Crosstown Arts at The Concourse

Nick Manlavi always felt drawn to bartenders. “Bartenders are rock stars who couldn’t be bothered to learn to play instruments,” he says, paraphrasing a line from a movie.

Manlavi is bar manager at P.O. Press Public House & Provisions, one the area’s hottest new restaurants, located near the town square in Collierville. P.O. Press has gotten raves for its creative and thoughtful treatment of ingredients, which extends to the bar.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Nick Manlavi

One recent meal fully engaged all of Manlavi’s creative muscles. It was a special occasion, an anniversary dinner. It would be nine courses, paired with drinks. But, there was a wrinkle. One of the party did not drink.

P.O. Press usually has two or three “mocktails” — i.e., no alcohol — on its seasonal menu.

Manlavi says his goal to make something that is fun to drink. He’ll ask for preferences. He’ll consider a meal’s dishes and think about flavor profiles. He’ll take advantage of the restaurant’s full arsenal of ingredients and equipment.

For this dinner, he made an Arnold Palmer with pomegranate foam, a beet and carrot old fashioned, a ginger and peppercorn cordial, a coconut pina colada, and a radish and mint mule.

The mule Manlavi made to match the root vegetable sushi roll, one of the dinner’s courses. Manlavi says he had to tread carefully with this drink. “Radish is a weird flavor,” he says. “And they smell like feet.” He ended up using a lot of grapefruit in this one.

Manlavi says he’s particularly proud of the pina colada, even more so because there was no pineapple juice in the house. To approximate pineapple juice, he used lime juice and champagne vinegar.

The old fashioned is particularly clever. The carrot is used to simulate the dense mouthfeel usually associated with the beverage.

Manlavi says such an endeavor is much like pairing wine with a meal, and, ultimately, it boils down to a sort of customer-is-always-right ethos. “Not drinking is an important thing for a lot of people,” he says. “I’m happy to take people on a tour.”

P.O. Press, 148 N Main in Collierville, popress.com

Over at Alchemy in Cooper-Young, bar manager Ben Williams says they serve around 30 to 40 mocktails a week. Much of their mocktail menu, which features seven drinks, is based around their proofier offerings, which makes sense: The cocktails have always been the big draw at Alchemy.

The Oh Clementine is Alchemy’s most ordered mocktail. It’s orange juice, lemon, sugar, and strawberry puree. The KCCO is an Alchemy landmark. KCCO stands for Keep calm, Collins on. It’s a cheeky play on both a mojito and a Tom Collins, which is achieved through the mint and lemon.

The Orange You Glad is another favorite. “It is good,” says Williams. “It’s made for those who remember growing up eating a Dreamsicle from the ice cream guy who drives by the neighborhood.”

Alchemy, 940 S Cooper,
alchemymemphis.com

Bart Mallard says he created the mocktails at Crosstown Art’s Art Bar because, “I’m interested in [the Art Bar] being a place where everybody can come and not feel uncomfortable. And people who are most uncomfortable at bars are people who don’t drink. So I was like, well, let’s change that as fast as we can.”

Mallard usually goes to his favorite markets to scan the produce for inspiration. He also turned to his friend Chris Cosby, who, with his wife Stephanie, is in charge of the plants at Crosstown. Cosby turned Mallard on to herbal tinctures.

There are two mocktails on the menu now at Art Bar. The Plum the Golden Depths (with the exotic golden plum) and the Rise of Spring (with banana pepper and damiana). They are both labor- and ingredient-intensive, Mallard says.

Bart Mallard

“I would prefer the menu to be half and half,” Mallard says of alcoholic and non-alcholic drinks. “But I don’t think we’re quite there yet culturally.”

Art Bar, Crosstown Concourse, 2nd floor

In sixth grade, Ali Rohrbacher won first prize at the school’s science fair for her project on recycling. “I weighed each individual house’s recycling for three months.”

And, she says, “It was essentially a lot of math.”

Math wasn’t her strongpoint. “I avoided doing math for my entire academic career, even when I went to college. Then I ended up coming to find a hobby, an obsession that turned into a career, that is so math-centered. I have to do math every single day. So, it’s a little ironic.”

That was baking. Rohrbacher, 28, now is head baker at The cafe at Crosstown Arts.

She excelled at arts and crafts as a child growing up in Memphis. “I was much more adept — and naturally adept — at arts and literature studies.”

Rohrbacher applied to art schools, but ended up going to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, an alternative education-styled public college. She got her degree in arts and literature, but she still didn’t know what she wanted to do for a career.

Rohrbacher eventually moved back home and got a job doing data entry-type work and, later, she got a part-time bookkeeping job. “[I] talked my way into it, being that I went to a college and I could read. That’s basically all the requirements.”

In “an effort to become a healthier person,” Rohrbacher began cooking. “A lot of that stress and anxiety about my future was translating into white cheddar popcorn and wine and candy and things that were not so healthy. So, in an effort to become just a functional adult that is also healthy, not eating white cheddar popcorn every day for meals, I started reading about cooking. I got a book about canning, making jams and pickles.”

After she made some “incredible pickles,” Rohrbacher learned how to make meatballs that rivalled the meatballs in subs she and her roommates got at a restaurant. “I was like, ‘If I could figure out how to make the rolls, we would save so much money.'”

Her first bread recipe was basic. “Maybe it was even in Joy of Cooking. That’s how basic of a recipe it was.”

She then bought a book, Bread Revolution by Peter Reinhart, about sprouted grains and sprouted flour, and she began making sourdough bread starter from scratch. “It was no longer a pursuit of health food. It became about a pursuit of an obsessive hobby.”

Rohrbacher began baking bread before work and after work. “I have a competitive personality type. I also used to run in the same kind of way. I hated running, but I would run every day because I was competing with myself from the day before. [It’s] almost like I supplemented baking for running.”

About a year later, Rohrbacher began giving her bread to friends. And, after she finally perfected it, she began selling it. She began Hustle & Dough Baking Co., a cottage foods operation she still runs.

While still working at her office jobs, Rohrbacher worked out a volunteer arrangement with Caritas Village. She used its kitchen on Sundays for her baking. In return, she did catering jobs, where she made pies and other items.

She also began selling her baked goods to City & State cafe. She then got a job as The Liquor Store restaurant’s head baker, where she made pies, cakes, fresh biscuits, burger buns, Cuban rolls, and sandwich bread.

Last May, Rohrbacher went to work at The cafe at Crosstown Arts, where she continued her self-teaching practice and developed vegan recipes. She eventually created a bread program and became head baker for Crosstown Arts.

Rohrbacher is in a good place with her career. “I can relate it to that way I thought that I would feel one day about doing visual art. I feel that every day because every day I’m baking bread. Every day I get to see and touch and then sometimes eat these products that I’ve made with my own hands. Because I’ve been working every day at it for the last few years. Because I care so much and I, literally, do work so hard. I get this sense of satisfaction from it that I absolutely did not get from data entry.”

The cafe at Crosstown Arts, 1350 Concourse in the Crosstown Concourse, 507-8010