Born and brought up in Mumbai, Ankush Gamre has had an intriguing journey in India’s cocktail industry. Starting off with cleaning shifts at a hotel, he seized the opportunity to learn from the bartenders during his free time. Absorbing knowledge from the hotel’s bartenders during his spare moments, he eventually secured a full-time position at Please Don’t Tell bar while completing the 2-year Diageo Bar Academy Programme.
In 2016, he joined Masque as an assistant bartender and has since risen to the role of head mixologist and beverage manager, overseeing both Masque and The Living Room’s cocktail programs. Ankush firmly believes in the power of research and devotes himself to understanding not only the ingredients and flavours but also the best methods to extract and transform them.
During his recent visit to Malaysia, the skilled mixologist brought FirstClasse to behind the bar emphasising technique-driven cocktails, the significance of local ingredients, and the importance of adapting to the evolving cocktail culture.
We Asians are deeply embedded in our culture. In your opinion, how does cultural influence play in your cocktail creations?
I think it influences the ingredients and flavour profiles we work with. We’re used to loud flavours, a lot of the same herbs and spices taste different here than they do in other parts of the world – but it also affects how we make those cocktails. In a country where the cocktail scene is still young, sometimes you have to have a kind of hustler mindset – or what we call ‘jugaad’ in Hindi – which is to kind of find low-budget hacks to work around tools or ingredients we don’t have access to. I think that ‘jugaad’ mindset can teach you a lot!
How do you approach the process of pairing food with cocktails? Walk us through the process.
Indian foods are so flavourful and vast, with a variety of ingredients, profiles and structures. You quickly learn that you can’t always go by the book; sometimes you have to go by instinct. And so we write a new ‘flavour book’ with every new food menu we launch. It takes multiple tastings with the kitchen team while we come up with flavour profiles that we think will work.
So, how do you balance creativity and accessibility in your cocktail recipes?
I believe that the world is growing up, and our audience is more and more ready to experiment with their tastes. We try to rely largely on produce for all our flavour profiles. For example, we’ll try to obtain the flavours of citric acid or malic acid from all-natural products, and really understand the chemistry of natural fruits and veg to see how we can achieve the flavours we want. I don’t want to have to rely on products that are difficult to access to make what I want.
In terms of accessibility to customers – we’re always pushing our techniques, but at the end of the day, you need to serve up a tasty drink. We’ll push the bar in terms of ingredients used and try to get our guests to always try something new yet keep it approachable. I think it’s important to sometimes balance the new with the familiar and nostalgic.
Tell us about your proudest creation thus far.
Making clear ice in-house with an aquarium pump. We made a 50-litre block for maybe INR 50! In terms of cocktails, my recent favourite is one we made called The Gentleman. It has vodka, pea shoots, cucumber peel, rocket and ginger, and we made a nettle ice to go with it. The ice is dark green, and as soon as it starts diluting, it turns the drink yellow. It used a lot of unusual produce, and it was a great example of getting into the chemistry of your ingredients. We’ve also been working on a sweet potato shochu that’s shaped up nicely!
What are some unique ingredients or techniques you have incorporated into your cocktail recipes?
Leafy greens, green veggies, paan ki jad (betel root) and jatamansi (spikenard or muskroot). We actually use a lot of trimmings from the Masque kitchen: jicama, coriander stems, asparagus stems and so on. We also craft a lot of our drinks using liquid nitrogen. It allows us a huge amount of control over the flavours we’re able to extract from each ingredient. We don’t do a lot of milk or fat washing, and so the liquid nitro gives us a lot of control over the final product.
Define your work in three words.
Flavourful, technique-driven, chemistry!
What advice do you have for aspiring mixologists?
There are endless possibilities in the world when it comes to flavour. we just need to step out of our bubble and start looking for them. You might want to do something that people will find hard to digest. but the moment you come up with a process to break it down in a new format, people will accept it happily. Just keep pushing the boundaries of what you’ve been told is possible!
If you could collaborate with anyone, dead or alive, to create a unique cocktail recipe, who would it be?
Shobit Shetty, my mentor – and Remy Savage!