Cocha’s creative cocktails complement its fresh cuisine

An excellent cocktail menu is many things.

It should be thoughtful and purposeful with its choices of ingredients, creative in its approach and a little loose and improvisational in its style. An engaging cocktail shouldn’t make you think too hard, but it should surprise you on occasion.

Nick Siracusa, the brains behind the bar at downtown’s new international bistro Cocha, has struck that balance with his craft concoctions. Fresh out of Denver, where he helmed the popular food truck Taqueria Pacifica, Siracusa has worked closely with Cocha owners Saskia Spanoff and Enrique Pinerua to match his cocktail menu with the restaurant’s locally sourced, super-fresh kitchen.

As Siracusa muddles together pear and arugula in one moment and crushes ice with a mallet the next, he runs through the story behind some of the standouts on the menu. The Cocha Constellation is a bit like a “fizzy vodka Collins,” he explains, developed in honor of and named after a sculpture made of Mardi Gras beads on the restaurant wall, and we’ll be having the last of the blackberries in our Blackberry Sage Smash while Spanoff is around the corner buying more.

Each drink tastes intentional and spontaneous at the same time, and with menus changing by the season at Cocha, more cocktail creations await. For such a new restaurant, it seems Cocha has already found its voice. cochabr.com

Move your mouse over these mixtures to see how they’re made.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.