Cocktail stories: French Toast, Double Chicken Please

New York’s Double Chicken Please serves up a boozy brunch in a glass.

*This feature was originally published in the September 2023 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.

Double Chicken Please started life as a nomadic mobile cocktail pop-up operating from the back of a 1977 Volkswagen minibus, run by former industrial designer GN Chan and bartending veteran Faye Chen. Now, six years on, instead of taking their inventive cocktails to the people, the people are flocking to them at their bricks-and-mortar site in New York’s Lower East Side, where the pair’s elevated cocktail programme has won them some of the highest accolades in the on-trade.

Double Chicken Please offers two drinking experiences under one roof. In the casual no-reservations front room, guests can sample crowd-pleasing ‘taptails’ and fried chicken with speedy, easy service, while for those with a reservation in the back room, known as the Coop, it’s all about high-concept creative cocktails.

Tako Chang, manager of brand marketing and PR communications, tells us how the bar has adopted the concept of hacking design in the curation of its menu, which has been categorised into three sections based on palate and flavour profiles: Appetizers, Entrées, and Desserts.

Design hacking involves the deconstruction and reformation of objects, and this approach has allowed the team to “deconstruct flavours and creatively reconstruct them into cocktail experiences”, says Chang, something that is perfectly demonstrated with the bar’s popular French Toast cocktail.

Inspired by brunch, and made in the style of a ‘Flip’ cocktail, the French Toast is a combination of vodka, roasted barley, brioche, coconut, milk, maple syrup and egg. 

“This is a really fun example of the way we’ve been inspired by the concept of a pairing menu,” Chang explains. “We apply a technique called ‘reverse pairing’, which is where we take a classic food pair and swap their roles, so we make the food into a drink and the drink turns into a food. It’s a classic breakfast combination,” she says. “Imagine you are eating breakfast – French toast with an Espresso Martini – except you are drinking the French toast and eating your Espresso Martini in the form of Double Chicken Please Oreo garnish; it’s toasty, smooth and creamy.” 

French Toast

Ingredients:
35ml Barley Tea Vodka
60ml French toast mix*
10ml Brown sugar syrup

Method:
Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a flip glass. Garnish with a house-made Oreo.

*French Toast Mix
320ml Whole milk
320ml Maple toast mix (burnt brioche, maple syrup, and coconut water)
5 Whole eggs
2.8g Sea salt

Method:
Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl and blend with an immersion blender. Strain into a bottle, and store in the fridge.