Cooking with Booze

Eric Hara Does Seasonal Jell-O Shots While Readying Fishtail and Davidburke Townhouse

Photo: Courtesy of Double Cross

Executive chef Eric Hara is hard at work readying David Burke’s new restaurant, Fishtail, for a November opening. He tells us, “It’s going to be clean and simple and focused on the fish we’re getting” — hence a recent trip to the Paris fish market. After that, he’ll turn his attention to relaunching Davidburke & Donatella as Davidburke Townhouse in January. “We’ll put more exotic meats on the menu and clean up the dining room. We’re keeping Davidburke as our signature restaurant — it’ll still be more whacky and whimsical.”

To that end, Hara, in conjunction with Double Cross, a new vodka brand that’s filtered seven times (with diamond dust, people), has just designed some seasonal Jell-O shots —the first of their kind, he thinks (actually, Tailor’s solids may have beaten him to the punch). He’ll add a pumpkin-pie flavor to the menu in November, and will follow it with sweet-potato and candy-cane varieties. Hara says he’s also experimenting with a vodka lollipop containing a mescal worm and — get this — Alka Seltzer–like tablets that dissolve when you drop them into vodka, dispersing flavors like… butter. Eben Freeman, you might just have some competition here.

Eric Hara Does Seasonal Jell-O Shots While Readying Fishtail and Davidburke