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At first glance, marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, and bagels might not seem appropriate fodder for cocktails. (And if you asked my epicurean mother, they’re not fit for human consumption at all.) But after nearly 15 years dreaming up cocktail recipes for renowned bars and restaurants, for my first book, and for my now-shuttered nonalcoholic drink brand, Proteau, I’ve realized that cocktail inspiration can be found in a lot of unexpected places.
Recently, as I neared my 40s, this inspiration arrived in the form of a sentimental sensation deep inside my millennial brain. It was a yearning for the misspent and underappreciated years of my youth: the glorious 1990s. I took this inspiration and ran with it while writing Saved by the Bellini & Other ’90s-Inspired Cocktails.
If the delicious pun-based title is any indication, I had a blast creating recipes based on everything I loved about this pivotal decade: the music, the movies, the fashion, the toys, and, most critically, the food. My ode includes a juicy-poppy drink rendition of Aqua’s iconic “Barbie Girl” song, and I reimagined buffalo flannel—a ’90s fashion staple—into a coffee-inflected rum-and-whiskey sipper. The ’90s also gave us iconic packaged snack foods, including one of my personal favorites, Bagel Bites.
Am I asking you to essentially drink marinara sauce? Yes, kind of. But if we look to the quintessential tomato-based cocktail, the Bloody Mary, we can start to see this pasta topping’s potential. Great cocktails succeed when they balance sweetness, acidity, alcohol strength, and bitterness. It’s easy to see how marinara sauce supplies a few of these elements: Tomatoes contain acidity and sugar, and most marinara sauces contain garlic and onion, which provide a pungent sweetness and mild bitterness—an important element that can provide a sturdy backbone to a cocktail.
Swapping out plain tomato juice for marinara sauce can bring more complexity to any standard Bloody Mary recipe, but it was also the perfect base for my Bagel Bites–inspired Pizza Anytime cocktail. To give the drink a bagel-like quality, I accented the vodka with a healthy shake of everything bagel seasoning. To that I added some lemon juice for additional acidity and some hot sauce to dial up the piquancy. I topped it all off with a rim of Parmesan-infused salt. I will acknowledge that it’s no mozzarella, but parm offers a more pronounced cheese flavor and is much easier to incorporate into drinks. (Plus, you can season vegetables and pasta with the leftover flavored salt, though I typically sprinkle it on popcorn.)
Together, these ingredients give rise to an improbably drinkable, 21-plus-only concoction that’s anything but grown-up. So, the next time you’re feeling a bit stuck, just do what every maudlin millennial like me did: Regress to your youth. And if something feels like it doesn’t belong, it might be all the more reason to include it.
