tinted Atost, the last of which gets a boost from the house strawberry syrup. “Then Basil Eau de Vie gives an interesting vegetal note against the sweetness,” and a dollop of mezcal “to round out the cocktail.”

The up-front first impression is pure nostalgia for the candy-sweet Slush Puppie of youth, gradually giving way to the more adult experiences of sour lime, dry vermouth, and finally, the gently smoky bite of mezcal. A fitting cocktail for a young person leaving behind the easy comforts of her childhood home, heading out into the wide world and its more complicated joys.

Part Time Lover’s

Soft Spoken

• .75 oz lime
• .75 oz strawberry syrup
• .75 oz dry vermouth
• .25 oz basil Eau de Vie
• .25 oz mezcal
• 1 oz Red Bitter Blend (Campari, Aperol, Atost)

Combine ingredients with ice in cocktail tin and give it a short shake. Pour into Collins glass filled with ice and top with soda. Garnish with mint leaf and a strawberry.