With Hotels With Great Taste, we’re pulling back the curtain for a peek at the “special sauce” that hotels use to create memorable, meaningful culinary experiences for their guests.
I see the hotel bar as a vestigial organ of the travel experience, a holdover from a bygone time when retiring to a wood-paneled room off the lobby and charging a cabernet or a double Scotch, neat, to your room was proof that you were really living.
Even as they have begun to shed this stodgy stereotype—spots housed in a Four Seasons and a Courtyard by Marriott are current James Beard Award semi-finalists in the bar categories, for example—“current” and “cool” still aren’t my hotel bar watchwords.
That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised to find a bar project that’s both delicious and of-the-moment at the Rosewood hotel in Munich. Take the stairs down to Bar Montez, and you’ll be treated to one of the most inventive non-alcoholic drink programs I’ve come across anywhere in the world.
Rosewood Munich
The bar’s moody lights, tufted chairs, deco patterns, and gold accents would have fit right in with the speakeasy craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s. But, when I was there, the jazz trio in the center of the room (an almost-nightly fixture) played in t-shirts and jumped decades in their song selection, transitioning from Gershwin to an instrumental Ed Sheeran. It felt warmly inviting, whether you consider yourself part of the mixology set or are more of a I’ll-just-have-a-vodka-soda type.
That “everyone’s welcome to be fancy here” vibe anchors the zero-proof drink program too. “Why did alcohol-free drinks get hidden away on a separate page of the menu for so many years?” muses bar manager Mario Schulz, one of the minds behind the cocktails. “A drink without alcohol [made at a cocktail bar] should be just as normal as any other—without explanations, without special treatment, without labels.”
To that end, Schulz began rolling out paired menu items—an alcoholic and N/A version of the same drink. Unlike at other bars that attempt something similar, the two cocktails drink almost identically.
Juice made from fresh-pressed apples cooked with thyme and a bit of malic acid packs a gussied-up gin and soda called the “Malicious” with a big one-two punch of tartness and sweetness. The alcohol-free version uses a Bavarian N/A spirit in place of Hendrick’s, but all the body and flavor of the gin-based cocktail remains intact.
Rosewood Munich
