Innovative Find
Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell spoke those words to his assistant, Thomas Watson, on March 10, 1876, during the first-ever phone call. Joel Testa, CEO of Testa Dining Group, used it as the concept behind his new Watson speakeasy that he opened March 10 — exactly 147 years after that historic call.
“Thomas Watson was instrumental not only in inventing the phone but would go on to invent a lot of accessories from the phone and then went on to be a naval shipbuilder,” says Testa. “He’s fairly obscure so that obscurity led to the idea that speakeasies are obscure, hidden.”
To even begin to locate the Watson, people need to sign up for the VIP list, receive clues, follow them to what resembles a post office lobby and locate a hidden door. Inside the dark, moody spot, blue velvet sofas, gray velvet privacy curtains, Edison bulb fixtures, brass decor and candles whisk you back to around the 1860s to 1890s pre-Prohibition Gilded Age, during the Age of Invention era.
“Over half a million patents were issued during that Gilded Age,” Testa says, “some of them being inventions that would forever change our lives.”
Many inventors were from Ohio, like Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Testa’s maternal grandfather, a Babcock & Wilcox engineer who invented a furnace heat exchanger. Find sketches of his grandfather’s patent, along with those from other inventors, inside the leather-bound menu of craft cocktails and mocktails made by mixologists who are like inventors serving you drinks from their labs.
The Alchemist’s Secret Garden ($19) comes out as a beaker of green chartreuse, ginger liqueur, lime, honey and mint garnished with flamed rosemary, in a lit-up bamboo box with moss and greenery and a vile of billowing smoke.
“It’s reminiscent of a garden, early morning, where dew, mist and fog rise up and cover the ground,” Testa says. “It’s very light and delicious, and very easy to drink.”
You get involved in creating cocktails like the gin and tonic ($13). Vials of gin and tonic, a pipette of lime juice and lime-infused ice cubes arrive at the table, and you build the cocktail. For Love on the Rocks ($12), you spoon watermelon Pop Rocks into your mouth and then sip a sweet and spicy vodka-based drink, causing a reaction and flavor explosion.
The blue-ribbon winner is the Watson Old Fashioned ($25), completely reinvented. Mixologists use a Japanese coffee siphon to infuse bourbon with vanilla bean, orange, allspice, cinchona bark, clove, cinnamon and house bitters and then cool it with dry ice. In stunning fashion, the bourbon gets sucked up into the siphon as it heats, gets infused with flavorings at the top and flows down the siphon when the heat is removed.
“It’s very smoky, very aromatic. There’s fire. It happens with a Bunsen burner,” Testa says. “It looks like a science experiment that’s happening in front of us.”