Jon Perks meets ‘molecular mixologist’ Chris Hoy, who could be Birmingham’s own Heston Blumenthal.
Travel, they say, broadens the mind.
It certainly did for Chris Hoy; it also broadened the drinks menu at Nuvo Cocktail and Lounge Bar, where he is bar manager.
Since winning Birmingham’s best bartender at the 2002 Nightlife Awards, Chris swapped the likes of TGI Friday’s, The Jam House and The Living Room where he cut his teeth for some of the coolest bars and locations in Asia and Australasia.
Now back in his hometown, he has brought the “molecular mixology” know-how he picked up on his travels to give Brummies a taste of what they’ve been missing. The 31-year-old is, if you’ll pardon the pun, raising the bar.
You quickly sense this guy would be disappointed if you simply asked for a gin and tonic or pint of lager; he makes his own ginger beer and alcoholic sorbets and has bought a special smoking gun, which burns flavoured wood chips to add flavour to a drink. For him, dry ice and a foam gun are as much standard issue as the simple bar spoon used to stir and muddle cocktails.
Of course Chris owns one of those too, but when we visit Nuvo he’s not muddling mint for a mojito, but instead using lemon grass syrup and kaffir lime leaves for a Far East Breeze cocktail, one of his new “contemporary classics” on the new menu.
Along with root ginger, lychees, vodka and apple juice, it produces a long, refreshing cocktail that Chris feels will be a big hit with the female population.
“I was toying with the idea of putting a pineapple and coriander Martini on the list instead, but this is going to fly out,” he confidently predicts.
“I think this will overtake and hopefully replace the Cosmopolitan. The ladies of Birmingham went crazy for the Cosmopolitan and I think they’ll love this.”
It’s just one of several exciting new drinks at Nuvo which are a result of Chris’s travels over the last three or four years – and his desire to learn more about the art of molecular mixology – or, as he describes it, “applying science to change the molecular structure and taste of drinks”.
“A lot of these drinks aren’t my invention but I’m bringing them back; they’ve been on lists where I’ve worked,” he’s quick to point out.
“Years ago I tried to find as much as I could on the internet but there wasn’t much,” says Chris.
“I thought ‘this is something I want to get involved in’ but it wasn’t really until I got to Australia and I started working with Grant Collins that it really happened.”
Working alongside chef Rob Staedtler in Singapore and Bangkok, Chris first learned how to infuse flavours into salts and sugars.
