If you think that there's no difference between a bartender and a bar chef, propably you've never seen the latter at work: moving among coloured stalks full of ingredients like fresh fruits, flowers or roots, and bottles of homemade juices and infusions, he looks like a modern apprentice sorcerer working in a chemistry lab.

A bar chef, if compared to a standard bartender, spend half of his time trying to find the perfect ingredient, or track some unknown liqueur: for them, even the size and shape of an ice cube matters, or the melting temperature of the ingredients of their concoctions. Bar chefs have enlivened cocktails with about every fresh herb: rosemary, lemon, thyme have moved from the kitchen to the bar - as well as a few flowers and the occasional root. This has marked a major change in cocktail culture and is becoming a fashionable trend in bars around New York.

Spice up your cocktails!

Bar chefs - or "beverage managers", as they are often called - keep on experimenting new ingredients, or new combination of well known cocktail components: most of this young cocktail stars take their inspirations from chefs and pastry chef, .and that's why some of their recipes can look bizarre or weird.

Albert Trummer, one of the most famous N.Y. bar chefs, from Town restaurant, serves to his customers a Truffle Martini, made with real truffle slices; Nick Mautone, from Gramercy Tavern, has invented the famous Basil Martini, garnished with a dried tomato: some people say it tastes like pizza; tomato is one of the ingredients often used by bar chefs - think of Petrossian's Tomato-and-pepper-vodka punch.

Sometimes these revolutionary mixologists can go even further, and use ingredients like calendula or verbena, or even horseradish-roots, as Michael Waterhouse of Dylan Prime did to create his famous Bloodless Mary. Even if this can be considered a very bizarre idea, using botanicals to flavor alcohol isn't a new idea. The earliest distilled spirits, back in the 12th century, were usually flavored with herbs, since many herbs and roots have healing properties: after all many of today's spirits, including gin and vermouth, are made from herbs.

Adding a new twist to classical cocktails
Beside this "avant-garde" mixologists, many bar chefs are more "conservative" and believe that before starting inventing new mixture a bar chef must master all the Classics: instead of looking for weird ingredients, they prefere using their imagination to turn classical drinks into modern cocktails.

Their creativity brings new colours to standard recipes, giving even old fashioned cocktails a new eye appeal; that's the case of the "Cocktail King" Dale deGroff, and his disciples, for exemple Audrey Saunders, from Carlyle hotel, who created her Old Cuban changing the standard Mojito recipe (replacing the white rum with stronger añejo rum and soda with champagne). but sometimes they like experimenting new flavours too: Dale deGroff himself invented drinks like the Oyster cocktail.

Today most customers are actually looking for new flavours and colours: and enjoys this revolutionary and bizarre cocktails. That's why bar chefs are becoming real stars.