Mixologist Erica Presto has made a career of shaking things up. She worked at downtown San Jose bars like Paper Plane and Alter Ego, and also at Oak & Rye in Los Gatos, before coming to Silos in Morgan Hill, a cocktail and small bites concept started by Oak & Rye Chef Ross Hanson and Jacob Farleigh, a chef with kitchen experience at Manresa and Dio Deka.<\/p>\n
At Silos, it\u2019s all about elevated flavors.\u00a0 The cocktail menu is topped by concoctions like the Saturn, made with gin, almond, lemon and passionfruit, and the Leatherbound Book, blending bourbon, herbal aperitif, cinnamon and tobacco bitters.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur success is in making cocktails depends on the ability to decipher what you are smelling and tasting,\u201d says Presto, a south San Jose native.<\/p>\n
Presto has a good grounding in the kitchen, which serves her well in the mixology space. She loves gathering her friends and coworkers at her place in Redwood Estates to cook up some scratch-made pho or Korean barbecue.<\/p>\n
She grew up in a Filipino household with parents who are both chefs. Her mother was raised on fancy city food, while her father came from a small fishing village where they ate only what they caught.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019d never find those dishes on a restaurant menu,\u201d says Presto.<\/p>\n
While their culinary tastes are divergent, one thing they can agree on is tequila, their drink of choice.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Mom and Dad have always been the entertainers,\u201d says Presto. \u201cWe are big drinkers, and my family loves to party. They\u2019re all about the drinks and the karaoke. Shove a mic in their hand, and look out!\u201d<\/p>\n
Presto says they\u2019re starting to drink more wine now, which kind of surprised her. They also love Cognac VSOP.<\/p>\n
Presto actually started working her olfactory lobes in the world of coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worked for almost 10 years at Chromatic, a big-batch open roaster,\u201d she says. \u201cEvery single day, you taste 20 different types. You are evaluating stuff that you\u2019ve never had before. You have a tasting wheel, which helps you decipher what you\u2019re experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually, she discovered the lure of mixology. \u201cI started out doing a few bars, and then one job ends up being four jobs, like when your buddy needs your help downtown.\u201d<\/p>\n
She found the work exhilarating but not very lucrative, so she began working with 3D printers for making dental implants. For someone with an acute sense of smell, this probably wasn\u2019t the best move.<\/p>\n
\u201c3D resin leaves a bad taste in your mouth,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Observing more old friends moving from coffeehouses into bars, she started attending of pop-up workshops held at various downtown San Jose venues. She notes that there\u2019s one at Haberdasher every Wednesday.\u00a0 \u201cSomeone donates food so nobody gets too drunk,\u201d Presto says.<\/p>\n
The workshops are sponsored by booze companies that take you through the products and describe how to properly position and market each one, whether it be bourbon, gin or mezcal.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople should check this out, as it brings you from the world of casual daytime drinks into more adventurous realm of cocktails,\u201d says Presto. \u00a0\u201cI also like to throw myself into competitions and weird spaces. It feels like a kid and it\u2019s Halloween, and you\u2019re not the only one in a costume.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presto observes that with everything costing more all the time, everyone is struggling. \u201cThe craft cocktail industry is a direct reflection of our economy and political climate,\u201d she says. \u201cChartreuse became a bartender\u2019s handshake, but it\u2019s so become so expensive. We are all inherently broke now, so we are trying to make more things out of cheapo stuff. Beer cocktails are a good indicator of a good summer and also of an economic recession.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll sometimes serve a pony glass of Miller alongside a glass with Aperol, lemon juice, an ice cube and a splash of Strega. An Italian herbal liqueur created in 1860 in Benovida, Italy, Strega is what Presto calls a poor man\u2019s Chartreuse. It\u2019s literally half the price. Known as the \u201cwitch liqueur\u201d (strega is Italian for witch), it has a sweet, viscous profile derived from 70 herbs and spices, including saffron and juniper.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s honey-sweetened and reminds me of riding a motorcycle through the forest and fields,\u201d says Presto, who uses it in a cocktail called the Bee\u2019s Knees.<\/p>\n
As a former bartender, I ask her the telltale question: vodka or gin? \u201cWe try to make drinks with gin on our menu,\u201d says Presto. \u201cVodka is lazy.\u00a0 Flavored vodka is making a resurgence, though; it reflects people\u2019s budgets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presto\u2019s secret to making impressive cocktails starts with the garnish. The rim is like the ring in which the performance occurs, and making that ring stand out is part of the challenge.<\/p>\n
Lately, she\u2019s been developing a rim called Green Tajin that involves three different kinds of chiles and dehydrated limes. She\u2019ll get a whole bag of kefir limes from the Little Saigon market for $2, remove the rinds (shockingly bitter) and then juice the pulp. She then adds the juice to the rinds and dehydrates it low and slow for 48 hours with a mix of sugar and salt. The chiles are roasted and then ground by hand. \u201cIt takes us two days to make, and the yield is super low, but it\u2019s quite tasty,\u201d Presto says.<\/p>\n
As for her personal cocktail preference, she will have a really dry gin martini with one olive. \u201cDo not force me to rush my martini,\u201d says Presto. \u201cIt\u2019s not like a slam-it-back-sweet before- or after-dinner drink. Just give me a super dirty martini and a side of chips and I am good for the night.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mixologist Erica Presto has made a career of shaking things up. She worked at downtown San Jose bars…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[184,7,4978,3901,421,181,23,190,193,412,88,90,89,198,200,420],"class_list":["post-462657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-bay-area","tag-california","tag-downtown-san-jose","tag-drink","tag-food-and-drink","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-los-gatos","tag-morgan-hill","tag-restaurants","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-south-bay","tag-things-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}