Love a good cocktail? You'll love Fino's Bill Norris

Fino's bar manager has competed in cocktail contests everywhere from San Francisco to New Zealand.

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, July 09, 2009

In the world of competitive cocktails, Bill Norris is a rock star.

He has competed in places as diverse as New Zealand (where his team placed second) and San Francisco, and on Friday he'll be competing again in New Orleans. Twice named "Best Mixologist" in the Austin Chronicle readers' poll. Texas Regional Champion in the 2008 Cocktail World Cup.

Aside from those competitive bona fides, he's big on local and seasonal ingredients. On this day at Fino Restaurant Patio & Bar, where Norris is bar manager, they're making peach sangria with Texas peaches. He makes his own grenadine and bitters. There's no excuse in this state, he says, not to use fresh juice. And Norris is awaiting a shipment of 15 pounds of cherries to make his own maraschino cherries. They pulled a drink off the bar menu recently because they couldn't get local berries anymore.

The gazpacho martini, on the other hand? That's so popular it's not going anywhere. For Norris to take that off the menu would be like the Rolling Stones taking "Jumpin' Jack Flash" off their set list: unthinkable.

Yes, his approach is labor-intensive. But you can taste that labor, that attentiveness, that passion. If Norris makes you a drink, you will thank him.

The guy is a sort of spiritual descendant of Jerry Thomas, the 19th-century bartender at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco and author of the first American cocktail book, and there's a family connection to the business: His grandfather and three great-uncles ran a speakeasy in Newark, N.J., that became legit after Prohibition and lasted until 1967, when riots in the city and general social unrest drove away a lot of businesses. There's an old family picture of his grandfather and brothers in their tuxes, holding shakers. If you asked those guys for a Pimm's cup, you'd get more than a blank stare.

Norris is part of a bartending renaissance that combines reverence for the golden age of mixology with blazing inventiveness. And as luck would have it, he sort of backed into it.

He was going to grad school at Sarah Lawrence College in New York for creative writing and tended bar because "it was the best way to make a living on semi-part-time work."

One day a customer ordered a sidecar, which he didn't know how to make, so he pulled out his Mr. Boston reference book and made the drink. Not long after, he and his girlfriend found themselves at the Rainbow Room and there, with that amazing view of Manhattan in three directions, he ordered a sidecar: "And it was so different from what I had made for that person before."

The scales fell from his eyes and Norris, now 37, realized there was a real art to this, a way to make a proper margarita, a proper mojito, a proper martini. Sipping a water at Fino on a recent afternoon before stepping behind the bar to make a Palabra Ultima, he dispenses booze wisdom. Here he is on gin:

"No one needs to fear gin. People who say they don't like gin probably had a bad martini. Martinis are supposed to be more than cold gin in a class."

(Dry martinis, he says, came about because vermouth is a wine that oxidizes once opened, which makes it turn in a matter of days. Little or no vermouth = dry martini.)

He's not completely comfortable with being tagged a mixologist, but you'll never catch him making mistakes he's seen other bartenders across town make, like the one who made a gin martini and then a vodka one in the same shaker, so the latter tasted of gin. Bad.

He is also zealous about giving drinks a proper shake.

"Twenty to 30 percent of the volume of a drink is supposed to come from diluted ice," he says. "So shake it like you mean it for 10 to 20 seconds."

And here's this bit of wisdom: "A jigger is a sign of professionalism, not weakness."

Some of this he learned while apprenticing at places such as L-Ray in the West Village in New York City, but much of it he learned right here at Fino, which he calls "a great playground. It's kind of like my sandbox."

He wound up in Austin after coming to town for the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2004 (aka the Year of the Pixies), went home, and a few months later loaded his stuff into a $500 Volvo and came back.

"I thought I was going to stay for a year, but I love the city," he says.

When he's not at Fino, he's running Custom Libations ( custom-cocktails.com ), which provides bar services for events , and he recently consulted on the pre-Prohibition cocktail menu at the restored Sengelmann Hall in Schulenburg and the new Annie's Cafe & Bar in downtown Austin. (The guy has reprints of bartenders' guides going back to the 1800s.)

And once again, he'll be competing at the bartending guild's caipirinha competition at this weekend's Tales of the Cocktail, the annual food and drink festival in New Orleans. He says such competitions are uncommonly congenial.

"It's an experience to be around some of the people who work in the best bars in the world," he says. "They're very generous. It's like a giant master class."

One of these days he might like to have a space of its own, but he's perfectly happy at Fino, where he's been for four years.

Getting a little recognition, getting a free trip to New Zealand, it's nice. Like every drink he pours, it's worth the effort.

"It's really gratifying because it's a fair bit of work," he says.

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603

Palabra Ultima

11/4 oz. Sombra mezcal

1/2 oz. Benedictine

1/2 oz. green Chartreuse

1 oz. Meyer lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with flamed lemon peel.

Paloma Flower

11/2 oz. reposado tequila

3/4 oz. fresh grapefruit

3/4 oz. St. Germain elderflower liqueur

3 dashes grapefruit bitters

1 egg white

Combine all ingredients with ice and shake very hard to emulsify egg white and chill. Strain into chilled coupe dish.