There are several iconic cocktails—from the Bobby Burns to the Singapore Sling to the Vieux Carré—that call on Bénédictine. But despite the cocktail revival’s best efforts, there are dozens more that have remained in obscurity. Shawn Lickliter, owner of the newly opened Vandell in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood, is perhaps the perfect practitioner to steward long-lost drinks made with the liqueur back into the spotlight.
A devotee of the ingredient’s “honeyed leather notes” since working with vintage expressions of it years ago at the now-shuttered Manzke, Lickliter has been enamored with Bénédictine for nearly a decade. He first encountered it at Normandie Club, where bartenders Alex Day and Devon Tarby were making the Poet’s Dream, a stirred cocktail, based on the Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937). That version of the recipe features a 2:1 ratio of dry gin to dry vermouth, supported by small amounts of Bénédictine and orange bitters. (Another version of the Poet’s Dream, made with an equal-parts ratio, appeared right around the same time in Gale & Marco’s The How and When, published in New Orleans.) Lickliter loved the drink, and he has carried it with him through various jobs ever since, tweaking it many times over to find his optimal spec. Now, at Vandell, his latest Poet’s Dream is a thoughtful, layered take on the one that he first met all those years ago.
To build his ideal recipe, he started with the gin. Though Fords is the standard at Vandell, Lickliter found that this drink shone ever more brightly with No. 3 Gin, a London dry from England’s oldest wine merchants, the Berry Brothers, which Lickliter describes as “super clean.” The gin keeps the non-juniper botanicals to a minimum, while offering a touch of grapefruit.
There’s a wildcard ingredient in this drink: pisco. “Gin can be a bully sometimes when you’re adding in a liqueur like Bénédictine,” he says. By splitting the base spirit, “you’re kind of backing down the juniper, but you’re also lifting the Bénédictine.” The pisco he uses is Capurro Quebranta, a smooth, herbal expression that brings notes of stone fruit and pear.
For the dry vermouth, Lickliter calls on Bordiga’s Extra Dry style, an industry favorite. It has more texture and body than your average dry vermouth, notes of citrus and sage, and a subtle wormwood bitterness, which helps to balance out the sweetness of the Bénédictine.
In addition to the iconic liqueur, Lickliter also calls on a quince liqueur from Rothman & Winter, which mirrors the honeyed fruit notes. The unusual product is akin to a mistelle, utilizing both fresh-pressed quince juice and quince eau de vie in its production. Its natural acidity subtly converses with the stone fruit notes in the pisco.
Like most of the spirit-forward drinks at Vandell, the Poet’s Dream is pre-diluted, bottled and kept at the perfect temperature in one of the six freezers behind the bar. When serving, Lickliter opts for a simple lemon twist garnish, just like the original New Orleans spec.
In the short weeks since the bar opened, the Poet’s Dream has been well-received. Staff often suggest it after a guest tries the bar’s signature Martini or the stirred Gimlet. On the menu, the cocktail is listed in the Olden Days section, so it also attracts the attention of those who want to be transported to another time and place. For many, Bénédictine conjures associations of the past—your grandma’s B&B obsession, perhaps, or the Rat Pack, or French monks, or midcentury Singapore Slings. Now you can add visions of this lost 1930s classic.
