This Bartender's Futuristic Drinks Raise Awareness About Endangered Animals

The dawn of the Trump administration prompted Tenzin Samdo, a veteran Boston bartender, to start to think about ways, both big and small, to push back. Having grown up a Tibetan refugee in northern India, protesting—“screaming on the streets for human rights in Tibet” as he put it—marching on the White House and working for the cause of displaced people were already things he was accustomed to. But the administration’s disregard for the environment especially bothered him. “When they made it ok again to hunt elephants for trophies, it really pissed me off,” he explained from behind his bar ArtScience Culture Lab & Café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He thought about what he could do to take a stand in his own way. “I’m a bartender—making drinks is what I do for a living, why not send a message through it?”

While the result, a cocktail list based on endangered species from around the world, may not achieve any sort of seismic shift on the grand scale, it probably can’t hurt to get the glut of scientists and tech workers who crowd his bar (due to its proximity to MIT and the rapidly multiplying tech companies in the area) thinking about it on a regular basis. And at the very least, the process provided him with a rich palate of inspiration and ingredients to work with.

ArtScience Culture Lab & Café is certainly a good place to experiment. The restaurant, part of Le Laboratoire Cambridge, founded by scientist and Harvard professor David Edwards—inventor of WikiFoods, an effort that replaces plastic packaging for foods with edible food-derived skins, and oNotes, a digital scent player—incorporates a number of his other culinary inventions as well. In addition from the more traditional machines (relatively speaking) like a rotary evaporator and a centrifuge, another of Edwards’ devices, Le Whaf, transforms ingredients into breathable cloud-like vapors. The alcohol- and calorie-free clouds are meant as a sort of olfactory garnish that prepares the senses for the ingredients that end up in the glass.

And, as befits an environmentally-conscious cocktail bar, there’s nothing left to waste here, with every byproduct of every cocktail’s prep ingredients being recycled back into use: eggshells become cups; fruit rinds become repurposed into powders and tinctures after being run through the centrifuge, each reappearing in entirely different forms.

The cocktail list has the feel of a zoo; it’s populated with snow leopards, piping plovers, Titi monkeys and a constantly-changing list of others (“there aren’t just a dozen endangered species; there are thousands,” Samdo clarifies). Each drink begins with Samdo matching the altitude at which the animal is found with spirits and ingredients likewise known for thriving in that type of environment.

The Titi monkey, for example, is typically found in the canopy level of tropical rain forests from Peru to Colombia, at about 8,500 feet above sea level. Samdo turned to that region’s patron spirit of pisco as a base, and puts it in a shaken, pisco-sour-esque, egg white cocktail. The eggshell is repurposed as well: it’s dehydrated, sprayed with absinthe, then filled with an edible emulsion foam that might take on a coconut flavor. Elsewhere in the recipe, he also incorporates a sandalwood syrup.

“It’s super aromatic. If you’ve ever walked into a forest with a lot of flowers, it kind of smells like that,” he says of the sandalwood component. “I wanted to create a rainforest-like flavor out of it, not just florally aromatic but also woody.” The surface of the drink is then topped with a digitally printed monkey design made out of wafer paper and sketched in edible inks.

“If you notice the monkey on the surface, he’s all dressed up and very professional looking,” he says. “But his expression is super pissed off.” “Everyone’s reaction is like, 'oh my god, it’s so cute.' I wanted to sneak in those sorts of images—hummingbirds, penguins—so when you drop off the drink, every person giggles or laughs. That was the energy the I wanted to create.”

It also doesn’t hurt that this one, like most of the cocktails he sends out, are eminently Instagrammable.

For the Snow Leopard, whose altitude was hard to match up directly with a spirit, he instead interpreted its rocky, mountainous environs with the earthiness of mezcal, then added dry vermouth insfused with rock tea, a type of oolong that grows on the rocky mountains of China, and savory cardamom-spiked agave. The Bird of Paradise lives on an exceptionally low altitude, so he matched it with tropical, low-growing fruits and spirits, rum, mango, almonds, saffron, and date palms for a presentation as colorful as its plumage. “I wanted to raise awareness, but in a gentle way,” Samdo says of the overarching species concept. “Growing up as a Tibetan, we always worshipped the earth, the ocean. Humans have a voice and we can scream out; animals can’t.”