Waiter, there's rice in my cocktail!

Paella rice adds body to our new Negroni Valenciano

My friends, it’s Negroni Week! For those who don’t know, this is a week celebrated around the world where restaurants and bars serve their favorite Negronis and support the work of Slow Food.

But José, what’s a Negroni? Maybe you’ve never heard of this cocktail…it’s not Spanish, so I don’t blame you! It’s originally Italian, with gin, sweet vermouth, and the bitter Italian liquor called Campari. It’s bittersweet and delicious, and provides a great simple template for experimenting.

For example, I told you long ago about the Foggy Hill Negroni, made by our cocktail innovator Miguel Lancha—this one is Vida mezcal, Cynar, Aperol, and a beautiful fog made with orange peels and thyme, infused with dry ice. If you’re in LA or NYC or Chicago or DC, you can find it at one of our restaurants!

For Negroni Week, though, we have created many new cocktails for our menus…our teams get so excited about the opportunity to make something interesting!

At barmini, we are serving a Negroni as a sphere (!) and one as a gummy bear (!!). We also have one with shiitake mushroom-infused gin (!!!)

At China Chilcano, we have both Peruvian- and Japanese-inspired Negronis, using liquors from both of those countries.

But the one I’m maybe most excited about, and the recipe I’m sharing with you today, is one we call Negroni Valenciano—which we are serving at Jaleo Chicago. If you’ve been reading Longer Tables, you will know that Valencia is the birthplace of paella, the very famous rice dish. Well, our team saw recently that some bartenders are adding sushi rice to their Negronis to add starch and body, so we thought … if sushi rice is good, paella rice has to be better!

So our Negroni Valenciano has the traditional base, plus bomba rice, and a few added ingredients—saffron syrup and sherry vinegar—to balance things out. The rice adds body and depth, but we think it turns down the brightness a bit, so the sherry vinegar adds that back. But if you don’t have saffron or sherry vinegar, give it a try with just the bomba rice. Make one without and one with (and share with a friend, of course!) — and tell me what you think!

Negroni Valenciano

Makes 1 drink