When longtime Chicago bartender Annemarie Sagoi, a veteran of the Dawson and the Drifter, went to Cambodia last year with her business partner, David Chhay, to consult on a hotel bar opening in the city of Phnom Penh, she only expected to stay for a few months. But while plans for that bar fell through, both Sagoi and Chhay became enamored of the city. At the beginning of 2016 they opened Le Boutier, a craft cocktail bar that celebrates Cambodia’s “golden age” of rock in the 1960s and ’70s. On January 3, Sagoi will be bringing several of Le Boutier’s cocktails to Bar DeVille for a one-night pop-up bar highlighting Cambodian flavors. She talked to me recently about her bar, the drinks she’ll be serving in Chicago, and cocktail culture in Phnom Penh.
It’s not like when you go to Singapore or Thailand or Shanghai, where you find people challenging the standards. You still get green drinks, blue drinks, things that are too sweet, “martini” lists. We saw an opportunity to try to help elevate the standard. There are places that look like cool cocktail bars but they don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re shaking martinis until they’re all water, using shitty ice—how most bars were in the 90s. There’s only one other bar in the city, called Elbow Room, doing stuff of similar quality. We’re all working together to help change the way people think. Nothing like [bitter, boozy drinks] had really been done before. Now other bars nearby are getting consultants, starting to understand how to use ice. It’s surprising how much it’s changing.
I use a lot of local flavors, but I can’t use most of the spirits distilled here. There’s one rum distillery not far from my bar that I’ve thoroughly checked out and they cut the heads and the tails, do proper distillation. Other than that, a lot of the booze they have, I don’t trust. I don’t think they know what they’re doing yet. So I make a lot of tinctures and syrups. Kampot pepper—it’s got eucalyptus and really nice pepper flavors—I make a tincture out of that, I make a curry syrup, lemongrass infusions, sticky rice syrup. I try to take the Cambodian flavors and pair them with spirits that work well together.
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is the name of a documentary about 60s Cambodian rock and roll that I saw in Logan Square at a film festival about a year and a half ago. It’s vodka—you have to have vodka drinks, because a lot of people here are scared of anything but vodka. Sticky rice syrup—I take rice, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, sugar, infuse it in hot water for a few days and then strain it. It’s almost like horchata flavors. Then I use some longan and lime as well.
