Celebrate bartenders and chefs with Brovo Spirits and local restaurants
I’m guessing you, like me, are someone who loves local bartenders and chefs, tastily relishing the cocktails and meals they deliver — and, hopefully, what they put into creating them. Now you can show that love, while getting to enjoy even more tasty cocktails and meals, at “Grown in the Ground,” an event put together by Brovo Spirits that’s taking place June 6-15 at more than 500 restaurants across the United States. As Mhairi Voelsgen, distiller and owner of Woodinville-based Brovo tells us, the event is an opportunity to “pull back the curtain to reveal a little of what makes your local restaurants special.”
Interestingly, though it’s an event allowing us to commend our local U.S. culinary and cocktail craftspeople, the concept was spurred by a trip Voelsgen and Brovo cohorts took to Lyon, France. There, they learned about Les Meres Lyonnaise — “meres” being a title given to the many brilliant female chefs of the region. It’s a moniker that goes way back, to working-class women who cooked for upper-class French families starting in the 17th Century. The situation that changed during World War I, when many of those posh families fled, leaving these women jobless.
To continue supporting their families, they began opening restaurants, as Voelsgen says, “making high quality meals with mostly local ingredients from providers they trusted. It was really the birth of the farm-to-table movement.” The Les Meres Lyonnaise were committed to area providers, and to delivering high-quality meals, pioneering techniques and a welcoming atmosphere — just like chefs and bartenders working at independent restaurants in our area. Grown in the Ground is a delicious celebration of that commitment.
It makes a lot of sense that Brovo, around since June 2011, would come up with this scrumptious event, as they’ve been partnering with restaurants, chefs and especially bartenders since the get-go. The recipe for their first amaro (those Italian-esque herbally sippers that are all the rage), released way back in January 2013, was created with Seattle bartender John Ueding; they’ve now released 27 amari as well as a wide, imaginative, award-winning range of distinctive liqueurs, vermouths and spirits, many of of which are made in conjunction with bartenders and restaurant folks.
Since the beginning, the very idea of “grown in the ground” has been the north star on which Brovo sets their sights. It’s a notion that prioritizes utilizing real ingredients, not chemicals or manufactured ones, not fillers or additives, not high-fructose corn syrup. Instead, they use real plants, real dried and fresh herbs and spices, real agave nectar and sugars. That path is one many U.S. chefs and bartenders follow as well, focusing on produce and ingredients cultivated and raised nearby. Spirits and liqueurs from area distilleries, too. The result allows them to bring their skills into contact with great producers to deliver memorable drinks, meals and memories. Grown in the Ground, the event, follows this philosophy.
What happens at Grown in the Ground, exactly? At participating restaurants, bars and retailers, including Pacific Northwest spots like Monsoon, Taylor Shellfish, The Aviary and many, many more, you’ll discover special dinners and drinks, unique menu items, seminars and other events that reveal the creativity, craft and care that makes these places so special.
Naturally, the specially designed cocktail menus during Grown in the Ground will feature Brovo’s latest releases: the stunningly yummy Alpine liqueurs Uncharted Rhapsody American Forest and Gen P American Genepy. While influenced by European herbal liqueurs, specifically Green and Yellow Chartreuse, these two are no mere imitations. As Voelsgen likes to say, she “doesn’t want to paint the Old Masters.” Instead, Bravo seeks to “chart a new course,” by honoring our Pacific Northwest terroir, with incredibly layered flavors that take more time to produce than any other liqueurs Brovo’s yet developed. The payoff is in the flavors, which linger long and make ideal cocktails.
These liqueurs’ terroir-focus makes them ideal for Grown in the Ground, because the event all comes back to the idea of celebrating chefs and bartenders who are ingrained in the “terroir and palate” of the area in which they live. As Voelsgen says — and it’s a good reminder for all of us who love our local spots— “chefs and bartenders are the keystone in the farm-to-table movement. A lot goes into the dining out experience.”
Grown in the Ground is the perfect way to support those chefs and bartenders, while having great cocktails and food and fun. We’re awfully lucky to have such wonderful culinary and cocktail scenes, and now it’s time to demonstrate how much we care about what these creators do, and how they do it.
For a full list of participating restaurants, visit www.grownintheground.com/ .
